📢 Exclusive on Gate Square — #PROVE Creative Contest# is Now Live!
CandyDrop × Succinct (PROVE) — Trade to share 200,000 PROVE 👉 https://www.gate.com/announcements/article/46469
Futures Lucky Draw Challenge: Guaranteed 1 PROVE Airdrop per User 👉 https://www.gate.com/announcements/article/46491
🎁 Endless creativity · Rewards keep coming — Post to share 300 PROVE!
📅 Event PeriodAugust 12, 2025, 04:00 – August 17, 2025, 16:00 UTC
📌 How to Participate
1.Publish original content on Gate Square related to PROVE or the above activities (minimum 100 words; any format: analysis, tutorial, creativ
The Rise of SocialFi: The Next Generation Social Revolution with a Market Capitalization of 1.7 Billion USD
Exploring SocialFi: The Leader of the Future Social Revolution
SocialFi, as a collection of projects that leverage blockchain technology to capture the value of social networks, is still on the fringes of the crypto market, with no true killer applications yet. However, considering the strong monetization capabilities of social traffic in the Web2 world, the future development space for SocialFi remains vast.
The development of SocialFi can be traced back to around 2017, when a number of projects such as Steem emerged. However, due to technical and user base limitations, most did not survive in the long term. The year 2021 can be seen as the founding year of SocialFi, driven by the DeFi Summer, with a new batch of projects like CyberConnect and Galxe completing financing and remaining active to this day. In 2023, Friend.tech briefly caused a stir with its unique model, although its popularity has significantly declined.
Currently, the market value of the SocialFi sector is only about 1.7 billion USD, which is in stark contrast to the huge profit margins of traditional social platforms. Nevertheless, the Web3 community still mainly relies on traditional platforms such as Twitter and Telegram, highlighting the strong inertia effect of social networks.
SocialFi projects are mainly divided into two categories: social protocols/graphs and social applications.
In the field of social protocols, Lens Protocol empowers social activities with financial attributes by NFT-ifying concepts such as profiles and followers. Farcaster adopts a three-layer architecture to provide a smooth user experience while maintaining decentralization. CyberConnect attracts users through multi-chain deployment and reduced operational costs.
In terms of social applications, Friend.tech's economic model is difficult to sustain, but its low-threshold customer acquisition strategy is worth learning from. Phaver, based on the Lens protocol, encourages the creation and discovery of quality content through innovative incentive mechanisms. Warpcast, as the "Web3 version of Twitter," seamlessly integrates Web3 elements, significantly lowering the participation threshold for users.
At the same time, the rise of the decentralized social platform Mastodon also reflects users' demands for privacy protection and freedom of speech, providing opportunities for SocialFi projects.
In the future, SocialFi projects need to focus on reducing barriers to entry and optimizing user experience while maintaining technological innovation, as well as establishing effective content incentive mechanisms. Only in this way can they truly challenge traditional social platforms, redistribute traffic value, and ultimately lead the next social revolution.