Social media platforms play an important role in cryptocurrency development. It is where news is spread, sentiment is built and communities are formed. Recently, we have seen the surge in interest in decentralised Web3 socials in 2024. These protocols aim to give ownership of identity and content back to the users.
Announced in June 2024, Solana’s Actions and Blinks aims to “connect Solana to the entire Internet”. Actions are APIs that return Solana transactions, making it simple to share with native app buttons, QR codes or URLs. Blinks, which stands for blockchain links, convert actions into shareable links and can be plugged into websites. It enables blockchain actions to be embedded in links and then shared in social media posts for example on X.
Currently, Blinks are usable on various protocols in Solana, for example, Phantom, Backpack, Jupiter, Tensor, Sanctum, Meteora and others. It is also integrated into X via supporting wallet chrome extensions. Use cases include DeFi (trade tokens or staking), NFT (mint and purchase), games (in-game purchases), content subscription and governance.
Launched in 2020, Farcaster is an open-source decentralised social graph protocol that hosts multiple social network applications. Farcaster launched Frames in Jan 2024, which was a major contributor to the protocol’s surge in interest this year. Similar to Actions and Blinks, Frames enables casts to turn into an interactive mini app (eg. create polls within posts, mint and display NFT collections etc). Since Frames launched, daily unique casters (users that made a post) increased 14x in two weeks while number of casts increased 19x.
Unveiled in February 2022, Lens is a decentralised social graph protocol developed by AAVE team. It introduced a new feature Open Action in Nov 2023, similar to Farcaster’s Frames, where external smart contract actions are enabled on a Lens publication.
One of the main use cases is to “collect” publications, which enables users to mint an NFT linked to a publication, either for free or at a fee. Lens saw a surge in user base and activities in 2024, growing from an average of 12,500 daily transactions in Jan to 129,000 in July 2024.
In comparison, Actions and Blinks is a plug-in to be integrated with existing web2 websites. This is different from Farcaster and Lens, which integrated their Frames and Open Actions function, respectively, into the dapps on their protocol. Given Actions and Blinks leverage the existing web2 traffic from already established websites for example X, it receives benefit from its large user base. Another key differentiation is that Actions and Blinks currently do not work on mobile.
We have seen a surge in interest in decentralised Web3 Socials in 2024. Our report looks into its recent developments, including Solana’s Actions and Blinks, as well as Farcaster and Lens on Ethereum.
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