Introduction

With Friend.tech’s daily active users plummeting to fewer than a hundred, it appears that crypto social is losing its momentum. While social projects based on crypto-economic models are diminishing in visibility, applications related to crypto-social, such as Farcaster and Solana Blinks, are introducing new approaches to make social interactions a means of driving traffic, thereby offering new growth potential for the ecosystem. This article aims to explore how crypto-social can be built, focusing on the unique characteristics of various projects.

What Happened to Friend.tech?

Indeed, the once-celebrated Friend.tech is now scarcely mentioned. Some people may still fondly remember the bustling activity during its early days or the dopamine rush of buying and selling keys. At its peak, Friend.tech was a notable product, providing a platform for speculation during a relatively bear market phase.

If we consider human social processes in terms of fulfilling instincts (internal drives), they can be broadly categorized into animalistic and collective aspects. The animalistic aspect represents the pursuit of survival resources, while the collective aspect focuses on enhancing individual identity through relational connections. Friend.tech leveraged these inherent tendencies to establish its economic model.

Individual-Centric Community Building: The community is built around the influence of individuals, where influence organically attracts tokens and attention flow. This model’s advantage is its ability to maximize early participants’ influence monetization and facilitate a flywheel effect of influence. Similar perceptions lead to consensus aggregation, creating intrinsic value and addressing collective pursuits.

Key-Based Transactions: As tokens for accessing specific channels, Keys are priced through a Bonding Curve and accumulate resources through trading growth. This accumulation occurs in two phases: early (establishing initial communities through early adopters) and later (using Key value as a form of endorsement).

Clearly, this structure introduced several issues, including the growth limitations due to ceiling effects and resistance to community consensus building caused by high speculative participation. As noted by an anonymous large holder, “(Friend.tech) ultimately became speculation itself. No one wanted to chat; everyone just wanted to trade Keys.” When participants are not driven by genuine social needs, interactions within the protocol quickly become confined to the token economy, leading to fragmented social modes and creating small, isolated communities. This has led to a relatively barren content ecosystem, with limited discussion space possibly hindering the broader interaction expected from Friend.tech’s derived communities. In this scenario, the social narrative is unlikely to be sustainable, especially since the project employed a points-based incentive mechanism, which also affected holder confidence (for a detailed discussion on points, please refer to the author’s previous writings).

The Friend.tech example illustrates the significant pain points in building social networks using crypto economic models, such as the economic model’s direct influence on the sustainability of social interactions within the protocol and creators’ preference for economic incentives. For creators, economic incentives might not be a primary internal drive; instead, they seek broad interaction and diverse viewpoints. This expectation often clashes with the limitations imposed by economic models. Therefore, we will now explore how a rising star in social-centric protocols, Farcaster, has managed to facilitate substantial levels of exchange and discussion.

(Part of) Creators’ Perspectives

What Did Farcaster Do?

It can be said that at its inception, Farcaster had almost no connection to token economics. The few connections were related to early participants with a strong crypto-native background, such as Ethereum OGs and crypto investors. Thanks to founder Dan Romero’s stringent invite-only screening process, the quality of early users not only ensured meaningful social interactions but also set the tone for the protocol’s development—a social-driven “new crypto community.” This community differs from typical internal groups and provides a sense of community boundaries compared to platforms like X, which is beneficial for fostering community culture. Under the influence of a crypto-native environment, token economics is gradually becoming an interaction medium within social processes.

A notable example is the success of DEGEN. Initially launched as a reward token in the Farcaster Degen channel and airdropped to active members, DEGEN achieved the following three points:

Initial Community Building: Through genuine social interactions, a highly engaging and consensus-driven group was established, which then served as a foundation for strong growth.

Seed Round Financing: The seed round funding led by 1confirmation in February (490.5 ETH) acted as a significant catalyst for the development of the DEGEN-related ecosystem.

Boundary Construction: Interaction within and beyond the channel sparked curiosity and led to discussions on more community-oriented topics rather than being confined to individual tweets. This not only enhanced user engagement but also helped consolidate consensus.

In terms of daily active user growth, DEGEN became the starting point and even turned into a cultural symbol of the Base ecosystem.

However, at this stage, some resistance is also emerging. The distribution model of DEGEN has undergone changes, such as the introduction of active badges and staking mechanisms, each accompanied by shifts in consensus. Additionally, by the end of March this year, the Layer 3 narrative of Degen Chain was being vigorously launched, with widespread belief that DEGEN represented the future of Farcaster and even Base. However, I believe that for a project primarily centered around MEME, Buidl can signify indecisiveness, especially when consensus-building is still unresolved. Although Buidl represents a long-term vision, in the rapidly changing crypto market, a project’s ecological niche is determined by its current state. Without genuine breakthroughs in ecological construction, peaks of enthusiasm may not be sustained.

Embracing the ecosystem is certainly not wrong, and having use cases is a notable advancement. Even with projects like Drakula (a Web3 TikTok supported by Degen) providing diverse services, market enthusiasm eventually waned, leading to a loss of consensus. Nevertheless, I believe Farcaster’s innovations, compared to other social protocols, have achieved significant advancement. Innovations such as Frames, which revolutionize on-chain social interactions, and the open third-party client model for collaborative development are noteworthy. Most importantly, Farcaster’s open social graph and framework form the foundation of everything. Therefore, I am confident that in the future, more organic use cases will provide fresh momentum for the on-chain social ecosystem.

Blinks - A Broad Solution

Solana Blinks integrates interactive interfaces into links and facilitates transactions via in-browser wallets. As an application with similar interaction logic to Frames, Blinks has both similarities and differences:

Reach: Solana Blinks offers multi-platform reach, enabling broad user distribution and transactions directly via wallets. In contrast, Frames interacts via wallet addresses bound to Farcaster and uses accounts rather than wallets for signatures.

Openness: Both allow developers to embed corresponding components in the front end and extend interaction methods, with project teams providing relevant support.

Integration: The ultimate goal of such interactions is to bridge the user experience between on-chain and off-chain activities.

Technical Implementation: Solana Actions wraps on-chain transactions into an API, enabling generic frontend implementations via Blinks; Farcaster Frames, on the other hand, uses OpenGraph standards to transform static embeddings into interactive experiences.

Overall, Blinks does not integrate social elements directly but embeds on-chain actions into social flows, offering a more customized user experience. In other words, Blinks can be embedded into any stream (such as Notion), leading to more diverse use cases. We can look forward to social use cases based on Blinks in the future.

Conclusion

Building a social ecosystem that seamlessly integrates with blockchain has long been a focal point in the market, with each existing project offering its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Just like the ebb and flow of the crypto market, attention will not stay fixed forever. Project teams need to stay attuned to trends and design products that genuinely respect users and communities to make their mark in the social space.

In time, the true outcomes will become clear.

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