The top five SocialFi platforms to watch in 2024

The SocialFi movement – new generation social media offerings which use decentralised Web3 technology – is rapidly accelerating, with several interesting platforms getting attention from users and investors alike. Here, we unpack the five most impressive SocialFi options to keep an eye on in the coming year.

Is SocialFi the future?

Although the success of traditional social media networks like Facebook and Twitter is undeniable, decentralised SocialFi platforms provide an appealing alternative to traditional social media, enabling users to fully own the data they create while reaping the full rewards of the value they provide to their communities.

The Web2 model on which traditional social media platforms are built is widely considered to be flawed. Social media influencers put in a significant amount of time and effort to create the content they post, but the vast majority of the value they create is taken by the centralised platform on which they share it. And they’re starting to notice and pivoting to other alternatives.

Another downside of Web2 social platforms is that users do not own their data. Instead, their personal information is owned by the platform and is sold to third-parties and exploited for advertising purposes. Finally, there’s the problem of censorship. We’ve seen no end of instances of centralised decision-making that have resulted in certain creators being banned from platforms due to the content they post. 

Uhive

Now likely one of the longest-running SocialFi platforms in the world, Uhive was founded in 2016 by the developer Muayyad Shehadeh, who was one of the earliest visionaries in the space. The platform has made impressive progress, and while other early SocialFi concepts have since fallen by the wayside it has maintained steady growth with a user base of more than three million active users. 

Uhive has managed to achieve substantial engagement among its user base, with some of its top content creators regularly gaining thousands of likes and hundreds of shares – levels that are unknown outside of traditional social media platforms.

The user experience is quite comparable to TikTok, and the network revolves around the UHIVE token that is designed to empower participants with its tangible utility and sustainable growth. Unlike many tokens that lack any real utility (think Dogecoin), UHIVE plays a central role in the Uhive ecosystem, where it is used to purchase Spaces, access premium features and pay for premium content. The tokens are seamlessly integrated into the user experience in a way that encourages user engagement. 

Uhive’s success in attracting the crypto native audience is significant, and it has since evolved to capture a much broader user base. 

Friend.Tech

A new Web3 social media dApp built on Base, the layer-2 blockchain created by Coinbase, Friend.Tech is a platform that allows users to tokenise their online personas and sell what are essentially “shares” of themselves to their fans. These shares are represented by social tokens known as “Keys”, and give users access to private chats with the tokenised creator. The price of these Keys is dictated by simple supply and demand economics. 

The basic premise is that fans of creators on traditional social networks like Twitter can buy their tokens and share in the revenue their content generates. 

One of the biggest advantages for content creators is that they benefit from the fees charged on each token sale. The platform deducts a 5% fee from each token that’s sold on its decentralised marketplace, with half going into its treasury and the other half going to the content creator’s wallet. 

Friend.Tech tokens are sought after because if users hold enough within their wallet, they’re entitled to directly engage the creator in question through its private chat feature. However, this may not be the primary goal of many fans, who are instead interested in investing the most successful content creators to generate a passive income. 

One of the disadvantages of Friend.Tech is it lacks its own, dedicated content creation platform or brand-building tools. Still, it has achieved significant success, becoming the number one SocialFi platform on DeFiLlama in terms of total value locked due to the unique way it allows users to invest in well-known social media influencers. 

Friendzone

Looking to improve on the success of SocialFi protocols, Scalene Academy’s Friendzone will distinguish itself from other platforms with its pioneering model that aims to create a more sustainable and scalable marketplace for social capital. Its unique features include an adaptive bonding curve that incorporates real-time feedback, in addition to a staking mechanism that powers a circular economy with reward distribution. 

In this way, Friendzone promises to become a paradigm shift for SocialFi. With its protocol, social presence will no longer be about recognition, but about earning tangible rewards and monetising the content people produce.

Friendzone brings a number of promising innovations to the SocialFi space, with its adaptive bonding curve ensuring that the value of “creator chips” is based on factors such as the real-time reputation of each creator, and the level of supply and demand. It claims to be a much fairer mechanism that safeguards against price manipulation, promoting more equitable market dynamics that prevent the plutocracy that has led to the failure of so many earlier SocialFi projects. 

The platform’s tokenomics create a circular economy that helps it to retain its value, based on reward distribution. Beyond buying and selling creator chips, users can also stake for rewards based on the quantity and duration they stake. It’s inspired by Curve’s veCRV model and helps to ensure fair distribution of the revenue generated by creators. According to Friendzone, this will help to incentivise long-term investment in creators, while ensuring the individuals are themselves incentivised to keep producing content and building up their fan bases. 

Other innovations include custom controls that provide more flexibility for creators to customise the benefits of their tokens, and provide rewards that better reflect the unique value they provide. It’s also planning a unique concept called “anti-chips”, which will enable users to take long and short positions on individual creators. 

Through these innovations, Friendzone believes it has the potential to redefine the potential of SocialFi. It will become the reputational discovery engine for social media that accurately mirrors the financial and social capital of creators and their communities, paving the way for everyone to invest in and benefit from content creation. 

Theta

A decentralised video streaming platform that’s taking on Web2 powerhouse Twitch, Theta is built on a blockchain infrastructure that upends the traditional content delivery network model. 

Theta encourages users to share their available bandwidth and computing resources to relay the video content its platform hosts, doing away with the need for traditional CDNs that are often limited by geographical locations. By hosting and relaying video content to users, Theta users will be rewarded in the platform’s native tokens, helping to play a role in what could end up becoming a much more efficient video-sharing ecosystem. 

With Theta, there are two native crypto tokens – the THETA coin, which is used for governance votes and proposals, and TFUEL, which is the primary vehicle for transactions. 

Theta is aiming to displace Twitch, which has become incredibly popular despite facing numerous criticisms. Twitch has become notorious for unfair bans and perceived bias, and it has also become very challenging for new users to gain visibility on its platform, with many saying that success is simply a matter of luck. In addition, Twitch’s terms of service are somewhat vague and enforcement appears to be inconsistent, putting user’s profiles and success in jeopardy. 

As a decentralised and open platform, Theta offers Twitch streamers a breath of fresh air, providing various opportunities for content creators to generate an income. For instance, they can receive donations from fans, and sell subscriptions and merchandise through its platform. With its community-based moderation, it offers a more equitable platform for content monetisation, allowing creators to focus more on their content and less on adhering to Twitch’s unclear rules. 

Stars Arena

Stars Arena is a fast-growing SocialFi platform that’s hosted on the Avalanche blockchain and provides a way for Twitter users to monetise their content via exclusive chatrooms and other features. 

It works similarly to Friend.Tech, with the basic premise being that users can buy shares of Twitter (X) personalities. These shares are known as “tickets”, and they serve as a representation of each X user’s relevance on the platform. For new users, their shares are valued at just 0.0066 StarShares, but this will go up the more in demand they become. The share issuers earn a small portion of the trading fees generated by the sale of their shares. 

The attraction of buying a ticket or share is that it provides exclusive access to the creator’s private chat rooms. In this way, they can enhance user engagement and foster a stronger community around each creator through public discussions, content tipping, referral programs and more. It’s an attractive proposition for die-hard fans of content creators, as it allows them to connect with them in a more personal way. If someone accumulates enough tickets, they can even message the creator directly, and view restricted content only available to other ticket holders. Users can also attempt to market the content creator in question in order to help boost the value of the tickets they hold. 

Stars Arena has witnessed stellar growth since making its debut earlier this year. From September 27 to October 4, it grew from just 26,870 transactions to more than 248,000, while accumulating over 10,000 unique active wallets. 
But although Stars Arena got off to a stunning start, it suffered a major setback when it revealed a “major security breach” that saw more than $3 million worth of AVAX tokens stolen from its smart wallets. The breach highlights the extremely nascent and experimental nature of SocialFi platforms and the need to implement strong security measures to protect their users.

More about SocialFi

SocialFi is the name of a new and growing movement that’s attempting to fuse the idea of social media networks with decentralised finance. The goal of this fusion is to enable content creators to monetise their work by posting their content online, advertising, minting NFTs (non fungible tokens) and encouraging user engagement. 

Unlike with traditional social media, SocialFi platforms build economies that revolve around decentralised payments and financial incentives within a social ecosystem. They also offer DeFi-like services such as social trading, staking, yield farming, NFT marketplaces, and more. Through these services, users can invest and earn money from their activities on SocialFi platforms. 

Another key difference is decentralisation. Whereas traditional social media platforms are owned by a centralised corporate entity, SocialFi networks host data across a web of independent nodes, and everyone who helps maintain the network earns rewards for doing this. It improves on security and privacy, because no single entity controls the network. In this way, data breaches are minimised and single points of failure no longer exist.