On October 11th, the decentralized social platform RepubliK completed a $6 million seed round of financing with a valuation of $75 million. Investors included OKX Ventures, HTX Ventures, and 6MV. This is a rare high valuation Web3 project in a bear market. Interestingly, the chief advisor of RepubliK is Richmond Teo, the CEO and co-founder of Paxos Asia.

As a Web3 social platform, RepubliK does not follow the common "interactive reward" model. Instead, the current RepubliK is almost a Web2 social product. To this end, we talked to co-founder Daniel, who believes that attracting users with Web2 products and then guiding them towards Web3 is RepubliK's current strategy.

Definition of Social Products

BlockBeats: SocialFi, when you first created RepubliK, it didn't have the same popularity as it does now. Why did you choose to create this product?

Daniel: Currently, the SocialFi industry is very hot. Before Friend.Tech, we had already launched RepubliK. And our vision is completely different from all current social platform projects.

At the fundamental level, we believe in a few things:

The first is community ownership;

The second is that users should receive fair rewards based on their contributions on the platform.

The third is that content creators should receive a larger share of income on social platforms, rather than only receiving a small portion like current platforms.

One thing that sets us apart from other platforms is that we will return all the value, fees, or revenue of the platform to content creators through continuous airdrops. This is not part of the marketing budget, but literally returning all platform fees to the community, whether you are a creator or a viewer. I can explain this in detail in the following part.

BlockBeats: What is the current composition of the team?

Daniel: Our team has about 40 people. We place great emphasis on technology and have teams in both Singapore and Berlin. With this round of financing, as seen in this article, we will further expand our scale.

It is not easy to establish a smooth platform that Web2 users are familiar with and enjoy. We are not just building an on-chain tool, but an ecosystem where users can come in and enjoy. That is why we need this level of engineering capability.

Attracting Web2 Users with Web2 Experience

BlockBeats: After a simple experience with RepubliK products, it feels very similar to Web2 products and does not have the experience of Web3.

Daniel: It looks very Web2 indeed. First of all, we are deliberately pursuing the feeling of Web2. Because the entire concept of RepubliK is to become a bridge for Web2 users to easily access Web3; secondly, the product you are currently seeing is actually still in the testing phase. It mainly consists of some Web2 features. All other features, such as wallets, airdrops, and creator tokens, will be deployed in the next few months. In a few weeks, you will see some things that are more familiar to Web3 users, such as our wallet system, etc.

We work with Fireblocks to complete all on-chain transactions. All internal transfers are done through Layer2. So what you see now is actually just a Web2 beta version. We believe that this is actually the harder part to build - a product that Web2 users are willing to use. Although it is only a beta version now, we have already achieved great success.

BlockBeats: So there is currently no real focus on the Web3 functionality of RepubliK products, so how do we attract Web2 users to join?

Daniel: Web2 users can easily understand that this is a Web2 product because they are very familiar with the experience. There is no need to connect to a wallet or understand past versions or Web3 to start using it. Once you join the platform, you will start accumulating value, which is the essence of Web3. We have not ignored the Web3 aspect, we just haven't launched it yet. We have three excellent engineers in the industry who have already built these products, and we are just waiting for the right time to launch them.

Because it doesn't make sense to let Web2 users experience all the features before TGE and product launch. The ecosystem has been planned and most of it has been built, just waiting for the right time to release.

BlockBeats: What role will RPK tokens play in the RepubliK platform?

Daniel: Many projects have equity, multiple tokens, utility, currency, governance, NFTs, land, and more, but we choose to include all functions in the RPK token. RepubliK has only one token, no equity, and no governance token. It is the crystallization of the entire community's value, which is the fairest way. If you want to become a platform owned by the community, you must do this. We see many Web3 social products trying to incentivize users through their tokens. This initiative is ineffective in most cases.

We are completely different from the previous SocialFi project. Let me give you an example. Before we started building, we communicated with over 1,000 creators and asked them, "What is important to you?" Because ultimately, they are the end users. We found that they don't care if their likes are on the chain, if their social graph is on the chain, if their comments or even their content is on the chain. What they care about is getting the maximum value from their interactions. This is what they really care about, and it is the comprehensive solution that RepubliK can provide.

Most Web3 SocialFi projects can be divided into two categories:

One approach is to clone Instagram or TikTok and add a payment layer. However, this doesn't really work because the features people need are not there;

Another approach is to build a Web3 tool and encourage people to integrate it into their social platforms. However, this poses a problem: if you only have a Web3 tool floating in the air without a supported platform and ecosystem, it won't attract Web2 or Web3 users.

There are many on-chain NFT trading markets or social graph protocols now. At first, people were very interested in these platforms, but their interest gradually faded. We have seen this happen repeatedly, so we have invested engineering resources to build a platform that users truly want to use.

RepubliK is like a bridge connecting Web3 social to the entire Web3 industry, whether it's a trading platform or an NFT market. Assuming I am a Web2 user, I came to RepubliK because there is interesting content there. I started recommending friends, liking content, and even posting some content on my phone. These are all things that used to be done for free on social media. But on RepubliK, I can start accumulating RPK tokens for contributing content. I will think about what these tokens can be used for. As a result, I began to explore the Web3 field. This is how we lead users from Web2 to Web3. It's not just Web3 social, but also other parts of the Web3 ecosystem.

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