Review the 7-year evolution history of SocialFi: From Steemit to friend.tech, who will be the killer app?

Original post by Jason Choi, Founder, BlockCrunch; Former Partner, Spartan

Original compilation: Leo, Joyce, BlcokBeats

The popularity of Friend.tech seems to have brought the dawn of the SocialFi track, but for now, whether Friend.tech will become the next "X" version of the encryption industry, the popularity of the app can help us understand encryption more deeply A Brief History of Social, BlockCrunch founder and former The Spartan Group partner Jason Choi wrote an article introducing "The Vertical History of Encrypted Social", compiled by BlcokBeats as follows:

Almost since the inception of Crypto, there have been many predictions that blockchain will be used to create a decentralized version of Facebook (Meta) or Twitter (X), where users own data, or some kind of on-chain reputation system that supports social use cases .

In 2016, steemit rewarded bloggers and content curators with STEEM tokens on its Reddit-like platform. Steemit has 1.3 million registered users and is built on its native chain. But in 2018, with the failed ICO, Steemit laid off most of its staff, and the company slowly failed.

Also in 2018, a Twitter clone app called Peepeth emerged that stored its data on the Ethereum chain, promising users that no centralized company could own their data. However, each interaction with L1 requires expensive gas payment, which is too expensive for most users and then fades away.

In 2020, investors such as Gary Vaynerchuk invested in the "Roll + social token" platform, creators can issue their own ERC-20 tokens to fans in exchange for services/access rights, but due to enforceability and new user friction Without their growth, such platforms (such as Rally) quickly went out of business.

In 2021, for content creators, NFT has accomplished what social tokens have never done. NFT is mainly used to bet on content and content creators themselves. When a complete social dApp for creators + fans has not yet appeared, NFT has brought us a glimpse of the potential of encrypted social.

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

And the project has won the support of many famous VC institutions such as a16z and Sequoia, but unfortunately, the project later aroused public dissatisfaction and anger (including the Prime Minister of Singapore). With consent, the profile is pre-populated with data from Twitter.

2022-The social giant Reddit enters the market with its own NFT strategy. Subreddit (originally DAO) issued its own tokens (like $MOON) and to date has over 200,000 addresses on Arbitrum NOVA.

That same year, Farcaster launched a "fully decentralized" Web3 Twitter desktop app, followed by mobile apps. Today, there are over 1 million broadcasts (tweets) and 4.6K monthly active users on Farcaster.

As Phaver begins to emerge, cryptocurrencies are further integrated into the mobile space. With protocols like Lens Protocol and Cyber Connect, Phaver's front end and most interactions run on the Web2 platform, but the social graph runs on Web3.

In 2023, friend.tech will be reintroduced by BitClout based on the idea of bonding curve algorithm to price user tokens. This time backed by Paradigm, the mobile-native app built on Coinbase's BASE L2 quickly amassed 100,000 users.

While it is questionable whether friend.tech’s monetization (trader) business model can develop into a business that is essentially user retention (subscriber), they have clearly attracted the attention of crypto-twitter recently.

Whatever the killer app for crypto social is, I firmly believe that a successful social app should bring crypto to users, not users into crypto.