Seven-year evolution of cryptocurrency social networking, from Steemit to friend.tech.

Original author: Jason Choi, founder of BlockCrunch; former partner at Spartan

Translated by: FakeLaugh, Leo, BlockBeats

The popularity of Friend.tech seems to have brought a glimmer of hope to the SocialFi track, but it remains to be seen whether Friend.tech will become the next "X" version of the cryptocurrency industry. Regardless, the popularity of this application can help us gain a deeper understanding of the history of cryptocurrency socialization. Jason Choi, founder of BlockCrunch and former partner of The Spartan Group, wrote an article introducing the "vertical history of cryptocurrency socialization", which is compiled by BlockBeats as follows:

Since the emergence of Crypto, many people have predicted that blockchain will be used to create decentralized versions of Facebook (Meta) or Twitter (X), where users own their data, or some kind of on-chain reputation system that supports social use cases.

In 2016, steemit rewarded STEEM tokens to blog authors and content curators on its Reddit-like platform. Steemit has 1.3 million registered users and is built on its native chain. However, in 2018, with the failure of its ICO, Steemit laid off most of its employees and slowly moved towards failure.

In 2018, a Twitter clone app called Peepeth emerged. The app stored its data on the Ethereum blockchain and promised users that no centralized company could own their data. However, the high cost of gas required for each interaction with L1 was too expensive for most users, and the app gradually disappeared.

In 2020, investors such as Gary Vaynerchuk invested in the "Roll + Social Token" platform, where creators can issue their own ERC-20 tokens to fans in exchange for services/access. However, these platforms (such as Rally) quickly went bankrupt due to their lack of feasibility and friction with new users.

In 2021, NFT has accomplished something unprecedented for content creators in the social token industry. NFT is mainly used to bet on content and content creators themselves. When a complete social dApp for creators and fans has yet to emerge, NFT has shown us the potential of encrypted social media.

In 2021, DeSo (formerly BitClout) was officially launched. BitClout was founded by a former Basis founder and collapsed after raising more than $130 million from investors. BitClout promised to launch a Twitter clone where users could buy tokens representing Twitter users.

And the project has received support from many well-known VC institutions such as a16z and Sequoia, but unfortunately, the project later caused public dissatisfaction and anger (including the Prime Minister of Singapore). The main reason for the dissatisfaction is that BitClout pre-filled personal profiles with Twitter data without the user's consent.

2022 - Social media giant Reddit enters the field with its own NFT strategy. Subreddit (the original DAO) issued its own tokens (such as $MOON), and currently has over 200,000 addresses on Arbitrum NOVA.

In the same year, Farcaster launched a "fully decentralized" Web3 Twitter desktop application, followed by a mobile application. Today, Farcaster has over 1 million broadcasts (tweets) and 4.6K monthly active users.

With Phaver gaining popularity, cryptocurrency is further integrated into the mobile field. With protocols such as Lens Protocol and Cyber Connect, Phaver's frontend and most interactions run on the Web2 platform, while the social graph runs on Web3.

In 2023, BitClout will reintroduce friend.tech based on the concept of pricing user tokens using the unified curve algorithm. This time, it has received support from Paradigm, and the mobile native application built on Coinbase's BASE L2 has quickly accumulated 100,000 users.

Although it remains uncertain whether the monetization flow (traders) of friend.tech's business model can develop into a user retention (subscriber) business, they have recently clearly attracted the attention of Crypto Twitter.

Regardless of what the killer application for cryptocurrency socialization is, I firmly believe that a successful social application should bring cryptocurrency to users, rather than bringing users into cryptocurrency.

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