The Current Status and Future of Web3 Social Products: Exploring the Development of SocialFi from Its Essence

2025-08-11 09:06:10

Exploring the Current Status and Future of Web3.0 Social Products from the Essence of Social Interaction

With the popularity of Web3.0 social products, the number of users continues to grow. However, after an airdrop ends, the number of daily active users often drops significantly. How can projects maintain their vitality? Whether tokenization can truly incentivize user participation remains unknown. Additionally, with the tokens plummeting in the secondary market, do Web3.0 native applications have a foothold, and how can the conflict between content moderation and decentralized social interactions be balanced?

These are the questions that entrepreneurs in the Web3.0 social field need to consider. This article will explore various aspects such as the essence of social interaction, the significance of Web3.0 social products, their classification characteristics, problems, and optimization directions, to help readers better understand the current situation and future of Web3.0 social products, and provide some ideas for addressing social fatigue.

The essence of social interaction is "the relationship between people + interaction". Broadly speaking, it can be divided into interactions among acquaintances and interest-based interactions. However, the base of crypto natives in Web3.0 is limited, so products focusing on interactions among acquaintances may be premature. Interest-based interactions require the creation of new relationships in new scenarios, and simply copying and migrating social relationships will not work.

1. Reasons Why Web3.0 Social Products Are Gaining Attention

By 2027, the number of global social media users is expected to approach 6 billion. Currently, the average internet user spends 144 minutes each day on social media and instant messaging apps. Despite the large user base of traditional centralized social platforms, they also face numerous issues such as data breaches, content censorship, and algorithmic bias.

As a result, more and more people are starting to pay attention to Web3.0 social products. These products are based on blockchain technology and can achieve a decentralized social experience, ensuring user data privacy and security. At the same time, they can eliminate censorship and algorithmic bias from centralized platforms, providing original content creators with more autonomy. Web3.0 social products are expected to become one of the important trends in the development of social media in the future.

Facebook is a giant in the social media field, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns the largest social media platforms, each with over 1 billion monthly active users, including the core platform Facebook(, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. These large centralized players have successfully monopolized the entire industry. However, with the rise of SocialFi, this pattern may be disrupted.

SocialFi aims to address the shortcomings of traditional social platforms. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey once summarized three principles that social media should follow:

Social media must be resilient to control by businesses and governments;
Only the original author can delete their own content.
The review is best achieved through algorithm selection.

Based on the principles of fairness and decentralization, blockchain social media applications flourished at the end of 2022. This is evident from the sharp increase in the total number of active wallet addresses interacting with social DApps smart contracts. Currently, the total number of smart contracts for social DApps is rapidly growing, and the new trend of SocialFi may completely change the landscape of the social media industry.

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2. Common Categories and Characteristics of Web3.0 Social Products

Currently, popular social and DID projects mainly include infrastructure, middleware, applications, and tools. Among them, the SocialFi sector is gradually growing, with many projects based on social tokens, integrating DeFi elements, and continuously undergoing technological updates and upgrades, becoming SocialFi projects.

According to the issuance projects of Social tokens, they can be classified into the following categories:

Personal Tokens: Token holders can access early fan groups, enjoy discounts or participate in events early, and receive merchandise, NFTs, etc. These tokens symbolize status or engagement, allowing early creators or entrepreneurs to gain economic returns. Typical projects include RAC, ROLL)CreatorToken(, MeTokens, MintGate, and ALEX.
Community Tokens: Mainly issued and controlled by the community, typically governed by Decentralized Autonomous Organizations ) DAO (. Primarily used to incentivize community members to contribute, such as granting access to the community, enjoying special information, etc. Typical cases include WHALE, Mirror, FWB, Cent, Yup, Matataki, SWAGG, KarmaDAO, Ark, Seed Club, Forefront, Flamingo, and Aavegotchi ) GHST (.
Minting and distributing platform tokens: representing control tokens over the platform, mainly facilitating creators to issue and manage tokenized communities. Typical projects include Chilliz, RALLY, BitClout, Zora, CircleUBI, Loopss, Fyooz, Bluesky, Audius, Mastodon, Nafter, Coinvise, and Calaxy.

In addition, there are some noteworthy projects, such as Mask Network. It bridges Web2.0 and Web3.0 in a "plug-in" manner, allowing users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and even DAPPs on existing social networks. Mask Network utilizes distributed system technology, enabling users to operate on social networks without relying on centralized servers, thereby enhancing data security and privacy.

3. Current Issues with Web3.0 Social Platforms

The Web3.0 social platform is built on blockchain technology and decentralized principles, significantly differing from traditional centralized social platforms. However, it also faces some challenges during its development:

High data storage costs: Web3.0 social platforms store user data in a decentralized manner on blockchain networks, requiring more computing resources and storage space, resulting in higher storage costs. Web2.0 sees hundreds of billions of data uploads, likes, and comments on social media platforms daily, which poses a huge challenge for blockchain. Some solutions have emerged, such as increasing block size or shard parallel processing, or storing identity information and read/write data capabilities on-chain like Farcaster, while other data is stored off-chain in servers.
Insufficient network effects: The user scale and activity level of Web3.0 social platforms are relatively low, and the network effects are not as strong as traditional platforms, making it difficult for users to find suitable social circles and communication partners. Currently, the user base of Nostr and Farcaster mainly consists of Bitcoin and Ethereum users, as well as professionals in the fintech industry. Attracting a large number of traditional Web2.0 users is not easy and requires more time and resources for public education. Some projects have proposed the idea of creating middleware tools for social media like Twitter to help users become familiar with SocialFi.
Cross-platform interaction difficulties: Web2.0 social platforms lack standardized data formats and APIs, leading to challenges in data transmission and sharing. Different protocols in Web3.0 may adopt various data formats, encryption methods, and validation rules, requiring collaboration between protocols to establish standards. Additionally, users may prefer to stay on their initially chosen protocol, resulting in fragmented social networks. Achieving large-scale social interaction in SocialFi still requires collaboration and integration between protocols to promote data sharing and interoperability.
Achieving a Sustainable Economic Model: The main value capture methods of SocialFi include rewards for social behaviors and incentives for content creation. However, currently in most projects, 80% of content providers are from the project team, and 20% of the content suffers from serious homogenization issues or difficulty in verifying accuracy. The lack of high-quality content creation, incentive mechanisms, and an objectively完善的审核机制 has become a development bottleneck.
Business expansion has entered a white-hot stage: top traffic influencers have become the preferred targets for many competitors. SocialFi aims to create a self-consistent economic system by tokenizing social influence, helping individuals with varying levels of social influence to obtain corresponding benefits.

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4. Optimize the Entry Direction of Social Products

In 2023, SocialFi will still be one of the hotspots of the next cycle. More and more middleware and protocols are continuously innovating and evolving, making social applications more stable, secure, fast, and scalable. At the SocialFi protocol level, there are continuous innovations in technology regarding storage, communication, content distribution, and reputation/credentials. Decentralized social media protocols and middleware are gaining attention, such as Nostr, Farcaster, and LensProtocol.

Privacy will become an important area of innovation. zk technology can be used to enhance the security and privacy of lending transactions on SocialFi platforms, protecting user transaction data and lender privacy. However, it is necessary to balance the conflict between anonymity and establishing social status.

In the future, Web3.0 social products need to explore more innovative interaction methods and social scenarios to attract more users to join. At the same time, issues such as user experience, scalability, and privacy protection need to be addressed. With continuous technological advancements, Web3.0 social products are expected to become more mature and widespread.

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