Why Multi-Chain Social Requires a New Primitive

Users are siloed into chain-specific identities (e.g., Farcaster FID on Optimism, Lens Profile ID on Polygon). This prevents a unified social persona and forces applications to choose a single chain, limiting reach.

• Problem: A user's reputation and followers are non-portable assets.
• Solution: A primitive that abstracts chain-specific IDs into a sovereign, chain-agnostic identity layer.

Social graphs are the most valuable asset in Web3 social, yet they are trapped on their native chains. A Lens follow cannot natively interact with a Farcaster cast.

• Problem: Network effects are capped by the liquidity and user base of a single L2.
• Solution: A primitive that enables synchronous, verifiable reads and writes to social graphs across any chain, similar to how UniswapX routes intents across liquidity pools.

Social state—likes, comments, collectibles—is stored on its native chain. This breaks composability, as a comment on an Arbitrum NFT cannot be seen by an app polling Base.

• Problem: Developers must run indexers for every chain, a ~$50k/month operational cost at scale.
• Solution: A primitive that provides a unified query layer and state synchronization, acting as a CCIP or LayerZero for social data, not just tokens.

ENS anchors identity to a single L1 (Ethereum), making it a bottleneck. A user's social graph on Farcaster is siloed from their DeFi activity on Solana or gaming assets on Arbitrum.\n- Identity Silos: Your .eth name is useless for signing transactions on non-EVM chains.\n- No Portable Reputation: On-chain history and credentials don't travel, forcing users to rebuild social capital per chain.

Primitives like Lens Protocol's Profile NFTs and CyberConnect show the shape of portable social graphs, but remain largely EVM-centric. The next primitive must be a verifiable, chain-agnostic identity root that can map to any local namespace (.eth, .sol, .bnb).\n- Graph Portability: Your followers and content persist across any chain you interact with.\n- Proof Aggregation: Accumulate reputation from activity on Ethereum, Solana, Base into a single verifiable claim.

ERC-4337 and Paymasters solve gas sponsorship, but only per transaction on a single chain. Multi-chain social interactions (e.g., commenting on an Avalanche post from your Polygon wallet) require intent-based bridging and fee abstraction across heterogeneous environments.\n- UX Friction: Users must hold native gas tokens on every chain they wish to be social on.\n- Session Limits: Current session keys are chain-specific, defeating cross-chain fluidity.

Adopt the intent-centric architecture of UniswapX and Across Protocol for social. Users express a desired outcome ('Like this post on Optimism'), and a solver network handles chain bridging, gas payment, and transaction execution.\n- True Gas Abstraction: Pay for any chain's interaction with a single token in your wallet.\n- Atomic Compositions: Follow, mint, and comment across Arbitrum, zkSync, and Base in one signed intent.

Social apps are forced to choose a primary chain for data (e.g., Farcaster on Optimism). This centralizes the social graph's liveness and economics to one L2, creating a single point of failure and limiting experimentation.\n- Vendor Lock-in: Developers must build on the app's chosen chain, not the best chain for their feature.\n- Synchronization Overhead: Keeping off-chain social data (via Lens, Orbis) consistent across chains is a manual, slow process.

The endgame is sovereign social rollups (using Celestia or EigenDA for cheap, portable DA) that publish compressed social state diffs. A universal state layer, like what LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Tokens (OFT) does for assets, can then reconcile these states across execution environments.\n- Sovereignty: Each social app controls its own chain and economics.\n- Universal Sync: A lightweight client can verify and sync your social state from any chain in <100ms.

Current social protocols treat user graphs as fungible, stateful data, leading to fragmentation and loss of context across chains. A new primitive must treat the graph as a sovereign, portable asset.

• Key Benefit: Enables composable social capital that moves with the user.
• Key Benefit: Unlocks cross-chain reputation and sybil-resistance for applications like Lens and Farcaster.

User engagement and content are siloed on single chains, preventing monetization and interaction with assets on other ecosystems like Solana or Arbitrum.

• Key Benefit: Enables cross-chain social tipping and NFT airdrops without bridging.
• Key Benefit: Creates a unified market for social yield, connecting protocols like Friend.tech with DeFi across all chains.

ERC-4337 accounts and MPC wallets solve sign-in, not state. A user's on-chain persona, achievements, and connections are fractured without a primitive to synchronize them.

• Key Benefit: One identity that aggregates activity from Ethereum, Base, zkSync.
• Key Benefit: Drives discoverability and reduces cold-start problems for new dApps, similar to how ENS simplified addresses.

This isn't a bridge or a messaging layer. It's a dedicated protocol for proving and propagating social state changes across chains with minimal latency and maximal security.

• Key Benefit: Sub-second finality for social actions (follows, likes) using optimistic or ZK proofs.
• Key Benefit: Trust-minimized design, avoiding the security pitfalls of general-purpose bridges like LayerZero or Axelar for this specific use case.

The winning primitive will likely be a sovereign rollup or appchain with a lightweight client verifiable across all major L2s. It must be agnostic to underlying social apps.

• Key Benefit: Maximum sovereignty over data and economics, unlike a smart contract on a general-purpose L2.
• Key Benefit: Enables native token capture from cross-chain social activity, creating a new asset class.

Horizontal "social infra" layers fail. The value accrues to the protocol that vertically integrates the graph, the identity, and the cross-chain state layer into one cohesive primitive.

• Key Benefit: Captures value from data indexing, governance, and transaction flow.
• Key Benefit: Becomes the default social backend for the next 100M users, similar to how Polygon became the default for NFT gaming.