There are moments in technological history when the tools change—and so does everything else. We tend to focus on breakthroughs in infrastructure or computational power. But the real cultural shifts come from something more subtle: a new interface.
Interfaces are what make tools human. The keyboard, the mouse, the browser, the touchscreen—each unlocked a wave of creativity and adoption not because they were powerful, but because they made power usable.
Today, as we sit on the verge of a new digital era—driven by blockchain networks, artificial intelligence, and increasingly programmable media—we are missing the most crucial ingredient:
A new interface. One that reflects the way people already live online. One that speaks the emotional language of the internet.
That interface is social.
Infrastructure Has Outpaced Experience
Over the last five years, we’ve seen tremendous growth in technological potential:
Web3 has given us decentralized protocols, wallet-based identity, composable assets, and programmable value.
AI has delivered generative creativity, autonomous agents, and new modes of assistance.
Gaming and virtual spaces have created persistent digital environments where users can socialize, create, and compete.
And yet, the day-to-day experience of using these technologies is disconnected, clunky, and fragmented. Users are expected to juggle wallets, platforms, tokens, modals, extensions, and interfaces that feel like they were designed for engineers—not people.
The infrastructure has matured. The protocol layer is ready. The primitives are in place.
What’s missing is the interface layer—and more specifically, the interface layer that matches how real people use the internet today.
That interface is the social feed.
Social Isn’t Just Media—It’s Intent
Consider the numbers:
As of 2024, over 5 billion people use the internet.
4.88 billion of them use social media.
The average user spends 2.5 hours per day on social platforms.
Nearly all of that time is spent inside feeds—browsing, reacting, messaging, and sharing.
This is no longer just entertainment. Social platforms are the default interface for how people:
Discover culture
Coordinate action
Express identity
Build relationships
Social has become the operating layer of digital life.
But in technology and design circles, we’ve treated “social” as if it were a product category, not a primitive. We’ve seen it as entertainment, not infrastructure. We’ve built applications around “users,” not communities.
Meanwhile, users themselves are signaling—through time, behavior, and desire—that they want more:
More participation.
More expression.
More meaning.
They don’t want more dashboards. They want more play.
Case Study: The Rise of Bankr
In early 2025, a developer known as 0xDeployer launched a bot called @bankr on Farcaster, a decentralized social network. The idea was simple:
> Let users perform complex onchain actions using natural language inside the feed.
Instead of navigating to a dApp, connecting a wallet, signing a transaction, and waiting for confirmation, users could just post:
> “@bankr, buy 5 USDC worth of $[ticker]”
The response? Immediate traction and adoption.
Bankr quickly expanded to X (formerly Twitter) and also launched a browser-based chat interface—offering a private, ChatGPT-like way to interact with the bot beyond public feeds.
Today, it supports:
Token swaps
NFT transfers
Wallet provisioning
Multichain functionality
(Maybe food delivery, soon?)
The brilliance wasn’t just in the backend functionality—it was the interface. Bankr recognized something fundamental:
> Social actions are intent.
Users already understand how to @mention, comment, and message. By embedding smart contracts into that flow, Bankr turned the feed into an interface for finance.
This logic has proven extensible. In fact, Bankr adopted the token creation functionality originally pioneered by another Farcaster experiment—Clanker, which allows users to create and deploy tokens just by @mentioning the bot, attaching an image, and assigning a ticker.
That’s composability in action.
From Experiments to Movements
These aren’t isolated one-offs. They are part of a much broader, deeper trend.
Twitch Plays Pokémon (2014) transformed Twitch chat into a chaotic game controller, attracting over a million players. Beyond the gameplay, it became myth, ritual, and collective performance.
Anoncast allowed users to post anonymously to Farcaster and X using zero-knowledge proofs and token ownership—creating new models for privacy-preserving social expression. Even Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin took notice.
Historical interfaces like EverQuest’s chat commands and early MUDs like Zork set the standard for how text could be used not just for communication, but for collaborative world-building.
These are not footnotes. They are the forgotten foundations of today’s most powerful design patterns.
Chat changed gaming. Social changed identity. The feed is changing interface.
Why Now?
Why didn’t this happen two years ago? Why not two years from now?
Because we’ve reached a convergence:
Social protocols like Farcaster and Lens are wallet-native.
LLMs and AI agents can now inhabit social feeds.
Bot Actions and Frames provide programmable interfaces inside posts.
Developers are realizing that building culture requires play, not just code.
Social is now composable. Onchain logic is now expressive.
The infrastructure is finally catching up to the behavior.
Where This Is Going
In the next 10–20 years, we will not think of apps as separate from networks. We will not separate games from feeds, or wallets from identities.
Your online presence will be embodied. Your profile will be a character. Your feed will be a world.
We are moving toward an internet where:
Posts are game moves.
Comments are creative rituals.
Emoji are spells.
Bots are characters.
Threads are quests.
This won’t compete with the modern gaming industry. It will redefine it. Just as Amazon didn’t compete with bookstores, but redefined commerce through a new interface: the web browser.
Social is that interface for the onchain world.
The Interface Is the Innovation
We’ve spent years building better infrastructure.
It’s time to build better interfaces.
Social is no longer just a feature. It’s a paradigm. It’s how humans want to interact with the digital world.
To ignore it is to miss the point. To embrace it is to unlock the next generation of software—not just more powerful, but more participatory, more playful, more personal.
The feed is the interface. The internet is the world. Let’s make it playable.
raulonastool
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Interesting read! Social interactions are indeed the missing link in many interfaces. Let's keep exploring and pushing boundaries in this direction. 🚀🔍
Couldn't have said it better myself
https://paragraph.com/@raulonastool/social-is-the-missing-interface