Why Decentralized Social Graphs Are Inevitably Economic Graphs

Influence, reputation, and community engagement are valuable but trapped in siloed platforms. This creates a $0 market cap for social equity and misaligned incentives where platforms capture all value.

• Key Benefit 1: On-chain graphs tokenize social capital, enabling direct monetization via creator tokens, social NFTs, and governance rights.
• Key Benefit 2: Portable reputation (e.g., Lens Protocol, Farcaster) becomes collateral, reducing trust barriers in DeFi and DAOs.

Smart contracts transform static follower lists into dynamic, revenue-sharing agreements. Every interaction can be a microtransaction with enforceable terms.

• Key Benefit 1: Automated revenue splits for collaborations (e.g., Superfluid streams), turning community growth into a predictable cashflow asset.
• Key Benefit 2: Native integration with DeFi primitives like Aave, Compound, allowing social graphs to function as underwriting engines for credit.

Web2 social runs on an attention-for-ads model, extracting ~$50B annually from user data. Decentralized social (DeSo) inverts this: users own their graph and its economic output.

• Key Benefit 1: Direct user-to-user payments and subscriptions (e.g., Farcaster Frames, Lens collect) bypass ad intermediaries, capturing >90% of value for creators.
• Key Benefit 2: The graph itself becomes a high-fidelity data oracle for on-chain credit scoring and intent-based markets, as seen with Noox badges and Gitcoin Passport.

Platforms like Facebook and X monetize user graphs via ads, creating misaligned incentives and data privacy breaches. On-chain graphs flip the model: users own their social capital and can monetize it directly.

• Direct Monetization: Creators capture value via token-gated content, tipping (e.g., Farcaster frames), and social tokens.
• Portable Reputation: Your follower graph and engagement history become collateral and underwriting data across DeFi and gaming apps.

Modular social primitives (profiles, posts, follows) as NFTs enable permissionless innovation atop a shared graph. This turns social apps into lego blocks for new economic activity.

• Unbundled Frontends: Anyone can build a custom client (e.g., Phaver, Orb) that interacts with the same underlying user base and content.
• Programmable Relationships: A 'follow' can trigger airdrops, govern DAO votes, or unlock credit lines via projects like RociFi.

Embedded interactive apps within casts transform static social posts into transactional surfaces. This is the 'app store' moment for social finance (SocialFi).

• Frictionless Commerce: Users mint NFTs, swap tokens, or tip without leaving their feed, powered by Uniswap, Zora.
• Viral Distribution: Economic actions become the content itself, creating powerful network effects and new customer acquisition channels.

On-chain activity creates a persistent, verifiable identity graph. This solves the 'fake user' problem that plagues Web2 social and airdrop farming.

• Proof-of-Personhood: Projects like Worldcoin and BrightID provide sybil resistance, making social graphs credible for governance and rewards.
• Underwriting Data: A wallet's social graph depth and quality becomes a novel data source for undercollateralized lending (e.g., Arcx, Spectral).

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) like Helium prove the model: contribute resources, earn tokens. Social graphs apply this to attention and curation.

• Attention Mining: Users earn for engagement and content curation, aligning growth with community incentives (see Steemit).
• Data Sovereignty: Users control and can license their own graph data to AI training models or advertisers, cutting out middlemen.

Social graphs become the discovery layer for all on-chain assets. Your network dictates your access to opportunities, from NFT mints to early-stage token sales.

• Graph-Based Access: Token-gated communities on Guild.xyz or Collab.Land use social connections as a key.
• Viral Liquidity: A meme shared on Farcaster can bootstrap a Pump.fun token to $10M+ market cap in minutes, demonstrating graph-powered liquidity formation.