Why Social Graphs Should Be a Public Good, Not a Corporate Asset

Centralized platforms treat your social graph as a proprietary asset to lock you in and monetize your attention. Switching costs are prohibitive, and innovation is gated by API policies.

• Data Silos prevent composability, forcing developers to rebuild networks from scratch.
• Ad-Driven Models optimize for engagement, not utility, creating toxic feedback loops.
• Arbitrary Deplatforming can erase a user's digital identity and community overnight.

Protocols like Lens Protocol and Farcaster decouple social data from applications, storing it on decentralized networks (e.g., Polygon, OP Mainnet). Your identity and connections are non-custodial assets.

• Take Your Followers With You: Migrate your audience seamlessly between client applications.
• Permissionless Innovation: Any developer can build a new feed algorithm or social app atop the shared graph.
• User-Owned Economics: Direct monetization via NFTs, subscriptions, and community tokens.

The graph is becoming a modular primitive for the onchain economy, integrated with DeFi, DAOs, and gaming. This is the antithesis of the walled garden.

• DeFi Integration: Use your social reputation for undercollateralized lending via projects like Arcx.
• DAO Tooling: Native integration with Snapshot and Sybil for governance.
• Curation Markets: Token-curated registries and algorithm markets (e.g., The Graph) can rank content without a central editor.

Storing high-volume, low-value social data onchain is prohibitively expensive. The current solutions rely on hybrid architectures and face significant UX friction.

• Cost Prohibitive: Posting a tweet on Ethereum L1 would cost ~$50+ in gas.
• Hybrid Storage: Most protocols use IPFS or Arweave for content, with only pointers onchain.
• Key Management: Seed phrases are a catastrophic UX failure for mainstream adoption; solutions like ERC-4337 account abstraction are critical.

Farcaster's hybrid design, with onchain identities and offchain hubs, demonstrates a viable path to scalability without sacrificing decentralization. It's the Base-native social layer.

• Onchain Identity: Usernames (FIDs) are owned as NFTs on Ethereum.
• Offchain Hubs: Servers that gossip signed messages, enabling ~100k TPS for social actions.
• Client Diversity: Multiple clients (e.g., Warpcast, Supercast) compete on the same network, proving protocol neutrality.

The final state is a global, permissionless social fabric as fundamental as TCP/IP. This erodes the moat of trillion-dollar incumbents and realigns incentives with users.

• Unbundling of Features: Each feature (feed, messaging, groups) becomes a competitive market of clients.
• Global Search & Discovery: A unified graph enables truly open search, unlike platform-specific silos.
• Anti-Fragile Networks: Censorship-resistant protocols cannot be shut down by corporate or state actors.

Platforms like Facebook and X monetize your social graph by charging developers for API access, creating a rent-seeking moat. In web3, this manifests as protocols that tokenize graph data but gatekeep it behind proprietary nodes or governance.

• Extraction: Users generate value, platforms capture >30% margins.
• Stagnation: Innovation is throttled by platform policy, not user need.
• Fragmentation: Each new app must rebuild its own graph from zero.

If a DeFi or governance protocol relies on a single, corporate-owned social graph for Sybil resistance or reputation scoring, it creates a single point of failure.

• Censorship: A platform can blacklist addresses, crippling on-chain activity.
• Data Poisoning: Malicious or biased graph curation skews lending rates and voting power.
• Example: A protocol using Lens Protocol or Farcaster data must ensure the underlying graph remains credibly neutral and un-owned.

Proprietary graphs create data silos that break the composability promise of web3. Your reputation from Galxe doesn't port to Gitcoin Passport, forcing redundant attestations.

• Friction: Users repeat KYC and social verification for each app.
• Inefficiency: Developers waste resources rebuilding verification logic.
• Solution Path: Public good graphs like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) or Ceramic enable portable, verifiable claims without a central issuer.

Tokenizing a social graph often leads to speculative governance where token holders' profit motives conflict with user welfare. See The Graph's curation markets.

• Short-Termism: Token-driven governance prioritizes price over protocol utility.
• Centralization: Whales can control graph indexing rules and data availability.
• Outcome: The graph serves capital, not users, replicating Web2's core flaw.

A corporate-controlled on-chain social graph presents a clear target for global regulators (GDPR, DMA). This creates existential risk for any dApp built on top.

• Sanctions: Entire graph subnets could be geoblocked or frozen.
• Liability: Developers become data processors, facing massive compliance overhead.
• Mitigation: Truly decentralized, anonymized graphs with no controlling entity are more resilient.

When a graph is an asset, its owners have no incentive to allow disruptive, cannibalistic use cases. This kills the permissionless innovation that defines crypto.

• Example: A Twitter-owned graph would never enable a decentralized competitor.
• Result: The ecosystem consolidates around a few corporate hubs like Lens or Farcaster, which then set the rules.
• The Fix: Protocol-owned, forkable graphs where the code, not a company, is the ultimate authority.