The social graph is a financial asset currently owned and monetized by centralized platforms. This architecture creates platform lock-in and stifles innovation, as developers must build within walled gardens like Facebook's or X's APIs.
web3-social-decentralizing-the-feed
Blog
The Future of Connections: Owning Your Social Graph
An analysis of how protocols like Lens and Farcaster are dismantling the walled-garden model of social media by enabling users to own and port their social capital as on-chain assets.
introduction
THE GRAPH
Introduction
Social networks are broken because they own your identity and connections, creating a closed, rent-seeking system.
Decentralized social graphs like Lens Protocol invert this model by making the graph a public, user-owned primitive. This enables permissionless composability, allowing any application to read from and write to a user's portable social data.
The core technical shift is from API calls to smart contracts. Instead of requesting data from a private server, applications interact with on-chain social actions (follows, posts) stored on networks like Polygon, creating a verifiable and censorship-resistant record.
Evidence: Farcaster's protocol-native revenue for developers surpassed $5M in 2024, proving sustainable economic models exist outside ad-based platforms when the graph is an open utility.
thesis-statement
THE GRAPH
The Core Argument: Social Capital as a Transferable Asset
Your social graph is a composable, monetizable asset class that blockchains will unlock.
Social capital is a financial asset. Your network's trust, attention, and influence has tangible value, currently captured by centralized platforms like Facebook and X. On-chain, this value becomes a composable primitive for lending, governance, and reputation.
The social graph is a portable identity layer. Projects like Lens Protocol and Farcaster Frames demonstrate that your followers and connections are not platform-specific. This decentralized social graph functions as a persistent, user-owned identity system across applications.
Portability enables new financial primitives. A verifiable, on-chain reputation score becomes collateral for undercollateralized loans via protocols like Goldfinch. Your follower graph dictates your sybil-resistance and voting power in DAOs like Optimism's Citizen House.
Evidence: Lens Protocol has over 450k profiles, with top profiles earning 6-figure incomes from minting and trading collectibles, proving the direct monetization of social capital.
market-context
THE SOCIAL GRAPH
The State of Play: Walled Gardens vs. Open Protocols
The core battleground for user ownership is shifting from content to the underlying social graph.
Social graphs are the moat. Platforms like Facebook and X monetize network effects by locking your connections into proprietary databases. This creates a walled garden where user data is an asset for the platform, not the user.
Open protocols invert ownership. Decentralized social graphs, like those built on Lens Protocol or Farcaster, store connections on-chain or in user-controlled storage. The protocol is a neutral utility; the graph is a user-owned asset.
The value accrual flips. In a walled garden, value accrues to the platform's advertising business. In an open protocol, value accrues to the applications and users building on the graph, creating a competitive market for client interfaces like Orb or Hey.
Evidence: Farcaster's daily active users grew 50x in 2024, driven by clients like Warpcast, proving demand for protocol-native social experiences not controlled by a single entity.
protocol-spotlight
SOCIAL GRAPH INFRASTRUCTURE
Protocol Spotlight: The Architects of Portability
The next wave of user-owned applications requires a portable, composable, and monetizable social layer. These protocols are building the rails.
01
Lens Protocol: The DeFi Blueprint for Social
Treats social connections as non-fungible assets (Profiles, Follow NFTs) on a shared data layer. This enables composability and user ownership.
- Key Benefit: Enables permissionless innovation; any dev can build a front-end (e.g., Orb, Phaver) on the same user graph.
- Key Benefit: ~400k+ profiles and $100M+ in ecosystem funding demonstrate network effects are real.
400k+
Profiles
Polygon
Network
02
Farcaster Frames: The Trojan Horse for On-Chain Activity
Embeds mini-applications (mint, vote, trade) directly into social feeds, turning posts into transaction gateways. It's an intent-based distribution layer.
- Key Benefit: ~10x higher engagement for frames vs. standard links, proving embedded actions drive adoption.
- Key Benefit: Decouples client risk (client diversity) from protocol security, a lesson learned from early Ethereum.
10x
Engagement
200k+
DAU
03
The Problem: Walled Gardens Kill Innovation
Platforms like X and Facebook lock your social capital and data, stifling developer creativity and extracting all economic value.
- Key Consequence: Zero portability. Your followers and content are sunk costs, creating vendor lock-in.
- Key Consequence: Innovation throttle. New features are gated by a single product team's roadmap.
0%
Portability
100%
Extraction
04
ERC-6551: Your Wallet as a Social Hub
Turns every NFT wallet (like a Pudgy Penguin) into a smart contract account that can own assets, interact with apps, and maintain a persistent identity.
- Key Benefit: Enables NFT-native social graphs where communities (e.g., Bored Apes) become verifiable, actionable DAOs.
- Key Benefit: Creates a portable reputation layer tied to your on-chain avatar, not a custodial profile.
1 Wallet
= 1 Identity
Token-Bound
Accounts
05
The Solution: Sovereign Data & Economic Alignment
Ownership of your social graph means you control the data and can permission its use, aligning economic incentives between users, creators, and developers.
- Key Benefit: Monetization shifts from platforms to users and creators via direct fees, NFTs, and community tokens.
- Key Benefit: Composable data allows for hyper-specialized apps (e.g., a DeFi app that uses your Lens follow graph for credit scoring).
User-Owned
Revenue
Composable
Data
06
CyberConnect & The Business of Graph Indexing
Provides the essential indexing and query infrastructure for portable social graphs, abstracting complexity for developers. It's the Chainlink for social data.
- Key Benefit: ~3M+ user profiles managed, showcasing demand for managed graph services.
- Key Benefit: Multi-chain strategy (Ethereum, Polygon, Base) ensures protocol agnosticism and reduces chain-specific risk.
3M+
Profiles
Multi-Chain
Strategy
SOCIAL GRAPH INFRASTRUCTURE
On-Chain Social Metrics: The Proof is in the Data
Comparison of core technical and economic models for user-owned social graphs.
| Metric / Feature | Lens Protocol | Farcaster | DeSo |
|---|---|---|---|
Primary Data Storage | Polygon PoS (L2) | Farcaster Hubs (P2P) + Optimism (L2) | Custom L1 Blockchain |
User Sign-Up Cost (Gas) | $0.50 - $2.00 | $5.00 - $7.00 (Storage Rent) | $0.01 - $0.10 |
Graph Portability Standard | ERC-721 Profile NFT | Farcaster ID (FID) + Signed Messages | Derived Public Key |
Native Monetization | Collect Publications (ERC-721) | Channel Keys (Paid Subscriptions) | Creator Coins & Social Tokens |
Protocol Revenue Model | Treasury from Profile Mint | Annual Storage Rent ($5/yr) | Transaction Fees & Diamond Block Rewards |
Daily Active Users (Est.) | 30,000 - 50,000 | 40,000 - 60,000 | 10,000 - 20,000 |
Developer SDK Language | TypeScript/JavaScript | TypeScript/JavaScript | JavaScript, Go, Dart |
On-Chain Follower List |
deep-dive
THE ARCHITECTURE
The Mechanics of Graph Ownership: NFTs, Keys, and Smart Contracts
Social graph ownership is enforced through a composable stack of cryptographic primitives and smart contracts.
Graphs are minted as NFTs. A user's connection list is a non-fungible token on a base layer like Ethereum or an L2. This transforms social data into a portable, ownable asset that can be traded, used as collateral, or integrated into other applications via ERC-721 standards.
Keys manage access and updates. A user holds a cryptographic key pair, with the private key authorizing graph modifications. This creates a verifiable identity root separate from any single platform, enabling protocols like Lens Protocol and Farcaster to build interoperable social layers.
Smart contracts encode the logic. The rules for following, unfollowing, and permissioning are immutable code. This removes platform intermediation and allows for novel monetization, such as requiring a fee to follow or enabling token-gated content streams via Lit Protocol.
Evidence: Lens Protocol's social graph, stored as NFTs on Polygon, has facilitated over 450,000 user profiles and 50 million interactions, demonstrating the scalability of this model for on-chain social.
risk-analysis
SOCIAL GRAPH FRAGILITY
The Bear Case: Spam, Sybil Attacks, and Network Effects
Decentralized social graphs face existential threats from low-cost attacks and winner-take-all dynamics.
01
The Spam Attack: Zero-Cost Identity Corrosion
On-chain social graphs are vulnerable to spam because creating a new identity costs only gas. This drowns out real signals, making the graph useless for reputation or discovery.
- Cost to Attack: As low as ~$0.01 per fake profile on L2s.
- Signal-to-Noise: Can be driven to near zero, invalidating follower/following metrics.
- Existing Defense: Projects like Lens Protocol use a paid mint to raise the base cost, but this is a barrier to growth.
~$0.01
Attack Cost
Zero
Signal
02
The Sybil Dilemma: Reputation Without Roots
A decentralized social graph's core value is portable reputation. Sybil attacks—one entity controlling many identities—make this impossible without centralized oracles.
- The Oracle Problem: Protocols like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Gitcoin Passport attempt to be trust layers but reintroduce centralization.
- Economic Limits: Pure crypto-economic staking (e.g., $FARCASTER storage rents) is expensive and excludes users.
- Result: The most useful graphs are the most centralized, defeating the purpose.
High
Oracle Risk
Costly
Defense
03
The Network Effect Trap: Fragmentation is Inevitable
Social networks derive value from a single, dominant graph. Web3's permissionless nature guarantees fragmentation across protocols like Lens, Farcaster, and DeSo.
- Interoperability Illusion: Bridges like Cross-Chain Schema standards are proposed but lack the economic incentive for unified discovery.
- Winner-Take-Most: Even if one protocol wins, it becomes a de facto centralized platform, replicating Web2.
- User Reality: Most users will not maintain multiple social wallets, leading to protocol silos.
Multiple
Protocol Silos
Weak
Composability
04
The Data Bloat Problem: Paying for History Forever
Storing social interactions on-chain creates permanent, uncensorable data but also permanent cost. Users or protocols must pay for storage in perpetuity.
- Economic Model: Farcaster's ~$7/year storage rent is a tax on participation.
- Scaling Limits: Storing rich media (images, video) on Arweave or IPFS adds complexity and cost layers.
- Long-Term Risk: If a protocol fails, users lose access to their immutable social history, creating a data tomb.
$7+/yr
User Tax
Immutable
Data Tomb
future-outlook
THE GRAPH
What's Next: The Composable Social Stack
The future of social networking is a portable, composable graph where user identity and connections are sovereign assets.
Portable social graphs dismantle platform lock-in. A user's follower list and reputation become a transferable asset, moving from Farcaster to Lens Protocol as easily as moving ETH between wallets. This commoditizes the social network itself.
Composability enables new primitives. A developer builds a recommendation engine by querying a user's Lens Protocol graph and their on-chain activity from The Graph. This creates applications impossible within a single, closed platform.
The monetization model inverts. Value accrues to the user and the application layer, not the infrastructure. Platforms compete on UX and features, not data hoarding, similar to how Uniswap competes on liquidity, not on owning the ERC-20 standard.
Evidence: Farcaster's Frames, which turn any cast into an interactive app, processed over 5 million transactions in Q1 2024, demonstrating demand for a composable social layer.
takeaways
SOCIAL GRAPH INFRASTRUCTURE
Key Takeaways for Builders and Investors
The next wave of social applications will be built on composable, portable, and monetizable user graphs.
01
The Problem: Platform Lock-In
User relationships and content are siloed within walled gardens like X or Farcaster, creating vendor lock-in and stifling innovation. This prevents:
- Portability: Users cannot take their followers to a new app.
- Composability: Developers cannot build on top of a unified social layer.
- Monetization: Value accrues to the platform, not the user or the graph itself.
0%
Portability
100%
Platform Capture
02
The Solution: Portable Social Graphs (e.g., Lens, Farcaster Frames)
Protocols that decouple social data from applications, storing it on-chain or in decentralized networks. This enables:
- User Sovereignty: Own your followers, posts, and reputation across any frontend.
- Developer Composability: Build features like on-chain referrals or social DeFi using a shared data layer.
- New Business Models: Fee splits for graph contributors, akin to Uniswap's fee switch for liquidity providers.
200K+
Lens Profiles
$10M+
Ecosystem Funding
03
The Investment Thesis: Infrastructure Over Apps
The foundational protocols that enable graph portability and composability will capture more value than individual social apps. Focus on:
- Graph Indexers & APIs: The The Graph for social data, critical for query performance.
- Data Availability Layers: EigenLayer, Celestia for cheap, scalable social state storage.
- Sybil Resistance: Proof-of-personhood primitives like Worldcoin, BrightID to prevent spam and airdrop farming.
100x
More Composable
-90%
Spam
04
The Killer App: On-Chain Social Finance (SocialFi)
Monetizing social capital directly, bypassing ad-based models. This is not just "crypto Twitter." Watch for:
- Creator Bonds & Cash Flows: Tokenizing a creator's future revenue, similar to friend.tech keys but portable.
- Social Trading & Curation: Reputation-based leverage or copy-trading with on-chain proof.
- Community Treasuries & DAOs: Using the social graph for governance and capital allocation, moving beyond Snapshot votes.
$50M+
Creator Volume
24/7
Markets
05
The Technical Hurdle: Scalability & Cost
Storing and updating social interactions on-chain is prohibitively expensive on Ethereum L1. The path forward:
- L2 & AppChains: Base, Arbitrum, and Polygon for low-cost transactions. Farcaster runs on its own L2.
- Storage Rollups & DACs: Solutions like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) or Ceramic Network for off-chain data with on-chain proofs.
- Hybrid Architectures: Critical data (ownership, stakes) on-chain, bulk activity off-chain.
<$0.001
Target Cost/Post
~1s
Finality
06
The Regulatory Moonshot: Digital Identity Primitive
A verifiable, user-owned social graph becomes the foundation for a decentralized identity stack. This intersects with:
- DeFi KYC/AML: Using social attestations for compliant, permissioned pools without doxxing.
- Sybil-Resistant Airdrops: Projects like Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Optimism already use graph analysis.
- Credit Scoring: On-chain reputation as collateral for undercollateralized lending via protocols like Goldfinch.
0
Middlemen
User-Owned
Data
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