Can liquidity mining expand "SocialFi"?
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Following the explosive period of GameFi and NFTFi, the concept of SocialFi has also become active.
The next potential sector that the market is optimistic about may be SocialFi.
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SocialFi: Emergence, Hit the Wall and Explode
Looking back at the development of the blockchain industry, "social" is actually one of the directions that the encryption community has been pursuing.
The founder of EOS, BM, has tried this field three times. After launching Steem and the EOS.IO network-based media product Voice, he left EOS and still chose to devote himself to creating the centralized social concept Clarion.
Looking back around 2017, a large number of blockchain + social projects have emerged in batches, ONO, QunQun, GSC, YeeCall, NRC, SwagChain, Huoxin, and TTC Protocol have been launched one after another.
However, due to problems such as the early market environment at that time, the limited number of participating users, and the limitations of the ecological model, most projects have long since disappeared. Rational voices in the market believe that the economic models of most projects with earlier development time are immature, and in fact they are not competitive.The old topic of "social" will have innovations in every cycle. After 2020, the liquidity mining model has gradually been built into various ecology and models.
With the blessing of DeFi, the "Fi" in SocialFi is more biased from the meaning of "Finance" to "DeFi".
There are still people entering the social token track. At present, the top-ranked and mainstream SocialFi concept projects such as Whale, Chilliz, Rally, Fyooz, and Zora have emerged one after another.
Whale has now become a project-based social token. At present, the number of most personal social tokens has increased, and the mechanisms are mostly similar. Mirror, launched by a former partner of a16z Crypto, demonstrates the "capitalization" of social and content. Every article should have the ability to be governed by NFT+, can be invested, traded and governed, and actively deal with the relationship between social tokens and the creator economy.
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(Source: Messari)
The emergence of the decentralized social platform BitClout has made the market clearly see the influence of DeFi on social. The product form of BitClout is similar to Twitter, which directly captures the data of the top 15,000 KOLs on Twitter, allowing these celebrities to passively claim and issue social tokens. Bitclout’s way of hype is still controversial, but it received a lot of attention in the early days, which is very meaningful.
Subsequently, the emergence of the v.cent.co project took the "celebrity social" a step further. The platform made celebrities' tweets into NFTs for auction. It also gathered some heat.
On the other hand, after social networking encounters the Web 3.0 era, many people realize that the front-end display interface hosted by the server is limited, and some Dapps may not need a server. In this case, Maskbook's browser plug-in model based on the existing centralized social networking has been recognized. Mask uses a simple plug-in model, manages through private keys, and transplants existing social networks into blockchain relationship chains, forming another boost to the value of SocialFi.
The full potential of social tokens is still to be realized.
In overseas communities, the concepts of creator economy, owner economy, and fan economy have become popular one after another. Under the open financial atmosphere brought by DeFi, the value evaluation system of "social value" in the market and encrypted communities is also updating and iterating:
Elon Musk and the Dogecoin ecosystem are good examples. Through his personal influence on social platforms, he directly stirred up the market prices of Dogecoin (Dogecoin) and Tesla ($TSLA). Meme culture develops with distinctive content style and extremely fast transmission speed. In the Doge series ecology, the "Doge++" project that focuses on "social mining tokens" has already appeared.
The important direction of SocialFi is to financialize and DeFi this "community influence". Through social tokens, both participants and issuers can benefit from "influence" more directly.Interestingly, in this vertical direction, some interesting tools have already appeared.
Some industry observers believe that taking the evolution path of the Internet from "game" to "social" as an example, this is an inevitable evolution route. In the future, SocialFi is also envisioned to have functions such as Twitter and Douyin.
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Social tokens continue to attract the SocialFi track to take shape
In the first half of last year, social tokens were in an almost negligible state. By this year, social tokens have gradually developed to have a circulation market value of over 100 million US dollars. Although this is still an early stage, some bright social tokens still attract a lot of attention in the market. Such tokens have natural advantages in traffic and dissemination.
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(Data source: Coingecko)
According to the data displayed on the Coingecko platform, the social token issuance platform Rally is currently the most highly valued social token, with a market value of more than 120 million US dollars.
The top-ranked social token valuation is Whale, whose value is supported by a large number of NFTs, with a valuation of up to 261 million U.S. dollars; the third-ranked currency Fyooz is currently valued at about 57 million U.S. dollars. Although some social tokens are accused of exaggerated valuations, in the long run, people and funds are still pouring into this track.This is also the most mainstream social token classification at present:
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(Data source: Messari)
Personal tokens are primarily issued and controlled by individuals and are often used in exchange for labor.
A typical example of a personal token is Roll, a community currency layer protocol developed on the Ethereum blockchain, an infrastructure for social tokens. Here, communities and content creators can mint their own fan tokens to realize a self-sufficient fan economy. In the Roll project, when the circulation of tokens is large enough, the community, third parties and almost any user can trade flexibly.
Community tokens are primarily issued and controlled by a group, usually managed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
A typical case of a community token is WHALE. WHALE tokens are issued by Whaleshark, a well-known collector in the NFT field, to democratize the ownership of the various NFT assets it owns. Based on WHALE DAO, decisions around the governance of these NFTs are in the hands of WHALE holders. The current market value of WHALE is 118 million US dollars. With the current interaction of more than 10,000 members in the community Discord chat group, WHALE is one of the most recognized social tokens in the market.
A very representative social platform token is Rally. The Rally platform can provide the main tool for creating social tokens. The overseas game live streaming website Twitch Twitch can create its own social tokens on this platform, which are mainly used to reward creators and members in Twitch. The platform encourages non-encrypted native media platforms to connect with mainstream audiences by issuing social tokens.
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How to expand the value of social tokens?
Current social tokens are tokens backed by an individual's or organization's reputation, profitability, related services, and brand. Often by issuing social tokens to encourage users to contribute to the community, or to use the token model to motivate users to produce valuable operations, personal tokens are also dedicated to exploring the value added to individual artists, content creators, and publishers.
In the first half of the year, because issuers often have their own communities and fan bases, under the slogan of "creator economy", social tokens embody many characteristics of Web3.0, and new projects are constantly launched.
On the other hand, the emergence and rise of social tokens has brought new ways of value input in social media. Social Token and NFT play a more critical role in decentralized social networking.
Social tokens are often closely related to content, music, videos, etc. produced by creators, and these contents are often compatible with NFT, and can bring more economic value and benefits to creators together, which makes social There are many intersections between token delivery and NFT. However, social tokens are not NFTs in nature and cannot be confused conceptually.
In 2017 or even earlier, DeFi, GameFi, and SocialFi were constantly being explored, but there has never been a very representative "popular" project.Until June last year, liquidity mining injected new vitality into the liquidity of the market, and the long-term DeFi boom started. This year's GameFi fire is inseparable from the "earn while playing" under the logic of liquidity mining, which allows everyone in the market to see the important role of liquidity mining.
Introducing this idea into Social Token may trigger a new industry explosion.
On August 17, the Social DeFi Alliance (Social DeFi Alliance) was established, which includes Mask Network Polygon, SushiSwap, QuickSwap, Gitcoin, and several DAPPs with strong social attributes developed based on Mask. According to official information, the alliance's The main goal is to launch more social DeFi projects suitable for social network users to participate in, promote the connection between Web2.0 and Web3.0, guide more top Internet social platform users to access DeFi, and promote the large-scale application of Web3.0, etc. .
