Web3 Social Network

Before our eyes, a new interesting trend of decentralized social networks, which is confirmed by the following events: 

Visual explanation of the term Web3 Social:

1. Web1: read;
2. Web2: read + write (appearance of social networks);
3. Web3: read + write + own (earn).

We have selected for you interesting projects in this niche, which are not yet issued their token.

Farcaster

Developed by a former Coinbase manager. The project raised $30 million from a16z, Standard Crypto, 1confirmation, A Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Chapter One, Multicoin capital and others.

Farcaster is a protocol that allows you to create social applications.

Application Farcaster is a Web 3.0 equivalent of Twitter. It allows you to track NFTs application user activity. You can also view the owners each NFT and mint time.

Farcaster uses a hybrid architecture. Farcaster identification is stored on Ethereum networks for security and consistency.

User data is encrypted and signed with an identifier and stored on server controlled by the user (Farcaster Hubs). Reason for which data is not stored on the blockchain lies in the fact that the cost of settlements in most networks L1 and L2 is too high and the speed is too low.

This architecture is different from the architecture used in the LENS Protocol. Farcaster takes into account the actual needs of developers more and is similar to social networks in WEB 2.0, but Farcaster is decentralized. User identities, data and social relationships are stored on the blockchain.

Farcaster's growth in numbers is easy to follow on their website. Learn more about Farcaster here.

The total number of users is only 8000 (+200 per week), of which were active last month about 3,000 people.

Very early stage.

To register, you need to get an invite from the team, but so far there are very few of them. You can try to write to Dan Romero in a personal.

Lens Protocol

Lens Protocol is a social graph from the team behind Aave.

A list of Lens ecosystem projects can be found here.

The profile service is a single profile for all applications, which will be built on the Lens protocol. In case of sale, the profile is sold along with subscribers.

Social network. Any activity is reflected in your future social ranking and may increase the amount of rewards. 

A marketplace where you can buy profiles and posts.

Registration:

Registration is currently limited.

Access options:

1. Buy NFT on Opensea (~$41), it will be tied to a specific username.
2. Be active in the Phaver app.
3. Request a whitelist from the Lens team.
4. Sometimes a profile can be obtained as a reward when new projects are released. in the ecosystem.

The protocol relies on NFTs on Polygon, and more specifically on NFT profiles owned by users and their content. The most interesting thing about NFT profiles is that they allow publication. There are three types of posts: post, comment, and repost (mirror). In addition, NFT profiles contain the Follow module, which allows you to issue Follow NFTs to various accounts to fix their connection with the main profile on the blockchain. It should be noted that publications are not NFT. The data contained in these publications may be stored either on decentralized protocols (IPFS, Arweave), or on centralized storage providers (such as AWS). With this architecture, any application can connect to the Lens protocol, and any user can transfer their profile to any application built on Lens.

Since the Lens protocol relies heavily on NFTs, last year it grew quite actively. All time created 108K profiles and 14K users were active last month. Statistics in Dune Analytics

CyberConnect

The company raised $25M in two rounds involving Multicoin, Draper, Hashed, Animoca Brands, Sky9 Capital and other investors.

CyberConnect is more of a "meta" project that allows anyone to develop your own social graph for your application.

The CyberConnect protocol stores and manages social networks in a decentralized manner. user data such as profiles, posts and content. interesting feature of CyberConnect is that users can publish their data in the form of NFTs on separate blockchains for monetization purposes. Cyber Connect relies on its own social data network and the Interest Graph Engine.

The social data network consists of the data infrastructure and protocols of smart contracts. The data infrastructure ensures data integrity by using pairs of cryptographic keys to store data between nodes networks. There are already more than 70 projects in the CyberConnect ecosystem. One of the most successful projects - Link3, where you can create and participate in Web 3.0 events.

You can be active in projects and events of the CyberConnect ecosystem, create profiles, upgrade your Link3 account in the hope of an airdrop.

About 52K unique users interacted in the last 30 days with Cyberconnect smart contracts according to DappRadar.

Mirror.xyz

Web3 service for publishing articles has been operating since 2020 and is already enough popular. Many serious crypto projects post their articles on Mirror.

The WRITE token has been announced and the tokenomics contains information about the airdrop for users.

The project raised $16M from A16Z, Dragonfly Capital, Standard Crypto, Uniswap, Compound and other investors.

The token is distributed by voting in the DAO by users who have 1 WRITE token. Once a week, DAO selects 7-10 liked articles and credits WRITE token, with which you can get a subdomain and participate in DAO voting. This is a more difficult option, but it is possible that they will give out a drop and other users of the platform, so we register accounts, write articles, collect likes, subscribe to other accounts and like other people's articles. Same you can mint NFT for publications.

Nostr

Nostr is an extensible open protocol that allows you to create censorship-resistant and decentralized social media platforms.

It is unlikely that you can make money here, since the project is too decentralized and does not have funding from top VC. You just have to watch it develop. From interesting - Bitcoin developers create a project. Vitalik created an account in Nostr and Jack Dorsey donated 14 BTC ($245K) to develop the project in December 2022.

Nostr is at a very early stage, at the moment it is possible to create such projects:

Nostr was originally created as an alternative to Twitter. For this purpose, there is many clients: coracle, astral, nostr.ch, branle, damus, alphaama, nostros other.

Anigma.io is a web application that is a clone of Telegram. Can create public channels that anyone can join and communicate. In Anigma, you can also send private messages to users. encrypted messages.

Nostr can also act as an alternative to Reddit where you can publish messages, and users can vote for these messages (nvote).

A working implementation of this concept is Jester, a platform where you can play chess online with other users through Nostr.

Sendstr is an online tool with which you can exchange encrypted text data between two devices over a protocol nostr.

Nostr does not need to register an account using personal data. Just like Bitcoin, you just need a set of keys. More precisely, two keys:

Public key: which will act as the username. This the key can be shared, and it will be available to everyone

Private key: This key is similar to a password. It must be kept secret. Except In addition, this key gives access to the user account on any platform, working with nostr.

Getting a set of keys is simple - you need to select a client for the Nostr protocol, for example anigma, coracle or astral and it will generate it. Nostr can help in the fight against censorship, as it is cheap and easy to create a repeater simply. At the moment there are more than 100 repeaters around the world. In fact, the repeater can work on the simplest smartphone. Except In addition, repeaters do not communicate with each other, which means censorship on one repeater does not affect others.