Why Lens and Farcaster Are Merely the First Wave

Protocols like Lens provide the rails, but the killer apps are the trains. The next wave isn't about building more social graphs; it's about building on-chain economies that use social graphs as a utility.

• Key Benefit: Shifts focus from user acquisition to value capture within the app.
• Key Benefit: Enables native monetization (e.g., token-gated communities, creator coins) that isn't possible on Web2 platforms.

Your social graph and engagement history are your non-financial credit score. The next wave will see protocols that underwrite social capital for financial primitives.

• Key Benefit: Enables under-collateralized lending based on provable reputation and community standing.
• Key Benefit: Creates a Sybil-resistant layer for governance, airdrops, and access control far superior to simple token voting.

Algorithmic feeds are centralized points of failure and manipulation. The next wave replaces them with token-curated registries and prediction markets for content.

• Key Benefit: Advertisers pay curators directly for attention, not platforms, realigning economic incentives.
• Key Benefit: Curation shares allow users to profit from their taste, turning passive scrolling into an active, yield-generating activity.

Even with a portable social graph, moving reputation and context between apps requires complex integrations. The next wave needs intent-based social actions that abstract away the chain.

• Key Benefit: Users express a goal ("tip my 10 best followers"), and a solver network executes across Farcaster, Lens, and X seamlessly.
• Key Benefit: Enables cross-protocol social DeFi strategies, similar to how UniswapX and Across abstract bridge complexity.

Social protocols will be dominated not by human users, but by AI agents with verified on-chain identities. These agents will trade, create content, and manage communities.

• Key Benefit: Creates a native on-chain demand layer for AI, where agents pay for API calls, data, and compute with crypto.
• Key Benefit: Agent-to-agent economies emerge, with social graphs facilitating trust and discovery between autonomous entities.

Current social graphs are fully transparent, a non-starter for enterprise and high-stakes communication. The next wave integrates ZK-proofs to enable private, verifiable social actions.

• Key Benefit: Prove membership in a DAO or group without revealing your identity, enabling confidential governance.
• Key Benefit: Private reputation scoring allows platforms to assess user quality without exposing sensitive engagement data, merging the benefits of Web2 data moats with Web3 portability.

Social graphs are cheap to fork. The defensible value is in the data layer and the economic primitives built on top.

• User-owned data stored on Arweave or Ceramic enables portable reputation.
• On-chain actions (e.g., NFT trades, DeFi votes) become the new social signals, not likes.
• Monetization shifts from ads to direct fee-sharing via smart contracts.

Posting and scrolling are primitive. The next wave abstracts actions into intents, similar to UniswapX or CowSwap for trading.

• Users express a desired outcome (e.g., "grow my audience"), and a solver network executes the optimal strategy.
• This enables cross-protocol social actions, composable with DeFi and gaming.
• The protocol capturing intent flow becomes the new relayer market, akin to Across or LayerZero.

Public, on-chain social activity is a non-starter for mainstream adoption. Zero-knowledge proofs solve the privacy-compliance paradox.

• Prove you're a qualified voter, accredited investor, or high-reputation user without revealing your identity or full history.
• Enables sybil-resistant governance and private social feeds.
• Aztec, zkSync, and Scroll are primed to host these private social primitives.

Pumping a governance token from social activity is unsustainable. Real revenue comes from facilitating high-value transactions.

• Fee-on-transfer for social graph updates, content monetization, or ad placements settled on-chain.
• Take rates on creator subscriptions, tipping, and paid DMs powered by Superfluid or Sablier streams.
• This aligns with the Ethereum roadmap, where L2s profit from execution, not speculation.

Winning protocols will be modular, not vertically integrated like Web2. This mirrors the Celestia, EigenLayer, and AltLayer thesis for execution.

• Separate layers for data availability, graph indexing, client logic, and discovery.
• Allows for specialized L2s (e.g., a Social Rollup) optimized for high-throughput, low-cost social transactions.
• Builders should focus on a single, best-in-class layer of this stack.

The next billion "users" won't be humans. Autonomous AI agents will require social protocols for coordination, reputation, and commerce.

• Protocols must be agent-first, with standardized data schemas and permissionless entry.
• This creates massive demand for on-chain social graphs as the source of truth for agent identity and behavior.
• The infrastructure for this is the true long-term bet, far beyond human-centric apps.