It’s undeniable that SocialFi is on fire.

From Miaoa in the wild era, BitClout at the tail end of the DeFi bull market, to Friend.Tech which is currently in the limelight, the social Ponzi scheme's journey from "point" to "line" that spanned several years has reached a turning point.

With the curve optimizer Friend.Tech as a prototype, copycat projects have sprung up recently, with completely identical models, constantly overdrawing the residual value of social media KOLs. We can't help but ask,How can ordinary users realize their value in this round of social revival?Is SocialFi limited to influence-based social media narratives? Is there a long-term path for Web3 social networking to truly achieve Massive adoption?

Soulcial, which was newly launched in the OP ecosystem, provides another possibility:soul NFT As a value anchor, it opens up a two-way social network among strangers.Through the multi-dimensional SBTI supplemented byAITo describe each user, and then use a highly adaptable social link mechanism to enable ordinary users to become value centers and value relays at the same time, and finally cooperate with the 100% fair launchTokenEconomic fairness incentivizes each social node, this is the picture depicted by Soulcial.

Soulcial is ambitious to become a master from "line" to "surface". Before we delve into this project, let's review the brief history of social networking on the Internet.

Classic Reappearance: Web 3.0 The social explosiveness of the times

As Cicero said, "Without making use of the achievements of the past, the world will always be in chaos."

As early as the 1990s, the US government first proposed the idea of an information superhighway, hoping to use it to build large-scale network infrastructure such as optical fiber to bring the entire population into the network society. This was also the underlying driving force behind the subsequent US Internet economy that led to the world's leading position.

In this regard, MIT commented that "the information superhighway directly connects millions of people, and everyone is both a consumer and a potential provider of information." This has to a large extent captured the essence of the early Internet and revived the early state of human civilization communication - freedom, decentralization, and equal flow of information between people.

1997 SixDegrees.com Therefore, it became the first real social network in human history. Of course, the social network that really became popular wasXiaobai Navigation Friendster, launched in 2002, dominated the charts in Asia for several years. It allowed users to create profiles, add friends, send messages and share photos, but it ultimately failed to keep up with the rapid iteration of technology and was limited by internal management issues, leading to its demise.

Will Friend.Tech surpass or repeat the development path of Friendster? The significance of this proposition is to analyze the historical stage of Web 3.0 social networks. To borrow the comment of Jason, founder of Folius Ventures, "Friend.tech may be the first to open up the situation, Friendster, rather than the final integrator Facebook . ”

As shown in the figure below, the development history of Internet social networking can be roughly divided into five stages, namely email, IRC, discussion groups, podcasts and existing social networks. More detailed representative products of each stage can be seen in the left figure, which started in 1997 and ended in 2006. Today, most mainstream social products have completed their preparation stage for takeoff.

The revelation is that Facebook was founded in 2004, just two years later than Friendster, and in the Web 3.0 era, this process will be even faster. Friend Tech copycats, such as Stars Arena, have already shown a trend of catching up quickly, and this is less than two months after Friend Tech began to rise on August 10.

Although Stars Arena has experiencedSafetyHowever, the team handled it in time and is ready to restart, seemingly with support from mysterious funds. Friend Tech was also exposed to user information leakage earlier, but what is similar is that both have not stopped their development, which fully demonstrates that the fire of social networking has entered the stage of accumulation of power. Although there are many problems, the general tone is a long journey.

The main thread lingering in between, whether it is SixDegree.com or Friend Tech, both represent the heavy preference of human beings for social products. Every time the underlying infrastructure is updated, the earliest adopters will be born, but in the end, the ones who are recorded in history are often the culmination of all. Friendster is SixDegree.com , Facebook is no different from Friendster.

From this point of view, Friend.Tech is definitely not the last one.

If SocialFi can provide more universal products, focus on the unique behavior and social patterns of each user, and NFT the social value of users' Web 2.0 & Web 3.0 in an all-round and multi-dimensional manner, it may be a feasible path to become a rising star.

From a more macro perspective, signs of the social revolution of Web 3.0 have already emerged, but who will ultimately win the game still needs to be discovered by those who are interested.

Decoding FriendTech, the network effect of social

The current situation is very similar to the Internet in the 1990s. According to the number of active addresses of Ethereum, the scale of the chain is between millions and 20 million, and the daily activity is in the hundreds of thousands. On the one hand, Web 3.0 has survived the survival crisis and accumulated the earliest seed users, but on the other hand, the chain world has to catch up with the scale of the existing Internet. The main gap is concentrated in the social and gaming fields. The next step of user acquisition cannot rely solely on DeFi and the public chain itself.

Backed by Telegram, the billion-dollar TON relies on Bots to attract customers, which shows that the current user demand is for "painless" use.BlockchainCoincidentally, the number of active users of Friend Tech is around 10,000, which is basically the peak of the current on-chain activity.

In the field of Web 3.0, the social track has been ignited as a whole, and the number of on-chain users of Friend Tech has climbed to the forefront of crypto projects. The next step is how to further increase the number of users to millions or tens of millions.

At its core, Friend Tech still has strong Web3 attributes. Its gameplay can be classified into the following points:

• Relatively "static" personal homepage: In Friend Tech, the user's personal homepage is usually limited to the PWA application and can only display the user's basic information and some simple content.

• Simple social features: The social functions of Friend Tech are relatively simple. Users can purchase other people's Keys to add friends, send messages and leave messages, but the functions are relatively limited. For example, users can only communicate with friends by sending private messages or leaving messages, and cannot have real-time chats or video calls.

• One-way flow of information: In Friend Tech, information dissemination is usually one-way. Users can post their own status or dynamics, but other users cannot obtain information by browsing and commenting, and cannot conduct real-time information flow like Twitter.

• Lack of personalized recommendationsFriend Tech lacks personalized recommendation functions. The information users obtain is mainly based on the friends they have followed or added. They cannot dig out "interesting" souls, but can only seek economic value based on key price rankings, which deviates from the equality of social interaction.

• Low user engagement: Due to the relatively limited functionality and interactivity of Friend Tech, user engagement is low. Users mainly consume information to seek profit rather than actively participate in the production of information on social networks.

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With the forking and impact of imitation platforms such as Stars Arena, we can see that it is similar to Facebook's overtaking of Friendster, with dynamic, rich functions, information flow, built-in trading tools, etc. But ask yourself, can this cause a fundamental impact on Friend Tech?

Most likely not, the various forks are still driven by FOMO andmake moneyThe trend of the effect is that those who imitate me will live, and those who are like me will die. Refer to Sushiswap to Uniswap and various public chains to Ethereum. It is almost impossible for Web 3.0 to maintain its imitation market in the long run.

Soulcial's first impression: making everyone's social value concrete

During the ETHShanghai hackathon in July 2023, Soulcial became the winning project with its leading product concept and excellent product experience. It developed almost in parallel with Friend Tech. The difference is that Soulcail chose to proceed steadily and continue to polish its products and details.

Later, in Lens ChineseCommunityDuring the hackathon, Soulcial was also selected and won the award. After gaining recognition from the native social layer Lens Protocol, Soulcial continued to delve into technology and won the Arweave Asia Summer Hackathon Unlimited Potential Award in September 2023. It will build a data storage solution layer on Arweave.

Social products naturally have network effects, and their spread is similar to a snowball, which will greatly increase ordinary people's visibility of Web 3.0.

However, Friend Tech currently has two fatal flaws. The first is its inclination towards high-value users, such as KOLs, celebrities, and even adult stars on Onlyfans. Their keys are more likely to be sought after than ordinary people. The second is the Ponzi economic model. Under the expansion effect of the network, subsequent buyers will inevitably have to pay more to hold positions, which is essentially unsustainable and cannot last long.

Based on,Soulcial hopes to find Web 3.0 The soul of social interaction - changing the unequal situation of human interaction from the bottom up and making everyone's value concreteSimilar to Pyth Network’s innovation in the oracle field, the most effective economic model is that producers and consumers benefit from each other. Removing middlemen is the eternal theme of Web 3.0, and the essence of decentralization is disintermediation.

Following the idea of sovereign individuals, the social network built by Soulcial has the following characteristics:

fullyDecentralization：Soulcial is no longer controlled by a centralized platform or project party, but empowers users based on the fair launch principle of the project token 100%. Through a multi-dimensional personal value rating mechanism, anyone can rely on their past activities to gain value discovery in Soulcial, rather than simply leaning towards high-value targets such as KOLs.

PerfectIncentives：Soulcial's social network has introduced the Connect2Earn incentive mechanism, which realizes value exchange and reward distribution among users through efficient links. Users can get rewards by participating in social asset bidding, showing and sharing soul traits, and extensive links, and it covers many Web 2.0 & Web3.0 social products to widely encourage user participation.

CustomizedSocial identitySoulcial's social network binds the user's social identity to SBT, ensuring the anonymity of the user's identity information under a trusted premise. Users can authenticate and authorize their identities through SBTI, thereby establishing trusted social relationships and networks.

Social Governance: Soulcial's social network will eventually come true DAO Governance model. Users can participate in the decision-making and management of the social network through voting, proposals, etc., jointly determine the development direction and rules of Soulcial, and achieve a more fair and democratic social network operation.

New social fission model: Different from Friend Tech, the classic Ponzi scheme that determines the price based on the number of peopleTokenEconomic model, starting from the fission method of Web2 social products, Soulcial has created a new price discovery mechanism that can be called "alternative Ponzi". In the transaction of user social assets (soul NFT), this mechanism can ensure the continuity of price curve and lossless transactions of users when only a few people provide liquidity. Users gain benefits in the process of making markets for the prices of other people's social assets, which in turn encourages the continuous expansion of the Soulcial social network.

It can be found that starting from the embodiment of personal value, Soulcial gradually builds multiple extensions of social circles and gradually combines DAO, decentralized society.

From the fair launch, to the multi-dimensional comprehensive evaluation system for users, and then to the final multi-scenario use of tokens, Soulcial is not like adding a social element to Fi, but rather adding economic incentives from user participation. Incentives will ultimately be implemented on the scalability of social networks. After experiencing the initial "alternative Ponzi" startup mechanism, Soulcial ultimately hopes to retain users in its own network.

Web3 Social: Soulcial AI Ignition moment

Things are changing, and the historical process from SocialFi to Web3 Social will also follow the path from GameFi to Web3 Game.

The last Web 3.0 product that "went viral" was StepN, which creatively combined the two-way advantages of fitness and Crypto. Users do not need to consider any of the complex logic and underlying principles of Crypto, but only need to focus on pure exercise and fun.

Soulcial's social thinking can be divided into two parts. The bottom layer is links, and the upper layer is incentives. No matter what kind of incentives, they will eventually fall into the network of links and rebuild a social network from the bottom up. This is its unique secret that essentially distinguishes it from existing Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 social products.

Free will, unique temperament。在 Soulcial 中，社交特质评估将由 AI 协助个体来实现，包括 Web 2.0 的主流社交平台信息，以及 Web 3.0 的链上信息，如交易信息或者 NFT 收藏偏好，在 AI 采集的标签中，将区分为六大维度，以综合展现每个人的灵魂特质和社交价值，并且标签系统会在未来开放给个人，便于进行更自由的标记。

The soul is born and enriches the body.After the AI-based evaluation system is completed, a unique SBTI will be generated, and SoulCast NFT can be minted with the assistance of AIGC. The NFT will contain all the user's tags to achieve the on-chain nature of user information, allowing the value transfer direction of personal social assets to change from K2M (KOL to Massive) to M2M (Massive to Massive).

Aggregate into a network and connect everything.In the stock mode, users can establish a connection with the other party's consent. In the incremental mode, new users are automatically connected when they register through the link of old users. In addition, after users purchase other people's SoulCast NFTs, a Star Connect link will be automatically established, unlocking functions such as private chat.

In addition to various linking behaviors, users can also discover friends through matching mode. The multi-dimensional tag system helps you find the best soul mate and establish richer interpersonal relationships.

It is even possible to build a more unique and deeper link relationship, similar to the six degrees of separation theory. Different levels of link relationships correspond to different NFT assets, and ultimately precipitate an NFT value system with internal circulation, avoiding the unstable price system of homogeneous Tokens.

Feeding back to reality and igniting the futureFollowing the off-chain-on-chain circulation model, Soulcial's social relationships will reflect real social relationships, and even create a new generation of opinion leaders, becoming a new content creator platform rather than a simple social platform. From AOL, MySpace, MSN, Facebook and TikTok, social media is not static, but rather coexists in multiple states, but every era has its leaders.

Will Soulcial be next? Ponzi it till you make it

In the early stages of Web 3.0 projects, it was understandable to use traditional Internet platforms to divert traffic, from Damus, Cyberconnect, Mask Network to Friend Tech. Operating some kind of incentive method based on tokens and airdrop expectations was also a common method of Web 3.0.

In the long run, there is no problem as long as the final price signal does not deviate from the value itself. The key to achieving this step is that the token needs to have sufficient pressure-bearing capacity, that is, the users of the token must far exceed the sellers of the token. Soulcial therefore chose the NFT model, and will eventually fall back to the social network itself, that is, to build the richest Social Event for people to inhabit their souls.

The article comes from the Internet:From SixDegress to FriendTech, Soulcial’s Web3 Social Fire Moment

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