17 – There’s A Web3 Buzzword For That

el Prof

August 16, 2024

GM HEARTLAND

🎶 Web3 buzzwords in my soup 🎶

🎶 SocialFi, interoperability, cross-chain solutions 🎶

—El Prof, Muhammed & Chad

MONEY MONEY MONEY

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Is SocialFi the Future of Social Media?

Content creators are the backbone of social media. But many need help to fully capitalize on their influence. Traditional platforms often prioritize profit over creator well-being, limiting earning potential and creative control in the process.

Despite the influencer market’s rapid growth, valued at a staggering $16.4 billion in 2022, creators face significant hurdles. Heavy reliance on brand partnerships and platform-controlled ad revenue leaves them vulnerable to algorithm fluctuations and exorbitant fees. Moreover, the critical issue of content ownership and audience data control hinders their ability to build sustainable careers.

Luckily, there’s a web3 buzzword for that.

Enter SocialFi: a groundbreaking approach leveraging web3 and blockchain technologies to reshape the creator economy. The theory goes, by transitioning digital content to decentralized platforms, creators gain ownership of their content and data, fostering a more equitable ecosystem.

Beyond that, blockchain technology unlocks innovative monetization models, such as tokenization and NFTs, expanding revenue streams beyond traditional methods.

Platforms like Polymarket are the tip of the iceberg for SocialFi. By creating prediction markets, creators can generate income based on their expertise and audience engagement. This model incentivizes high-quality content and rewards creators for their valuable insights.

But it’s not a stretch to imagine the logical extreme — a platform (or platforms) that empower creators to build their communities and monetize directly, free from algorithmic control.

SocialFi is poised to revolutionize the creator economy. It fosters a more sustainable and equitable digital landscape by granting creators ownership, control, and diverse revenue streams. As the space matures, we can anticipate the emergence of even more innovative platforms, ultimately benefiting both creators and their audiences.

—Muhammed

Daily News for Curious Minds

 

“I stopped watching the news, so sick of the bias. Was searching for an alternative that would just tell me WHAT happened, with NO editorializing. I found it. It’s called 1440. It assumes you are smart enough to form your own opinions.”

Buzzword Soup

This week, I was tasked with explaining cross-chain solutions from the context of interoperability. But even to a certified degen like me, that sounds like a crock of buzzword soup. So I’ve taken it upon myself to water it down a bit.

Let’s start instead on a very un-web3 topic: Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.

For those who don’t know what FiveThirtyEight is, it’s an aggressively web2 polling site that carved a place in history as the holy grail of millennial politics and perspective making in general. The site devised forecasts for political outcomes and more by creating a composite forecast of other people’s forecasts, which its founder Silver then curated and calibrated by “importance” to produce his novel forecast. These were then leveraged to build an accompanying media outlet, presenting stories supported by its own data, aggregating engagement and dollars alongside it.

It’s a very millennial way to go about building something new: remixing old ideas using new tools. As a millennial myself, who may even be guilty of a similar lack of imagination in my past endeavors, Silver’s approach is a natural (read: relatable) point of reference. But at the heart of it is something that transcends generations and speaks more to the overarching way in which humans pass information on through time: interoperability.

Interoperability is the idea of taking different publicly available datasets, and using them to build something new. That’s exactly what Nate Silver did with FiveThirtyEight. He deployed that technology over the publicly available betting lines, then adjusted them in real time for people visually watch.

Which brings us to cross-chain solutions. Take the aforementioned Solana-based Polymarket, for example, a social prediction market platform. It’s basically FiveThirtyEight, but with money. Users can bet on the likelihood of theoretical world events actually taking place. It’s a nifty idea, but what it lacks is a real-time data source. But imagine if it were able to partner across blockchains with something like, say, the Ethereum-based Chainlink, which makes verified data feeds accessible via smart contract on chain. It could enable real-time statistics to inform Polymarket’s predictions markets, in effect making on-chain data available to offline markets.

As such, the feeds themselves — as well as the schema to read the feeds — are the keys to interoperability. If there was a way to make these data feeds accessible across chains, it would unlock the so-called “multi-chain future”. Hence, the need for cross-chain solutions.

—El Prof

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