Why Decentralized Social Requires a New Definition of 'User'

EOA and MPC wallets are passive signers. They can't execute logic, manage assets, or interact with protocols without constant user signatures, creating a ~10-30 second latency for every action and making complex social coordination impossible.

• No Automation: Can't schedule posts, auto-curate feeds, or manage subscriptions.
• High Friction: Every 'like' or reply requires a wallet pop-up, killing UX.

Account Abstraction via Smart Contract Wallets turns users into programmable agents. Bundlers handle gas, paymasters sponsor transactions, and custom logic executes autonomously based on predefined rules, enabling social-specific intents.

• Session Keys: Grant temporary permissions for seamless app use.
• Social Recovery: Use friends or a DAO as your seed phrase backup.
• Composability: Agents can own other agents (e.g., a bot for your feed).

Frames are mini-apps inside casts that let users take actions (mint, vote, play) without leaving the feed. This is a primitive for agent-initiated transactions, where the protocol acts on the user's implicit intent.

• Intent-Driven: User clicks 'Mint' -> agent executes the full tx flow.
• Protocol as Agent: The Frame's smart contract becomes a temporary agent for the user.
• Viral Distribution: Actions propagate through the social graph itself.

Agents need rich, real-time social data to act. These protocols index and structure on-chain and off-chain social data (Farcaster, Lens, XMTP) into queryable graphs, providing the contextual intelligence for agent decision-making.

• Unified Graph: Query a user's social footprint across 10+ protocols.
• Real-Time Streams: Push notifications for on-chain events (new follower, mention).
• Enables: Automated community moderation, personalized feed agents, reputation-based access.

The end-state: user agents form autonomous social DAOs (like FlamingoDAO for social capital). Your agent pools attention, content, and capital with others, automatically voting on proposals, funding creators, and curating communities based on shared rules.

• Capital Efficiency: Pooled social capital can sponsor transactions, bid on NFTs.
• Automated Governance: Agents vote based on your staked reputation or preferences.
• New Economies: Enables decentralized talent agencies, co-creation studios.

Programmable users are hackable users. Malicious agents, Sybil attacks, and MEV extraction from agent intent become systemic risks. The stack requires robust agent security layers (like Forta for monitoring) and economic designs that penalize bad behavior.

• New Attack Vectors: Session key theft, malicious agent logic, spam armies.
• Critical Need: Agent reputation systems, bonding curves for agent creation, zero-knowledge proofs for private actions.

Without a centralized arbiter, protocols like Lens and Farcaster must prevent spam and manipulation using costly on-chain signals (e.g., NFT ownership, gas fees). This creates a tension: high cost = less spam but also less accessibility.

• Key Risk: Inflated costs for genuine users or cheap sybil attacks that degrade network quality.
• Key Metric: ~$5-50 current cost to create a 'verified' on-chain identity.
• Example: Airdrop farming on Lens via mass account creation.

User = Private Key. Losing a seed phrase means permanent, irrevocable loss of social graph, content, and reputation—a catastrophic failure for mainstream adoption.

• Key Risk: Single point of failure destroys years of social capital.
• Mitigation: Emerging solutions like ERC-4337 account abstraction and social recovery wallets (e.g., Safe) add complexity and trusted assumptions.
• Trade-off: True self-custody vs. the convenience users expect from Web2.

To avoid forcing users to hold native gas tokens, protocols use meta-transactions and sponsorship. This opens vectors for spam that can't be priced out by gas markets.

• Key Risk: Sponsored transaction pools (e.g., Biconomy, Gelato) can be drained by spam attacks, disabling the network.
• Example: A malicious actor could spam a Farcaster frame with sponsored transactions, exhausting the relay's budget.
• Requirement: Sophisticated rate-limiting and proof-of-personhood (e.g., Worldcoin, BrightID) become critical infrastructure.

Storing social data (posts, likes) fully on-chain (e.g., Arweave) is prohibitively expensive. Most protocols use hybrid models with off-chain storage (Ceramic, IPFS) anchored by on-chain pointers.

• Key Risk: If the off-layer data becomes unavailable (pinned by a few nodes), the on-chain reference points to nothing—digital decay.
• Key Metric: ~1-10 cents per post on-chain vs. fractions of a cent off-chain.
• Consequence: Centralization pressure on a few data pinning services, recreating Web2 hosting problems.

Social graphs represented as transferable NFTs (e.g., Lens handles) become financial assets first, social identities second. This leads to speculation, renting, and absentee landlord dynamics that distort network effects.

• Key Risk: Core social utility is subordinated to tokenomics; users are priced out of their own network.
• Example: A speculator buys 10,000 desirable username NFTs, creating artificial scarcity.
• Result: The network's value accrues to capital, not activity, stifling organic growth.

The promise of composable social graphs across apps (e.g., using your Lens profile everywhere) requires universal standards. In practice, protocol fragmentation (Lens vs. Farcaster vs. others) and client-specific features create walled gardens.

• Key Risk: Developers optimize for one protocol's quirks, locking users and content into a new stack.
• Reality: True interoperability needs shared data schemas and incentive alignment, which are harder than technical bridges.
• Outcome: Users face the same platform-lock in, just with different branding.