SocialFi has failed to take off — Here’s what needs to change

Opinion: Anurag Arjun, co -founder of the national team

On paper, socialfi is not thinking. It promises to transform the balance of strength on social media – which gives people to control how their content and personal data are used. It even provides users with a stake in the social media advertising market of $ 200+ billion dollars, a pie that is currently devouring it by the giants like Meta.

However, today’s socialfi platforms are more similar to digital ghost cities than the tumultuous web2 centers. Friend.tech, which was welcomed as an outbreak in 2023, arrived at 80,000 active users per day before they were less than 10,000. What hinders Sociali? Why does it seem to follow a friend. TECH fade in mystery instead of height to competitive Facebook dominance?

The harsh fact is that decentralized social networks have largely failed to attract and retain users despite the real enthusiasm of web3 societies. The basic promise of user ownership, data ability, and income determination remains convincing – but deep structural issues adopt the bottleneck.

Technical obstacles

Blockchain infrastructure has not been designed for high requirements for low social networks. Social media users expect immediate results when publishing pictures, admiration for comments, or following new accounts – procedures that generate hundreds of millions of transactions per day via platforms such as Instagram, Tiktok and X.

Consider this: Ethereum only handles 15-20 transactions per second (TPS). Even Solana-which is often described is a high-performance chain-where it limits about 5000 TPS. Compare this with daily video downloads of 25 million people from TIKTOK or 500 million daily jobs from X. Adoption becomes impossible when users face a delay for 30 seconds to confirm the comment on a volatile publication or gas fee ranging from 10 cents to $ 50 during network congestion.

Web2 lessons that you got harder

Meta spends 35 billion dollars annually on research and development to improve the simplicity of its addiction platforms. TIKTOK algorithm, which is sharpened through 1 billion hours of user’s daily participation, provides very frictional content so that 47 % of users open the application as soon as you wake up. The result? Facades where technology disappears behind the experiment.

On the contrary, most of the Socialfi platforms face new users with a portfolio of wallet, colloquial cryptocurrency, and changing drawings. For the main users, it is confusing and frightening. A 2023 DAPPRADAR Study I found that 92 % of Socialfi users abandon the platforms within 30 days. Until Socialfi applications can match the experience of contact with their Web2 counterparts with unique advantages, adoption will remain limited to encryption citizens.

Retail problem

Web3 Multichain Sociali has split into silos. The social chart of the lens protocol is not integrated with Farcaster. Friend.tech liquefaction tools do not go to Deso. The result? A broken experience with no network effects.

recently: Avara lens secure $ 31 million for L2 Blockchain, which focuses on socialfi

Consider whether Gmail users should pay to send an email to someone on Outlook – and they could not bring contacts or messages with them. This is the social reality today.

To solve this, decentralized identity systems such as ENS and emerging standards such as EAS should operate technology -based social graphics. The user’s content, followers and reputation must travel – take advantage of the broader ecosystem, not just one application.

Infrastructure designed for this purpose

The solution to the challenges of adopting Socialfi is not the gradual improvements to current models, but the infrastructure designed for this purpose is explicitly designed for social applications. Just as a revolution in horizontal scaling, the Web2 infrastructure, the structural structure of the normative Blockchain that separates fears such as data, implementation and settlement creates the basis for social applications that can expand in billions of users.

The transformation is already. Farcaster moved from Ethereum Mainnet to the optimistic pile of layer 2, giving priority to low -cost social interactions. The lens protocol is transmitted to ZKsyNC, using zero knowledge evidence to expand its scope while maintaining the user privacy. Cyberconnect Cyber, her improved L1 chain for social applications, which now supports faster and cheaper reactions with guaranteed social graph.

These chimneys designed for this purpose reflects how we limited WEB2- Data, implementation and storage to deal with Si growth. Web3 version is a standard structure: Rollups for performance, decentralized storage of media, and identity layers like ENS or Lit.

Social networks centered around the user

On the right basis, Socialfi can finally provide its primary promise: returning users to the social media experience center. This means the true property of identity and content, portable social graphic fees that work through applications, and distribute the fair value of people who create and work on the content.

The opportunity extends beyond fixing what is broken on social media. The real ownership enables creative ownership to keep control and an outlet audience via platforms. Programmed money provides Tiktok-asque virus trends to include instant revenue splits-imagining a dance challenge with 10 % of automatic revenue operations between creators.

Combining programmed money and social communications, new interaction models become possible – from the smooth transformation of quality content to the participation of automatic revenue for cooperative construction.

The early repetitions of Socialfi failed to obtain a significant traction that exceeds encryption fans. If we finally eat technical barriers and basic user experience, Web3 Social can provide an unpopular feature on the existing platforms that web3 can only offer.

Opinion: Anurag Arjun, co -founder of the national team.

This article is intended for general information purposes and does not aim to be and should not be considered legal or investment advice. The opinions, ideas and opinions expressed here are alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.