A Big Year For Crypto On Social

A big call out for social web 3.0 was made 2-3 years ago the biggest issue however are the platforms that exist at the time or were horridly built ended up falling drastically short of what web3 is. Here's the thing all development takes at least a year but in many cases you're looking at 2-3 years before a solid product is built and ready for the masses. This is the same with any business startup I've helped launch over the years.

2023 is now the time when we start seeing a lot of fresh applications launching. This bull market in the next years or two seems like it will be focused around core topics such as the following..

DEFI/Dex

With exchanges phasing out and taking the brunt of the SEC and governments cracking down and trying to restrict tings DEX and also DeFi will be the only way forward. These systems while they won't replace a bank any time soon at least provide the freedom of choice for people to do with their funds as they wish and to in a very real way act as their own bank and take control of their finances. It's crazy powerful because power is pulled out of the hands of banks and back into the peoples hands.

Social / Privacy / Ownership

We only started to scratch the surface of this during the last bull run and there was a huge outcry for better solutions to Twitter etc. That outcry lead to lots of development but again it takes time we are just now starting to see front ends take shape. Let's dive into a few of those...

Hive

The hive blockchain is actully built on the core foundation of what is called proof of brain. In reality it's a staking system that rewards value and content others feel is worth of their vote and in return they are given a curation reward.

This simply yet powerful solution is exactly what social media platforms are built on. The more likes, comments, retweets, shares etc the higher value your content is said to be and hive mimics this rather closer.

However Hive itself is mainly a blog front end only and limits its real reach and value. Personally I would rather see a layer 2 token for these front end applications so the tokenomics etc make more sense.

LeoFinance is set to launch LeoThreads come Feb 14 2023 just two days away from this post.

This new UI should give crypto twitter a run for it's money and open up huge new possibilities.

Lens Protocol

Lens protocol is built on top of the Polygons proof of stake blockchain. There's actully a number of front ends for this already which include a twitter like social platform, youtube etc but many of these are still in Beta and as far as I can tell they don't actully provide any type of crypto earning incentive. Their biggest push here is to simply provide ownership of your content which to me only goes so far. There needs to be some type on monetary reason to use these platforms because just owning my content doesn't appeal to many people.

Damus

This application is built from our wonderful old CEO owner Jack Dorsey himself. But again it simply looks like a small twitter like platform but with group focus. It's censorship resistant and allows for customized groups to be made. Honestly to me it looks like a mix of discord servers with a twitter front end and that just doesn't really appeal to me that much. However it could be a good option for LeoThreads to have communities based around threading functions like this but it would for sure have to be policed so only that type of content was presented on that community page which is something hard to balance as people want total freedom and not someone else stepping in. To me it just wont ever work because the platform or community would be over taken by spam and no one would want to interact with that.

Solana

Solana or SOL has had a lot of odd stuff going on with it. Once said to be a great option and then quickly dipping to where people thought it would simply die a horrible death to now maybe being something again. The two platforms that come in mind here are Taki and Chingari.

DSCVR

Ah remember all that Internet computer token hype from 2021. That token went from $400 all the way down to where it sits today at just over $5. That should tell you something about buying now in a bear market only and forget buying in a over hyped market. Never the less it's still a project and its expect to be somewhat like a reddit style platform.

Overall there's growing development however lots of it seems to be community and smaller edge case focus. Which can be a great thing in one way but really prevents massive growth compared to a traditional web2 platform. But maybe that's exactly what web3 needs to stand out. A focus on select communities and delivering the best and not being a for all blast pad like web2 applications currently are.