📢【Blockchain News】Mason Nystrom, an investment partner from Variant, recently took a deep dive into the development trends and vertical integration approaches in the SocialFi space. He pointed out that with the popularity of crypto social platforms and financial games, we can foresee a trend that more and more projects will pursue vertical development, striving to provide users with a more seamless and comprehensive experience, thereby creating new consumer behaviors and assets based on attention or social.
Mason divides the current SocialFi stack into four core layers: discovery, execution, liquidity, and asset issuance. He believes that as the SocialFi space expands, applications will continue to verticalize attention and markets to control users' social experience and the liquidity of attention assets.
He also proposed that SocialFi application developers need to own multiple layers of the SocialFi stack to ensure the defensibility of the protocol. Owning a discovery or liquidity layer will become increasingly important because these are the defensible layers of the SocialFi stack with strong network effects.
Mason also compared the two vertical integration approaches of transaction-first and social-first in detail. He believes that the transaction-first approach may be easier to launch because users' enthusiasm for speculation helps overcome the resistance to launching new social graphs and stimulating new consumer behaviors. And a social-first approach, where one platform controls the eyes, has historically been more defensive than an approach that only controls orders (e.g., transactions).
Finally, he emphasized that by thinking about the impact of monetization and financialization of applications on their applications in a unique way, builders can create compelling social financial games and networks.
What do you think of this point of view? Feel free to speak your mind in the comment area and discuss the future trends of the blockchain industry together! 👇