Crypto Notebook

Ver. Eng
Ver. Eng

What is SocialFi?

SocialFi, or Social Finance, is a sub-theme under the grand blockchain-based socialization idea. Due to the popularity of DeFi in 2020, SocialFi is also migrating toward Social DeFi. Currently SocialFi is still at its infancy/early stage, with most of its participants basing idea creation and technological upgrade off of the idea of Social Token. Note, social token is defined as “a token supported by the image of an influential individual, brand, or community,” and is built upon the value-increasing assumption of the underlying community. Some of the well-known projects in the field are Minting & Distribution tools and Content Monetization Schemes. All in all, SocialFi can be divided into the following subcategories:

1. Personal Token & Relevant Tools

tldr：value of personal token is proportional to extent of influence of that individual. Personal coin launching tools are quite diverse, preliminary hypothesis is that its technical barrier isn’t high, and the key of success for players might be ecosystem integration (cross-chain, etc)

Token based on personal value/influence

RAC: fan token launched by Grammy Awardee DJ RAC (André Allen Anjos) on Ethereum. Holder will enjoy exclusive fan perks. launched in collab with Zora (see below).

Whale: launched by personal buyer WhaleShark using a platform called Roll. Token value is based on the NFT assets held by WhaleShark. Creators could earn WHALE through staking NFT they created and can trade on Opensea using Whale as price unit.

Showtime(ALEX): Probably the first project that explored social token. Similar to crowdsourcing but under web 3.0

个人代币发行工具

ROLL: Roll helps its users create ERC-20 tokens as their personal social token. The platform and the creator will earn some tokens upfront, and the remaining will be unlocked linearly in the next 3 years.

RALLY: allow creators to combine RLY, Rally’s native governance token, with their own personal token, into a new personal token. Rally encapsulated the entire process of minting, channelling, money-intake, and transaction. It uses L2 solutions to optimize their instant transaction mechanism.

MeTokens: users create their own meToken on this platform, or they can purchase others’ meToken. Through staking tokens (e.g. ETH) in exchange for personal token, the total supply of individual meTokens and total staked tokens remain fixed, ensuring one can always redeem some staked tokens using personal token.

MintGate: most of MintGate users launch their personal token and distribute them through twitter to fans and make the token a permit for gated-communities. Owning different amount of tokens translates to different service experience. Contents can be handled on Filecoin, and Mintgate is currently collaborating with Matic Network.

2. Community Token

tldr：community tokens, on one hand, surround content monetization and attempt to change the traditional social and commercial logic surrounding “content”. On the other hand, it paves the governance infrastructure&tools for some DAO and social network (gated or not).

Content Monetization - NFT-ization of content, content-based financial derivatives, tokenization of social action, social experiment

Mirror: Writer platform that enable every article to be NFT-governable: contents can be invested, traded, and managed. Mirror’s NFT minting is achieved through Zora.

Cent: a social platform that turns KOL’s twit into NFT and auction it off

Yup: a contract that follows its users’ social activity, tokenizing actions like thumbup, like, and commenting. The platform distributes reward for contents with more social value (based on social actions) and enables profit for creator and middle person(s).

Matataki: a social token launching and content platform that uses the RMB currency for value calculation. Fans could purchase personal tokens through the platform and use them for actions like unlocking articles. The platform is powered by Meta coin, which is also the governance token.

SWAGG: A diverse social website centered around the SWAGG community. Found of SWAGG is more like doing a social experient: hodlers of SWAGG token can participate in building the entire ecosystem: acquiring artistic creations within the network, obtain airdrops before public sales, financially support community-raised projects, earn reward by sharing content with value, exchange for tokens for community work, vote within the community, and more.

Social token-based DAO and social networks - some shows exclusiveness

Karma DAO: started as a social experiment by cryptography enthusiast: meant to create a community for sharing investment opinion, providing insights and advice, communal leadership, fundraising, holding virtual meetings.

Friends with benefits: private social platform based on private Discord server, with creators and thinkers in the cryptography field. Participants of this community need to hold certain $FWB to join. $FWB has 1M fixed supply.

Ark: a investment-guided DAO. Participants could create a {ARK} to invite other members to purchase a particular Cryptopunk, or participate in a {ARK} purchase and earn shares of that Cryptopunk.

Seed Club: accelerator for social token. Aims at helping social tokens develop a template for better management and value ideation/statement through collaboration with creators. This org routinely publish a participating creator list and provide funding and misc support.

Forefront: an aggregator based on DAO, focusing on topics like social token, NFT, and DAO. Members complete tasks (e.g. share articles, create Discord bots, etc) to earn Forefront tokens.

Flamingo: a DAO focused on cryptographic art investment. Members have the right to collectively decide which NFT art piece to purchase, and they can engage in NFT-based partitioning, borrowing, mortgaging, event planning, and other activities. Gated-community with member limit of 100.

Steem: Steem is a social blockchain. It rewards users for sharing content on the platform (in turn growing the community) and provides direct source of income. It is, currently, the only blockchain that could provide support for real social apps through apps like Steemit.

BSocial: BSocial is a social network focusing on cryptocurrency and MMO (Making Money Online)

Note that, social token and the upcoming section has some overlapping; one can’t draw clear distinction for some projects. High-level speaking, however, community tokens exude a more “cozy, casual community” feeling, and social platforms, which comes after here, has a more “serious org” feeling.

3. Web3 Social Platform and Tokenization tools.

tldr: the hammer and wrench of the SocialFi ecosystem. Some tools suits personal usage, others for larger corporation. Projects built sometimes are very Web3, some are bridging the real world into Web3. Still young, worth following-up.

Minting/Distribution platform - tools for all the skyscrapers in the field.

Chilliz: Chilliz is a typical social token manifesting fan economy, with focus on enabling the sport industry to facilitate community engagement through token. CHZ is a native token of Socios, a sport fan incentive platform based on blockchain tech. Token-holding fans could (for participating teams) vote on the color of shirts, stadium music and team logo, friendship match, entrance music, and other affairs. These votes are binding and teams need to abide.

Zora: Zora defines its contract as the “general contract for media ownership.” On this platform, creators could launch their own token. Zora is also the partnership of RAC. Currently Zora as a platform is leaning more toward NFT minting.

CircleUBI: a social network built on personal token and social trust that helps users launch personal token. Trusted and beneficially aligned parties could engage in coin standard transaction of personal token, obtaining service from individual. CirclesUBI’s idea is more leaning toward social but not UBI. The developer, Martin, is one of the person who developed the AMM mechanism of Uniswap.

Loopss: the basic use case of Loopss is: based on streaming payment technology, individuals could launch personal credit token (value derived from “trustworthy-ness”). Transaction is relied on “mutual trust” and adjusted with “level of trust” and “exchange rate”. Similar logic to CircleUBI.

Fyooz: social token launching platform, focusing on people with some influence. This platform is sometimes called “superstar token.” Primarily, Fyooz collabs with musician, singer, athletes, or other KOL. Hodler of Fyooz gets certain fan privilege, such as exclusive events, party, and discount.

Decentralized media platform, Dapps

Bluesky: a decentralized social media project started by twitter in 2019, paused then, resumed 2021. Former core developer of Zcash, Jay Graber, is title project manager by Twitter CEO.

BitClout: aims at building a decentralized Twitter using PoW and blockchain. This platform increases community engagement by passively launching social token for twitter KOLS. Individuals could hodl their creator coin and trade. bitClout also built a PoW blockchain and internal DEX particularly for running this social media.

Audius: Decentralized music streaming media contract. Engaged in collab with TikTok in Aug 2021.

Mastodon: opensource social service network software based on ActivityPub agreement. Published in 2017, aims at becoming decentralized Twitter. Through its sites, users register, message, upload image, chat - just like traditional social network. It feels a little like those boutique social networks some two decades ago but decentralized.

Nafter: a social platform that turns short content into NFT. Platform is similar to Instagram, creators turn posts into NFT and sell them to profit. Users could stake platform token to earn shares of profit from NFT sales.

Coinvise: a social token launching platform focused on API, allowing developers to integrate tokens into their existing paltforms. On Coinvise, creators or community can mint social token and build incentive mechanism on Ethereum and Polygon Matic network. Creators can also use token for reward, airdrop, crowdsourcing, gated-visit, and NFT.

Calaxy: open social market, developed by Spencer Dinwiddie (Team Brooklyn’s basketball player). The founder is also one of the most active athlete in the crypto field. Recent popular activity of Calaxy is about sport shoes NFT.

Clarion: Clarion OS is at its early design stage. Its core is a friend-to-friend messaging contract, supporting real-time video meeting, chatting, and other activities among encrypted identities. This was the ex-founder of BM’s third project in the social media segment after leaving Block.one as its CTO.

Torum: Torum is building a SocialFi Metaverse Ecosystem, aiming at connecting global crypto users.

YouMinter: Very similar to instagram and other social media app, but with an internal NFT function. Users could create, mint, share NFT on iOS and Android. Creators gain fans, collectors put NFTs into collections.

4. Third-party Tools

tldr: Social Token is an extremely social concept, and projects usually require third-party tools for token-related activities; this usually means cross-interaction blockchain projects from other ecosystem.

Intermediate Plug-in

Mask Network: a very special portal indeed. Mask didn’t create a new platform, but rather bridge Web2 and Web3 concepts as a “plug-in,” allowing users to send encrypted message, crypto coins, and even Dapps - thus building a decentralized Applet (Dapplet) ecosystem without a centralized server - on top of existing social network. The distribution mechanism of Mask allows ordinary users to deepen interaction with crypto asset without fundamentally changing the mainstream user habit. Mask also enables encrypted socialization, decentralized storage, DeFi, DAO, and other ideas.

Tools / Others

Collab.land: a Discord and Telegram bot created by the team from Abridged.io. The bot creates gated chatgroup. Users enter the group by connecting its MetaMask wallet, and if within minutes the users didn’t reach certain token hodling standard, they will be removed. Bot also supports governance voting with Snapshot.

Snapshot: governance tool of {off-chain multi-sig, centralized counting & upload to on-chain}

Tip.cc: Frequently used superchat bot on Telegram and Discord, can be used to send tokens. The tool uses centralized server, but no gas is required nor is there any transaction fee. Usually this is used for airdropping within app.

Communifty: orginally called DAOFi and is a social token-based DEX bulilt on top of the success of KarmaDAO. Aims at helping with token creation and bringing early liquidity for community.

Outpost: A blogpost that accepts crypto token subscription. This platform contains many personal token, example include a kinda-popular social token JammSession (JAMM).

Kickback: Kickback is a social token activity management platform. Users stake token to earn the right of participation in events.

SourceCred: community data evaluation and reward tool. Community can use this tool to calculate user engagement data (e.g. #posting, #likes, #reply) and provide basic reward, which can be used to exchange for social token.

Muzenetwork: A encrypted community building and governance platform based on BSC. Helps users build their own crypto community.

Gnosis Safe: Multi-sig and digital asset management platform. Most of its users come from DAO

SuperFluid: On-chain streaming payment and money management tool. Contract is suitable for DAO payment, recurring payment, frequent reward distribution, and others.

CoinMeet: CoinMeet is building a blockchain ecosystem that include digital asset, digital identity, and digital social. It is a wallet, an ID, a socialization tool, a trade platform, a value router of digital economy. MEET is the native token of CoinMeet and is used for incentive mechanism.

ChatCoin: OpenChat is an open-source organization by ex-Googler. BeeChat is a decentralized app running under the structure powered by OpenChat. ChatCoin, or CHAT, can be used for money transfer, superchat, and entering gated-BEE community.

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