After the Meme and BRC20 craze, the crypto market became calm and quiet in the second half of May. This quietness is like a cooling-off period after the hustle and bustle, and it also seems to be brewing the next wave of energy.
Looking ahead, as the key narrative of the DeFi ecosystem and the next community hotspot, SocialFi has always been highly anticipated. In fact, as early as 2017, there were blockchain + social projects such as Steem, YeeCall, GSC, NRC, SwagChain, and TTC Protocol. Today, projects such as Mirror, Audius, RSS3, Mask Network, and Lens are the main ones, representing entrepreneurs and communities’ exploration of the current SocialFi and Web3 ecosystem. So, what is the current ecological status of SocialFi, and where will the next trend go?
The word SocialFi is a combination of Sociall+Finance, which aims to build a new community economic system by reshaping social relationships, just like GameFi. GameFi explored the Play to Earn model through props NFT. SocialFi's innovative model is to better empower and protect user rights by reshaping social relationships and exploring the potential value of social dialogue and community.
At present, SocialFi is a relatively new market with a small user base and it is difficult to accurately estimate its market value. There is a consensus that Web3 decentralized social applications built with blockchain technology can maximize the value of the social field and protect user rights.
In terms of development expectations, SocialFi is one of the hottest Web3 narratives at the moment. It can be foreseen that the future of Web3 will be traffic-oriented and will be able to divert Web2 traffic to the Web3 world. This is the ideal prospect for SocialFi. Once the traffic users pouring into Web3 establish extensive connections, they will eventually form a scale effect.
Since 2021, many high-quality SocialFi projects have entered the public eye, using Web3 thinking to reshape the industry ecosystem. Popular projects include: Audius, a decentralized music sharing and discovery platform, which is committed to empowering creators and consumers so that they can interact directly and benefit from it; Lens Protocol, a social protocol for the Web3 world, unifies users' profiles, audiences, and content on all Lens-enabled applications. The Lens ecosystem already has hundreds of application projects under development.
In terms of application innovation, for example, the decentralized charity autonomous organization CharityDAO uses the SocialFi fundraising service platform for the Web3.0 world, allowing users to independently initiate fundraising and support fundraising dissemination on social media to unleash the influence of crypto charity. Another example is BBS Network, which is committed to becoming a decentralized Reddit. It supports content sharing and rewards creators, curators and other stakeholders with its own native tokens.
At present, as an emerging concept in the rising stage of development, SocialFi's advantages are mainly reflected in:
1) Decentralization avoids loss of rights and interests, fully protects user rights and interests, and realizes data rights confirmation, rights and interests distribution, privacy protection and community governance;
2) The incentive mechanism encourages user participation, maximizes value, realizes value discovery, openness and transparency, reduces costs and disintermediates.
After the content on the SocialFi platform is released, users who receive high-quality content will spread it among users under the influence of the incentive mechanism, while low-quality content will gradually be eliminated, thereby achieving efficient content value judgment.
SocialFi is one of the most popular Web3 narratives at the moment, and we have every reason to expect that Web3 social applications will become the most influential and valuable applications of the Internet in the next 10 years, just like Facebook initially built a social graph for college students and WeChat applications created a life service community for hundreds of millions of users in China.
