TLDR

• The current development path is shifting from competing for TVL and building DeFi ecosystems to focusing on the attention economy. In Web3, SocialFi and memes represent the attention economy, with TON, Solana, and Base standing out.
• TON has great potential, with mini-games and mini-apps gaining unprecedented popularity and attracting the attention of major exchanges. Solana’s Blink has many potential issues to resolve, making widespread adoption difficult. Base is growing steadily under the management of Coinbase.
• The best economic model might be no economic model at all; once something can be precisely calculated, its lifecycle and ceiling become limited.

I. Embracing the Attention Economy

After Ethereum completed its transformation from 0 to 1, the entire industry found itself in a conundrum of how to progress from 1 to N. Most of our articles this year have focused on how foundational infrastructure can address the deficiencies of modularity, with little discussion on applications and ecosystems. We mentioned in a previous article that the lack of applications is because Layer 2 is still insufficient to support the emergence of “super applications.” Beyond the limitations of virtual machines and TPS ceilings, most Layer 2s are still focused on how to draw maximum value from the main chain through incentives and DeFi ecosystems, aiming to quickly dominate TVL. This templated approach only results in faster, cheaper, but less liquid “Ethereum clones,” offering no distinct user experience.

In contrast, new ecosystems like TON, Solana, and Base are fostering genuine on-chain prosperity by embracing the attention economy. According to Wikipedia, the attention economy aims to attract as much user or consumer attention as possible, cultivating potential consumer groups to gain maximum future commercial benefits. In this economic state, the most important resource is neither traditional monetary capital nor information itself, but the public’s attention. Only when the public notices a product can they become consumers and purchase it. One key method to attract attention is visual appeal, which is why the attention economy is also known as the “eyeball economy.”

In Web2, platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Google, and TikTok are prime examples of the attention economy. A simple question: have you ever paid to use these platforms? Most likely, your answer is no. However, you’ve probably noticed these platforms constantly pushing ads for products you like. This is because someone is buying your attention, and converting traffic into products is one of these platforms’ main revenue streams, supporting trillion-dollar internet giants.

In Web3, SocialFi and meme are the representatives of the attention economy. We won’t elaborate on memes here; let’s focus on SocialFi. Whether it’s friend.tech or Solana’s Blinks, I categorize them as SocialFi. Even TON can be considered a social-type application chain. The form of these entities — whether projects, components, or blockchains — is not important. Their ultimate goal is to convert public traffic from traditional Web2 social media into private traffic. This aligns with what I wrote over a year ago when discussing non-financial applications: the best Web3 non-financial applications should draw from Web2 rather than reconstruct applications already proven ineffective in Web2.

II. TON

2.1 Architecture

TON was initially designed to enable seamless payments and mini-app operations on Telegram, without consideration for traditional DeFi applications. This is the fundamental reason why its TVL is significantly lower than other major blockchains. The design choice to create a blockchain rather than embedding mini-programs and payments like WeChat stems from Telegram’s globally dispersed user base, which faces challenges in achieving currency and regulatory consistency. Blockchain can effectively serve as a trust source in this context. Here’s a brief overview of TON’s architecture:

1. Multi-chain Structure: TON uses a multi-chain architecture consisting of a master chain (Masterchain) and multiple work chains (Workchains). This structure allows different types of transactions and applications to be processed in parallel on different chains, greatly enhancing overall throughput.
2. Masterchain: The Masterchain is the core of the TON network, storing network configurations and the final state of all work chains. It maintains an active list of validators, their stakes, active work chains, and related shard chains information.
3. Workchains: Workchains are customizable blockchains optimized for specific types of transactions or use cases. Each work chain can have its own rules, consensus mechanism, and token economics.
4. Shardchains: Each work chain can be further divided into up to 2⁶⁰ shard chains. This extreme sharding capability allows TON to handle a massive number of concurrent transactions.
5. Dynamic Sharding: TON employs dynamic sharding technology, automatically splitting or merging shard chains based on network load to maintain optimal size and efficiency for each shard chain.
6. Hypercube Routing: TON uses hypercube routing technology for efficient communication between shard chains, ensuring smooth transactions across the ecosystem.
7. Validator Network: TON uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism, where validators participate in network maintenance and transaction validation by staking Toncoin.
8. TON DNS: TON includes a domain name system that assigns human-readable names to accounts and smart contracts, enhancing usability.
9. TON Storage: Based on BitTorrent-like technology, TON provides a decentralized file storage solution.
10. TON Proxy: Offers decentralized VPN and TOR-like services, enhancing user privacy and censorship resistance.
11. TON Payments: Similar to the Lightning Network, it has a payment channel system for efficient handling of micropayments.
12. TON Services: Provides a platform for developers to deploy applications and smart contracts.

This complex architecture allows TON to theoretically scale infinitely, handling millions of transactions per second from billions of users, while maintaining high speed, low fees, and decentralization, providing infrastructure for various applications and use cases. However, aside from the DeFi-unfriendly issues mentioned above, this architecture also faces centralization and complexity challenges.

2.2 Mini Games

Notcoin’s listing on Binance has ignited the Tap-to-Earn mini-games trend within the TON ecosystem. From a traffic distribution perspective, Tap-to-Earn has been extremely successful. Moreover, Binance Labs’ first investment after nearly six months of silence has also bet on TON’s mini-games ecosystem. Although this may primarily aim to attract new users to the exchange, Binance is the industry’s biggest trendsetter. At the very least, this signals that Binance is confident Notcoin won’t be the last hit.

So, back to the core question: can airdrops combined with mini-games sustain? Most of us likely encountered a popular WeChat mini-game in 2022 called “Sheep A Sheep.” This game guided users through an extremely simple first level, but significantly increased the difficulty in the second level. Users’ frustration and the strong sense of competition among friends, along with the desire to acquire game props and extra lives, led to rampant sharing and ad-watching within WeChat. Social virality, combined with specific contemporary factors, made this game the year’s most popular phenomenon, reportedly generating nearly 5 million RMB in daily ad revenue.

In simple terms, a successful mini-game’s monetization path should maintain user stickiness through addictive gameplay, then achieve monetization via ads or in-game purchases — i.e., “game-ad/purchase-monetization/exit.” Is this easily achievable in Web3? I believe it’s difficult and unsustainable. Currently, many projects are buying mini-game source codes, attempting to combine airdrop expectations with this traditional path to form a closed loop, or using exchange referral codes to distribute traffic when ads aren’t available, optimistically hoping to get rich with tokens. However, my direct impression of most Tap-to-Earn games today is “homogenization — studio airdrop farming — lack of user stickiness — token death upon issuance.” Once debunked, only a few premium projects will remain, and most projects will end up unable to control Sybil attacks and unable to recover costs.

From a retail perspective, I still think it’s worth a gamble to participate moderately. The participation cost is nearly zero. Additionally, I personally believe Binance intends to use its influence to create several “STEP” type hits. Most projects in the TON ecosystem align well with major exchanges’ project preferences — low market cap, high users. NotCoin is also the only small project simultaneously listed on OKX and Binance in this cycle, with nearly frenzied price pumps post-listing, and Binance’s current attitude towards TON (recently announcing Binance Holder airdrop Banana Gun). These signals remind me of the early STEPN days. Of course, Binance’s ultimate goal is to consume large amounts of projects to support BNB, sustainability doesn’t matter, as long as it can “explode.”

2.3 Mini Apps

Mini apps have always been one of my personally most promising directions. For Web3, this is an interesting attempt at mass adoption. There’s no need to overly elaborate on the potential of mini apps — we can see the answers from WeChat. Simply put, mini apps are more advantageous than WeChat in terms of coverage and application flexibility. Imagine a simple scenario: a small to medium e-commerce platform aims to expand into multiple countries and needs to provide subsidies to users. Using traditional local social apps would entail significant promotional and time costs. Using TON, the platform can effectively track task completion while being transparent and far cheaper, showcasing blockchain’s bottom-up advantage.

2.4 One of the Best Abstraction Layers in Web3

This year’s meme summer on Solana not only boosted itself but also popularized TG BOT. Top BOTs alone could reach a billion-dollar daily trading volume. Web3 dapps often suffer from poor user accessibility, leading to many abstraction layer projects. These projects often tout themselves with slogans like “chain agnostic,” but the reality is that the more abstract, the more complex they become, failing to find a balance between security and usability. In my mind, only three projects truly provide user-friendly access to on-chain activities: OKX Web3 Wallet, UXUY, and TON.

The first two need no introduction. During the inscription craze, they gained significant user favor with the most user-friendly mobile experiences, contributing critically to the inscription ecosystem’s prosperity. TG bot, however, is unique. It’s not an officially developed application but created by individual projects, and it supports sniping and trading all tokens on major blockchains, offering more convenient and faster operations than web versions. It’s extremely friendly to both developers and user mobile experiences. This concept can be extended to many ideas, such as introducing external chain DeFi ecosystems, bringing chain games in mini-app form, and task platforms. Many projects are exploring this, and decentralized implementation methods exist. Perhaps in the near future, we will achieve true “chain agnostic” within TG.

III. Solana Blinks & Actions

3.1 Architecture

From a technical standpoint, Blinks and Actions are not overly complex. The motivation for developing these tools stems from Solana’s recognition of the immense potential of the attention economy observed during the meme summer and the importance of lowering user entry barriers. Similar to TON, Solana aims to use social media as its “second layer.” Here is an excerpt from our previous research report to discuss the architecture of these two components:

Actions (Solana Actions)

Official Definition: Solana Actions are standardized APIs that return transactions on the Solana blockchain, which can be previewed, signed, and sent in various contexts, including QR codes, buttons + widgets (user interface elements), and websites.

Actions can be simply understood as pending transactions. In the Solana network, Actions are an abstract representation of the transaction processing mechanism, encompassing transaction handling, contract execution, and data operations. Users can use Actions to send transactions, including token transfers and purchasing digital assets. Similarly, developers use Actions to invoke and execute smart contracts, implementing complex on-chain logic.

• Solana handles these tasks using “Transactions,” each consisting of a series of instructions executed between specific accounts. By leveraging parallel processing and the Gulf Stream protocol, Solana forwards transactions to validators in advance, reducing transaction confirmation delays. With fine-grained locking mechanisms, Solana can handle a large number of non-conflicting transactions simultaneously, significantly boosting system throughput.
• Solana uses Runtime to execute transaction and smart contract instructions, ensuring the correctness of inputs, outputs, and state during execution. Transactions await block confirmation after preliminary execution, and once confirmed by most validators, they are considered final. Solana can process thousands of transactions per second, with confirmation times below 400 milliseconds. The Pipeline and Gulf Stream mechanisms further enhance network throughput and performance.
• Actions are not limited to specific tasks or operations; they can be transactions, contract executions, data processing, etc. These operations are similar to transactions or contract calls in other blockchains but have unique advantages in Solana: high efficiency, low latency due to Solana’s high-performance architecture, and flexibility to execute various complex operations, including smart contract calls and data storage/retrieval (more details in the expanded link).

Blinks (Blockchain Links)

Official Definition: Blinks can convert any Solana Action into a shareable, metadata-rich link. Blinks enable Action-supported clients (browser extension wallets, bots) to display more functionality to users. On websites, Blinks can immediately trigger transaction previews in wallets without navigating to a decentralized application; in Discord, bots can expand Blinks into a set of interactive buttons. This allows any URL-displaying web interface to achieve on-chain interactions.

In simple terms, Solana Blinks convert Solana Actions into shareable links (similar to http), enabling supported wallets like Phantom, Backpack, Solflare wallet to turn websites and social media into on-chain transaction venues, allowing any URL to directly initiate Solana transactions.

The primary goal of Actions & Blinks is to “http-linkify” Solana’s on-chain operations, integrating them into Web2 applications like Twitter.

3.2 Application Examples

This section is excerpted from some of the 33 use cases organized by @starzqeth:

1.Sending Red Packets on Social Media

Author: @zen913

2.Promoting Memes via Blink

Author: @MeteoraAG

3.Trading in DMs

Author: ft. @tensor_hq

4.Tipping on Social Media

Author: @zen913

3.3 Security Concerns

While Blink looks cool and has recently gained traction in the community, its practical usability leaves much to be desired. First, the feature isn’t very user-friendly for mobile users. Additionally, every action requires redirecting to a detailed webpage to link the wallet and sign transactions. The tight integration with wallets significantly increases the risk. Would you dare sign and complete a transaction through a link posted by a stranger?

Compared to TON, Blink’s advantages are limited to broader, simpler propagation, but it lacks the integrated experience of TG+TON. Security-wise, it’s not just about decentralization; it relies entirely on wallet checks to resolve issues. Thus, Blink currently seems more like an experiment, providing ideas for other blockchains but with many security issues needing resolution.

IV. Base

4.1 Rising Without Issuing Tokens

The architecture of Base is likely already familiar to many, so we won’t go into too much detail here. Similar to TON, Base also has a powerful backer. Its rise shares similarities with the current success of Solana, relying on memes to launch and achieving success without the need for token incentives, purely based on the promise of wealth. Initially, Friend.tech brought in a large number of users, and after parting ways with Friend.tech, Base had its own Farcaster to fall back on. Coinbase clearly understands how to operate a blockchain network.

4.2 Farcaster

Farcaster offers another answer to SocialFi. Simply put, Farcaster is an open social protocol framework that allows developers to build various social applications, much like how the email protocol supports multiple clients. Its standout feature is interoperability, designed to seamlessly interact with other blockchain networks, facilitating the smooth exchange of information and assets across different platforms. This allows multiple social media dapps to be built on the Farcaster protocol, such as the popular Twitter-like platform Warpcast.

4.3 Application Examples

This section references the work of Wilson Lee, a core contributor to the “Biteye” community.

Warpcast

Warpcast is the core application under the Farcaster protocol and the first Farcaster client, developed over a year by a top engineering team assembled by Dan. Its overall architecture is similar to traditional Web2 social software, offering a smooth user experience and currently occupying 90% of the Farcaster protocol’s traffic.

The registration process for Warpcast is simple; the system automatically generates a wallet for the user, and all Warpcast accounts are linked to a Farcaster ID, with generated content stored in the Farcaster hub. This design makes it easy for non-crypto users to enter the on-chain world, significantly lowering the cognitive threshold for new users. Users familiar with on-chain interactions can also link their commonly used crypto wallets. These adjustments make Warpcast user-friendly while promoting the growth and acceptance of the Farcaster ecosystem.

Jam

Jam is a creator economy platform based on Farcaster, allowing users to convert each tweet on Warpcast into an NFT asset similar to Friend.tech Key. Users can buy and sell each tweet, with prices determined by the bonding curve shown below.

Clubcast

ClubCast is an application on Farcaster similar to the knowledge-sharing platform Zhihu, introducing the Token-Gated Casts feature. Users must pay to purchase other users’ Club Tokens to unlock hidden content on clubcast.xyz or Frame. Currently, developer permission is required to use it.

4.4 The Best Economic Model Might Be No Economic Model

Base aims to solidify itself through various SocialFi applications provided by Farcaster. Unlike TON and Blinks, which mainly draw users from Web2 and convert them, Farcaster is a more traditional Web3 social protocol. This protocol includes lightweight applications that empower Web2 and more complex applications that aim to rebuild social interactions. Both types have closer ties with “Fi,” which means they first need to address content pricing and economic model design issues. Complex applications also face the challenges of content scarcity and user scarcity.

We’ve already addressed the issues with complex applications at the beginning of this article, so how should we think about the problem of economic model design? From Friend.tech to Pump.fun, the best economic model might be no economic model at all, allowing content to develop freely without predefined pricing curves. During the peak of Friend.tech, there was extensive discussion around the Key pricing model. Once something can be precisely calculated, its lifecycle and ceiling become limited, as was the case with Friend.tech.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [Medium]. All copyrights belong to the original author [YBB Capital Researcher Zeke]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
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