Could SocialFi, which upends social logic, be next?

原文标题：《 我看 SocialFi：社交逻辑的颠覆与下一个超级风口！ 》

Source: Star Value Investment

Crpyto's future is sure to be spectacular.

Of course, after so long in the doldrums of the market, there is always something of a "recharge of faith" to begin with. But I think this is not a bad thing. For one thing, some friends really need a firm preacher like me to boost their confidence in the currency. And secondly, that's really how I feel.

However, this is a departure from the "mainstream voice". Markets have been "low and choppy" for a long time, and all people want to know is what happens next and the fed's seemingly important (but inconsequential) rate-setting meetings. "You say you want to change the status quo, this is not within your ability to do things, even know the news in advance to predict the short-term market, are not within your ability to do ----- if you really want to do so, about only in a dream to achieve."

Discussing the conclusion of the "rate-setting meeting" is such a boring thing, even the Fed chairman can not determine the script, you and I can arrange the ending? Moreover, raising interest rates will not stop the tide of history. The worst may be the best: the market crashes and Mr. Market gets on his knees and offers you cheap chips.

Only this, the so-called "news surface", "economics", is really useless ----- if really can help us to judge the price is indeed useful, but the problem is not.

So generally speaking, when it comes to investing, Peter Lynch, one of Wall Street's best money managers of the last century, said that it's better to study history and philosophy than economics. The former (history) allows you to summarize past experiences, the latter (philosophy) allows you to establish logic for thinking.

This is the most important part of investing, and the core skill to truly "predict trends." Right now, for example, I'm betting that SocialFi is the next big thing.

1. The secret behind Crpyto bull market: the wealth-making effect of "universality"

Whether it is "public chain market" in 2017, "DeFi Summer" in 2020, or "NFT Collection" and "GameFi" in 2021, throughout the several bull markets, although they seem to be different, they are ultimately generated based on one of the most important conditions:Participant benefits.

Social Finance: The Next 'Hundredfold Coin Pool' According to one article:

"In 2017, rumor has it that" bull market of public chain ", but in fact, the wealth effect of 1C0 on most participants is the hidden line; In 2020, DeFi Summer turned this clue from a hidden line to a bright one. COMP's AMM (liquidity mining) enriched the market maker earnings of small institutions, while YFI's aggregator earnings and UNI's airdrop earnings further lowered the threshold for participation. In 2021, GameFi represented by AIXE, Crpytopunks and NFTFi represented by BAYC are actually the same logic: the former reduces the threshold for participants to make money, while the latter aggravates the benefits of participants."

In fact, many people do not realize that the Crypto industry at this stage, there is no killer product that can change life (solve pain points, convenient life), change user habits, and then change the world. But Crypto industry has its own characteristic, that is financial.

Note that all the features highlighted by Crpyto are visions of the future. But if you want the industry to develop rapidly, you need to participate in the explosive growth of the number of users. Using tokens to "decentralize" rights and benefits is the biggest feature of Crpyto industry. After that, once the "participant threshold" is lowered, it is a big outbreak.

Of course, if only such mode, the final shape is all kinds of ZJ disk, CX disk. Therefore, such a model must be based on the value of the product.

But many practitioners and investors see only technology, but they do not know that blockchain is open source? Technology is only for the realization of the product, rather than emphasizing the technology itself, interesting technology to make boring products will not be paid ------BCH isn't the best example?

Same thing with the public chain. Most (public chain) propaganda, relying on only stage unique, advanced technology, but the final out is only "Ethereum copy disk", what is the meaning of this? The use of Crypto's strong financial attributes to do product education, do user increment is the prerequisite for the start of the bull market.

1C0, DeFi, GameFi, and then SocialFi, social finance.

Second, the next direction that can achieve the "universal" effect of creating wealth: Social+Fi

The founders of AC and Bitmex have all mentioned GameFi, NFTFi and SocialFi. Vitalik also said in a recent interview that if he was going to make a DAPP, he would also choose social media.

As social beings, socializing is one of the most essential human needs. But we still face the question, what is the core pain point of social interaction? In other words, what kind of problems can decentralized socializing solve for us?

That's where history comes in. Social communication, the transition from letters to phone calls, has solved the "space barrier" and "time barrier", so that the time of information transmission from a month to instant; The transition from telephone to Internet has solved the "content barrier" and "cost barrier"; The transition from QQ to wechat and from PC to mobile has solved the "mobile barrier" and turned two fixed points into mobile networks.

Now, what kind of problems does decentralized networking solve? Many professionals stress "data privacy", but this is just "holding a hammer to find a nail" thinking. Made a series of social DApps and social networks, and the result? These dapps are either petrified or out of business.

User education and the value of privacy are the biggest issues. In the web2.0 era, it's true that user data is being stolen by social software and platforms, but how many people care? To use a less apt metaphor, it is "full of sensuality". When most people's salary is only a few hundred thousand, cheap, convenient is the core appeal.

Just give me free voice, voice calls, private data? Access to my data? Who care? Ask 100 friends around you, how many apps like WX and TB will not use it because they need access to data?

Decentralized social networking is actually born in the conflict between web2.0 and web3.0. Indeed, data life in the web2.0 era has been stolen and manipulated by centralized platforms. The release of data life, anti-censorship, anti-polarization and anti-algorithm deviation emphasized by web3.0 era are also inevitable.

But this world is a future world, it's web3.0, it's the meta-universe. Of course, we don't need to build a new world by ourselves. We just need to figure out a question: how should decentralized social interaction, which can't solve the core pain point, come about? To put it in plain English:

Networking is important. How do we make money from it?

3. How will Web3.0 and decentralized social networking be disrupted

The answer is social finance, or rather financial social.

In"What if I miss DeFi, GameFi, NFTS? Social Finance: The next "Hundredfold coin pool"! "I also put forward a concept of decentralized social: "Value first, then social; finance first, then social."

Value social has begun to take shape in the web2.0 era. Content interaction platforms such as Toutiao, NetEase and Baijia all put forward the concept of "everyone is a creator", but there is a huge problem that non-content providers do not gain profits.

The idea of a traditional platform is to provide content creators with revenue, retention through content and monetization through advertising. In the end, all platforms become homogenized competition, with only toutiao's algorithm and B's community forming a moat to stand firm. The remaining platforms, such as Wukong Q&A and Zhihu, Douyu and Panda, all fall into a vicious circle of burning money and competing for authors.

But there is a variable in this process, and that is the funny headlines. Qutoutiao used the "blockchain model" for the first time and put forward the concept of "user revenue" : watching a video can get gold coins, watching an article can get gold coins, and then accumulating gold coins can get profits.

Relying on the mode of "social mining", Qutoutiao fought its way through today's Toutiao, Baijiahao, Tencent platform, UCHao and other giants and successfully went public.

Sadly, Qutoutiao gives "participant benefits" but not "participant value". To know, there will always be an end to financing subsidies, only let users (readers and creators) together hematiosis, generate value of liquidity, in order to find their own position in the content social platform, or it is the fire after the listing of ---- Qutoutiao's stock price has shown everything.

To sum up, "participant benefit" represents explosive power, and "participant value" represents persistence.

This is where decentralized social networking breaks the ice. The unique token of Crpyto can better provide economic effect for users, while the DAO model can enable ordinary readers to participate in content construction and community construction, and obtain more value besides "obtaining content".

In "WEB3.0 changing the rules of the game: thin platforms, fat users," I talked about a common problem with the big WEB2.0 platforms:

"Monopoly platform data, using the algorithm to build trading trap, known as" big data kill cooked ". For example, if the net platform about car follow OA SaaS interactive data, know that you are late again will be fired, so the special circumstances, only to provide you with the most expensive taxi services, and tariffs -- -- -- -- -- are you scared?

In addition, the essence of the existence of the platform is to eliminate information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, so as to achieve "fair trade" and reduce transaction costs. But once this "two-sided platform" becomes a monopoly, it changes from a "dealmaking intermediary" to a "middleman", eating the plaintiff as well as the defendant, and becoming the most profitable of the three parties (buyer, seller and intermediary)."

What Web3.0 needs to do is:

"Retain the advantages of big data brought by the platform, return the" excess wealth "captured by centralization to both buyers and sellers (users), and hand over the governance rights to community users through DAO, which roots the evolution of the platform from intermediary to intermediary." ----- is the so-called "thin platform, fat users".

Make use of the decentralized characteristics, subtract the benefits of the platform side, make "social is mining" become the channel of traffic acquisition, use DAO to deepen users' participation in social, such financial social, can form the engine of the next bull market.

Iv. Current situation analysis and opportunities: VC VS community

But few decentralized social platforms seem to have achieved this. According to the current mainstream classification of social sector, social projects can be divided into personal social tokens, platform social tokens and community tokens. I think these categories are mostly gimmicks.

What is really worth watching is the VC VS community war.

DeSo and Rally are examples of VC. DeSo is a star product of the social department, and Sequoia Capital and A16Z have invested in it. With noble VC background, DeSo is destined to become a strong competitor of the leader of the social track. But the biggest problem with DeSo is that the DAO is not perfect (DeSo is a worthy project, I will write about it next time). This time I will use it as a bad example:

"DeSo emphasizes the creator economy, in which each user can make his or her own" creator token ", and the price rises/falls as the user buys/sells it. The initial popularity is very high, for example, Musk's personal token was priced at $11.299 million before he even entered the market.

But this direction I think is problematic. Because DeSo's emphasis on the creator economy is really a boring thing. Traditional social-content platforms, from Baijia to Toutiao, have the slogan "Everyone is a creator", and centralized social-content platforms are more advantageous for grassroots creators.

Why is that? Because of the flow. The centralised social-content platform, while acting as a "content intermediary", takes a cut from the creators, but it also uses algorithms to distribute your content to targeted users, allowing them to generate revenue for you.

Decentralized networking is not. DeSo design of creator token, only to bring their own traffic and celebrities useful, for them to reduce the platform "intermediary fees", for ordinary creators, no intermediary there is no traffic, no traffic revenue is zero, zero times the number of percent is zero.

Rally, which is owned by venture capital giants like A16Z and Coinbas, has the same problem. As for WHALE NFT+DAO socializing.

Corresponding to VC department is the social project of community department, the most representative is mask and mirror. Maks is not strictly a social project, just a social plugin. However, social plug-ins like this have greatly lowered the barrier of entry for users by aggregating information sources and DEX.

  In August of this year, mask also led a social finance alliance with participants including LAYER2, trading, prediction markets, developer community, fiat currency entry, NFT, community and media, which is quite a "self-built ecosystem". However, the biggest risk of Mask is probably what he is good at. How to get rid of the restriction of FB and Twitter plug-in and become a social portal in the real sense of Web3.0?

Hit the past, market value of 100 billion; I can't. I'm afraid it's over.

Mirror, another product of the community department, is left last, because I am the most optimistic. It may look like a content creation platform, but it may also look like a decentralized version of Medium to many. But mirror offers a few key features that make social finance explode:

Crowdfunding, auction, cooperation contribution split.

From this perspective, Mirror is not just a platform for providing content, but can become a crowdfunding platform, a content collaboration platform, and even a DAO community. But unfortunately did not send tokens, Mirror tokens only airdrop, the original way to get voting, voting is now closed....

There is no index to see other people's content, no comments, no likes, no rewards ------- but these are just technical issues. If the project keeps updating without mistakes, mirror has a great chance of becoming a decentralized headline today. I suggest that we use it more, it might be airdropped again?

All in all, it's up to the community and VC departments who can think of using the universal benefit effect to drive the incremental explosion of users. At that time, a new round of bull market will quietly come, and advance layout of you and me, and how much return?

It is exciting to think of such an early Crpyto industry, it is really magnificent ah.

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