1. When Crypto Assets Are No Longer “Niche”

For years, crypto’s relationship with regulation was defined by avoidance.

Builders optimised for permissionless access. Users sought decentralised networks. Products competed on who could remove the most friction. The fewer intermediaries, the better. But that narrative is beginning to change.

On 4 June, both SafePal and Bitget Wallet announced that their banking partner, Fiat24, would suspend new account openings for users in certain regions. Predictably, the community scrambled. Some rushed to complete their applications before the deadline. Others immediately started looking for alternatives. But if all we see is the loss of another crypto card, we’re missing the far bigger story unfolding beneath the surface.

Fiat24 is hardly an isolated case. Over the past two years, the crypto card industry has gone through an aggressive wave of consolidation:

• September 2024: OneKey, one of the earliest crypto cards popular in the APAC region, halted new registrations and top-ups, officially shutting down in January 2025.
• June 2025: Infini exited the consumer card business, admitting that retail cards consumed 99% of operating costs while generating almost no revenue, prompting a full pivot to B2B.
• November 2025: Crypto card provider Dupay ceased operations entirely, citing insurmountable compliance and payment settlement challenges.
• February 2026: Mastercard terminated UnCash’s “KYC-free” card channels, a move the company described as an existential blow to its business model. A sweeping purge of grey-area crypto cards had officially begun.

These closures were never simply operational failures. They reflect a profound paradigm shift: Crypto is no longer being treated purely as a speculative asset class. It is increasingly becoming part of the global financial system.

That transition inevitably eliminates businesses built around regulatory gray areas, but it also creates enormous opportunities for infrastructure designed to operate within regulated financial frameworks.

And that changes the rules of the game.

2. Regulation Is No Longer Chasing Crypto. It’s Preparing for It

For most of its history, crypto existed largely within its own ecosystem. People traded tokens, farmed yields, rotated between DeFi protocols, and speculated on memecoins. Regulators largely responded reactively, focusing on exchanges, AML enforcement, and fraud prevention.

But Consumer Crypto changes the equation. Today, stablecoins can pay for groceries. Crypto cards can settle restaurant bills. Tokenised assets can generate yield. Cross-border payments settle in seconds. Wallets increasingly resemble bank accounts. The industry no longer asks users to “live on-chain.” Instead, it is quietly integrating into everyday financial life.

Once that happens, regulators stop asking whether crypto should exist. The question becomes how it should coexist with the existing financial system. The conversation has shifted from prohibition to integration, and that philosophical shift is now translating into policy.

Within a single week in July 2026, three major jurisdictions revealed remarkably similar directions:

• Europe (MiCA enters full implementation): Following the end of the transition period, more than 90% of Europe’s 3,000+ crypto companies were phased out, leaving only 244 approved entities. According to Kaiko, licensed platforms including OKX, Kraken and Coinbase now account for roughly 83% of trading volume. Meanwhile, Binance, lacking the necessary licenses, has been forced to scale back operations across several European countries.
• Australia (Travel Rule becomes mandatory): Aligning with US and EU standards, AUSTRAC-regulated exchanges must now verify sender and recipient information for all digital asset transfers, regardless of transaction size, beginning 1 July.
• United States (Project Crypto): Rather than introducing restrictive rules, the SEC has focused on regulatory modernisation. Following President Trump’s executive order directing agencies to review digital asset regulations on 19 May, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins announced new efforts to provide long-term regulatory certainty and equal treatment for digital asset issuers on 30 Jun.

Three jurisdictions, three different approaches, but pointing to one shared conclusion: Crypto is no longer a lawless frontier. While many users see additional compliance friction, institutions see predictable rules. Predictable rules reduce operational risk, increase confidence, and attract capital. After all, no one deploys trillions of dollars into a black box filled with uncertainty.

The next wave of adoption is unlikely to come from products avoiding regulation.It will come from products designed for regulated markets. Compliance itself is becoming infrastructure.

3. The More Useful Crypto Becomes, the More Regulation Follows

As crypto shifts from onboarding users into Web3 toward embedding itself into everyday finance, regulators inevitably begin asking practical questions: Who is spending the money? Where did the funds originate? How should they be taxed?

These questions are becoming increasingly important across two of crypto’s fastest-growing sectors.

3.1 Consumer Crypto: Compliance Reefs Beneath a Simple UX

Crypto cards are the frontline of this social experiment. Products like Fiat24, KAST, Ether.fi Cash, and various exchange-issued cards allow users to spend stablecoins almost anywhere Mastercard or Visa is accepted. As discussed in our previous article, adoption has accelerated dramatically. According to Artemis Research, monthly crypto card volume grew from roughly $100 million in early 2023 to over $1.5 billion by the end of 2025, with 211% year-over-year growth recorded in March 2026.

For users, the experience feels simple. Deposit USDC. Tap the card. Pay. Behind that simplicity, however, sits infrastructure increasingly resembling traditional banking. Many crypto cards now offer IBAN accounts, FX conversion, cross-border transfers, and banking services. As these products mature, compliance requirements inevitably follow. Conversations around tax reporting, Common Reporting Standard (CRS), capital control and cross-border financial disclosure begin to emerge.

Fiat24’s recent restrictions illustrate this perfectly: As a regulated financial institution, it required customers to submit Tax Identification Numbers (TINs) to comply with CRS-based international information sharing.

This also explains why so-called “no-KYC crypto cards” have little long-term future. Regardless of how they are marketed, any card connected to Visa or Mastercard’s settlement network ultimately requires traceable end-user identities. Many of these “anonymous” cards simply relied on shell companies to issue corporate employee cards to retail users. The moment regulators scrutinise those structures, they quickly fall apart.

The lesson is straightforward: As crypto payments evolve from niche experiments into mainstream financial products, regulatory oversight is no longer optional. Higher compliance standards are eliminating businesses built on arbitrage. Only by embracing compliance can projects become enduring infrastructure.

3.2 The Same Pressure Is Moving Toward RWA

For years, RWA (real world assets) was primarily associated with tokenised U.S. Treasury bills. Today, Tokenized equities are becoming increasingly viable. Private credit continues growing. Exotic RWA, including trading cards (TCG), luxury collectibles, fine art and cultural memorabilia, are rapidly moving onchain.

According to RWA.xyz, tokenised RWAs (excluding stablecoins) surpassed $32 billion by mid-2026, representing more than a fivefold increase since early 2025. BlackRock and Securitize’s BUIDL fund alone has grown to nearly $2.3 billion.

Exotic RWAs are seeing similar momentum. In the TCG sector, Polygon’s Courtyard generated $17.75 million in revenue in Q2 2026, while Collector Crypt reached $32.37 million. Emerging platforms like BNB Chain’s Renaiss Protocol are also booming, surpassing $20 million in revenue within six months of launch, with secondary market trading accounting for 23% of volume. The Exotic RWA space warrants a standalone deep dive, which we have covered in a previous article.

From a technical perspective, tokenisation is no longer the industry’s biggest challenge. Institutional adoption is. Across major financial markets, regulatory frameworks are taking shape: the EU has folded most RWAs into MiCA. Hong Kong is opening doors for public issuance and trading, and the U.S. SEC maintains that most profit-expectant RWA tokens are securities, demanding strict registration and disclosure.

Yet even with regional regulatory frameworks emerging, the industry’s biggest challenge remains unresolved.

The long-term vision of RWA is straightforward: Any asset can become programmable and globally transferable. But the moment those assets cross borders, regulatory complexity explodes. Consider this: If an investor in Southeast Asia purchases tokenised U.S. equities, or fractional ownership of a rare Pokémon card, whose securities law applies? Which country collects taxes? Who resolves disputes?

Ultimately, the more successful RWA becomes, the more identity becomes unavoidable. When real-world assets go onchain, proving “who you are and what you own” is no longer a philosophical debate. It is a hard compliance constraint.

4. The Next Bottleneck Is Not Liquidity. It’s “Who Are You?”

Much of crypto’s infrastructure over the past decade focused on capital efficiency. DEXs improved liquidity. Rollups improved scalability. Stablecoins improved settlement. But as consumer payments and RWAs move into the mainstream, one uncomfortable reality is becoming impossible to ignore: The financial “highways” are built, but the assets “vehicles” cannot drive on them because they lack “license plates” (compliant identity and credit).

The next bottleneck is not liquidity. It’s identity. More specifically, identity and trust.

Nearly every compliance challenge eventually reduces to a simple question: Who are you? Yet, unfortunately, today’s answer remains fragmented. Users repeatedly upload passports across exchanges, wallets, banks and financial applications. Each platform maintains isolated identity systems. The result is poor user experience, higher operational costs, and duplicated compliance work. As consumer crypto and RWA continue scaling, the more obvious this fiction becomes.

The Fiat24 incident also exposed a less obvious problem. Users didn’t lose their assets, they simply lost access to a payment rail. But that highlights a deeper structural issue: today’s crypto payment infrastructure still treats users as passive “consumers” rather than active “participants”. Every payment settles, then disappears. Purchase history isn’t portable. Relationships with merchants don’t persist. Years of responsible onchain activity rarely become part of a user’s identity or reputation.

This is where crypto still falls short. The industry has become remarkably good at moving value, but not trust. The problem isn’t that users lack credibility. It’s that their credibility cannot be seen, verified, or carried across applications. Traditional finance solves this through centralised systems like FICO, but that model sits uneasily in a decentralised, privacy-first ecosystem.

Viewed through that lens, today’s regulatory shift becomes much easier to understand. The real opportunity isn’t simply complying with new rules. It’s building a portable trust layer that makes compliance more efficient without sacrificing user ownership.

5. This Is Where DeSoc Actually Becomes Interesting

Traditional KYC was never designed for an interoperable internet. It cannot move across platforms and creates centralised honeypots of sensitive personal data. What crypto increasingly needs is something more composable: A trust layer built from real user interactions.

This is exactly where Decentralised Social (DeSoc) becomes far more important than most people realise.

DeSoc is often dismissed as “X (Twitter) on blockchain.” But earlier this year, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin identified decentralised social as one of the application categories he most hopes builders will focus on. The reason is not because the world needs another social network, but because portable identity is foundational to an open internet. The true value of DeSoc doesn’t lie in the act of “socialising”; rather, lies in building portable reputation, something regulated crypto increasingly requires.

In early 2026, the DeSoc sector underwent a core pivot: stewardship of Lens transitioned to Mask Network, while Farcaster was acquired by Neynar. This “passing of the baton” revealed a critical shift: DeSoc was moving beyond token incentives and social experiments toward practical identity infrastructure, transforming everyday onchain activity into portable, verifiable reputation.

For this trust layer to be usable, the infrastructure must solve three fundamental problems: identity resolution, semantic behaviour, and trust accumulation. Three projects illustrate this evolution particularly well:

• Web3.bio (Answering “Who are you?”): As an identity aggregator, it bridges information silos, merging fragmented IDs from ENS, Farcaster, and Lens, along with wallet addresses, NFTs, and POAPs, into a unified profile. It acts as a “Web3 Identity Map,” turning identity displays directly into social connections and forming the verifiable baseline for social credit.
• Firefly (Answering “What do you stand for?”): It gives behaviour meaning. By aggregating content across X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky, alongside Mirror articles, Snapshot governance activity and Polymarket predictions, it transforms raw blockchain activity into meaningful social context, a crucial dimensions for credit evaluation.
• Orb (Answering “Who trusts you”): Built on Lens, it encourages high-frequency community participation through lightweight, gamified interactions. Every conversation strengthens social reputation rather than simply producing engagement metrics.

Together, these projects represent an important shift. Rather than forcing users to create new social graphs, they make existing onchain relationships visible, portable, and verifiable, transforming them into trust assets. At its core, this new form of social credit is not a score issued by a central authority, but a bottom-up social consensus built from identity, participation, and reputation.

Imagine a future user who has aggregated identities through Web3.bio, established governance preferences through Firefly, and accumulated years of community participation on Orb. When applying for a crypto card or participating in RWAs, the issuer doesn’t demand repeated passport uploads. Instead, institutions evaluate verifiable reputation credentials (VCs). Users retain data sovereignty, platforms ensure compliance, and regulators get an auditable trail.

This trust layer will not, and should not, replace government-issued KYC. But it can dramatically reduce the friction between users and regulated financial services. This is the new paradigm of Consumer Crypto: every payment and interaction adds to your onchain reputation, while your social relationships become a natural endorsement of your credibility.

When identity and credit data belong to users, they are no longer defined by platforms. They become self-sovereign individuals who own and shape their digital identity. We explore this vision of decentralised social in a separate, detailed article.

6. The Future May Require a New Social-Financial Layer

Crypto’s next chapter is unlikely to be defined by how effectively it avoids regulation. Instead, it will be defined by how elegantly it builds around it.

With this understanding, looking back at the recent wave of news paints a completely different picture. Taken individually, these events look like regulatory tightening. Viewed together, however, a grand narrative emerges: Major global economies are synchronously building a clear, predictable, and interoperable regulatory framework for crypto assets.

This is not crypto’s doomsday. It is an irreversible coming-of-age ceremony.

Consumer Crypto solves “how to spend”, RWAs solve “what creates value”, and DeSoc solves “who you are” and “how much you are trusted”. The three naturally converge, forming a potential framework for the next phase of digital social economies: A Social-Financial Layer underpinned by onchain reputation and trust.

Within this super-identity layer, three pillars reinforce one another:

• Asset Layer (RWA): Provides a quantifiable financial balance sheet (What you own)
• Payment Layer (Consumer Crypto): Provides dynamic behavioural cash flow (How you spend)
• Identity Layer (DeSoc): Provides social reputation backing (Who trusts you & who you influence)

The convergence of these three layers gives rise to a new form of composite onchain social credit. Imagine a user who holds tokenised Treasuries, pays recurring bills with a crypto card, and actively participates across decentralised communities. Even while remaining pseudonymous, a DeFi protocol could verify their trustworthiness through Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and extend unsecured credit or preferential borrowing rates.

Here, compliance and trust are no longer rigid barriers to entry. They become natural outcomes of onchain behaviour.

The industry’s challenge is no longer simply scaling transaction throughput, but scaling trust. Fiat24’s restrictions and Binance’s retreat may look like regulatory tightening, but they actually signal the end of an era built on regulatory arbitrage and fragile payment rails. Projects relying on regulatory arbitrage and fragile payment channels will disappear.

As every payment and interaction accumulates into portable social credit, users no longer depend on access. They carry their own trust. That is the real moat. The projects building identity and trust infrastructure today will be the first stop for the next wave of capital moving onchain.

Compliance is not the threat. It is the catalyst.

And regulation is not the finish line. It is where crypto’s next era begins.

Social Highlights

Our May dispatch is here!

Firefly Trading League Season 2 has wrapped, Season 3 is already speeding into action, DeFi United badges have been distributed, and the Bluesky integration has successfully landed. Meanwhile in the robot world, a parcel-sorting robot beat humans in a race and somehow looked completely indifferent to its own victory.

We’ve also picked two industry reads worth checking out — easy enough for casual crypto gossip, useful enough to catch up on what’s moving in Web3 Social 💜

Firefly Polymarket Trading League Season 2 Wrapped Successfully

In early May, the second one-month edition of the Firefly Polymarket Trading League came to a successful close.

Throughout the campaign, hundreds of traders competed on the leaderboard, with multiple Polymarket traders joining the action and engaging with the community. Leaderboard rewards were distributed after the campaign ended:

https://x.com/fireflyappcn/status/2053807336746066187
https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2053807333172445227

Firefly Polymarket Trading League Season 3 Is Now Live

By late May, after loud and clear demand from the Firefly community, Firefly Polymarket Trading League Season 3 officially kicked off!

The original 3,000 USDC prize pool remains unchanged, including PNL leaderboard rewards, daily trading rewards, and social sharing incentives. But this time, the campaign period has been cut in half to just two weeks.

Same prize pool. Double the intensity. Prediction markets are getting social 💜

Thousands of DeFi United Badges Have Been Claimed

After Kelp DAO’s rsETH token came under attack, concerns quickly spread across the market over potential bad debt and cascading liquidation risks in DeFi lending markets.

To help protect the broader ecosystem, leading lending protocol Aave joined forces with multiple top protocols to form the DeFi United emergency rescue fund. Aave founder Stani Kulechov personally donated 5,000 ETH, Aave DAO passed a governance proposal to allocate 25,000 ETH from its treasury, and Mantle provided up to 30,000 ETH in three-year credit support.

When DeFi was in trouble, DeFi United donors stepped up. Lens & Firefly issued honor badges to recognize these contributors 💜

So far, around 2,000–3,000 DeFi United donors have claimed their badges through Firefly. It is not just a badge of honor — it is also becoming an important part of one’s on-chain social identity.

https://x.com/LC/status/2054170692544057401
https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2049500137333178368
https://x.com/fireflyappcn/status/2049510253398773821

Firefly Social Graph Now Supports Bluesky

Firefly has integrated Bluesky into its social graph.

Firefly users can now connect their Bluesky accounts, browse Bluesky posts from people they follow, and interact with them directly inside Firefly.

A thrilling World Cup campaign is on the way

The World Cup is around the corner, and a brand-new prediction market campaign is quietly being prepared for the Firefly community.

The prize pool will be bigger. The gameplay will be richer. Stay tuned, fire frens 💜

Meme Reality

Human vs. Parcel-sorting robot

A parcel-sorting robot raced against humans and overtook them while one of the human competitors was in the bathroom.

The robot won, but as the crowd cheered, it simply waddled away — as if none of this had anything to do with it.

Truth Social: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Online

The good news is that Firefly now supports Truth Social too.

So you can filter out the noise — without getting buried under a meme avalanche 💜

Worth Reading

When Crypto Meets Everyday Spending: The Rise of Consumer Crypto

https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2055149856470303025
https://x.com/fireflyappcn/status/2054080194097635354

IOSG Founder: Has Web3 Reached Its Most Pessimistic Moment?

“Over the past two years, I’ve been more pessimistic than ever — but also more unwilling than ever to give up.”

Social Buidl 精选

5 月速递来了！Firefly 交易联赛二期收官、三期加速开跑，DeFi United 勋章派发和 Bluesky 集成升级成功。另一边，机器人分拣赢了人类却置身事外。再来两篇值得读的行业文章，轻松吃瓜，也顺手看看 Web3 Social 最近的新动向 💜

Firefly Polymarket Trading League 第二期圆满结束

5 月初，第二次为期一个月的 Firefly Polymarket Trading League 圆满收官，活动期间持续吸引数百名交易者竞争总榜，有多名 Polymarket Trader 互动并参与活动，总榜奖励已在活动结束后发放：
https://x.com/fireflyappcn/status/2053807336746066187
https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2053807333172445227

Firefly Polymarket Trading League 第三期开幕

在 5 月末，社区火伴们的高涨呼声之下，第三期 Firefly Polymarket Trading League 正式开幕！原有的 3000 USDC 奖池不变，其中包含 PNL 总榜奖励，每日交易奖励，以及优秀社媒分享激励，但在奖池不变的基础上，活动时间减半为两周，二倍强度，引爆预测市场社交！

DeFi United 勋章已发放数百枚

Kelp DAO 的代币 rsETH 遭受攻击， 遭受攻击，引发市场对 DeFi 借贷市场巨额坏账及连锁清算危机的担忧。为了维护整体生态安全，借贷龙头 Aave 联合众多头部协议组建了 DeFi United 紧急救援基金，AAVE 创始人 Stani Kulechov 个人出资捐赠 5,000 枚 ETH，Aave DAO 通过治理提案从金库拨付 25,000 枚 ETH，Mantle 也提供了高达 30,000 枚 ETH 的三年期信贷支持。

DeFi United 的捐赠者，在 DeFi 有难时挺身而出，Lens & Firefly 为这些贡献者发放了荣誉勋章💜，截至目前，有 2~3 千个 DeFi United 的捐赠者通过 Firefly 领取了荣誉勋章，这是光荣的勋章，是链上社交身份重要的一部分。

https://x.com/LC/status/2054170692544057401

https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2049500137333178368

Firefly 社交图谱已集成 Bluesky

Firefly 集成了 Bluesky 进入社交图谱中，现在火伴们可以在 Firefly 中链接自己的 Bluesky 账户，并在时间线中浏览/互动关注用户的 Bluesky 帖子！

世界杯神秘活动

世界杯即将来临，为火伴们设计的预测市场全新活动正在悄悄准备中。新活动的奖池会扩大，玩法也会更加丰富多样！火伴们敬请期待哦 💜

迷因现实

人 vs. 分拣机器人

和人类比赛分拣快递的机器人，在人类上厕所的时候反超，获胜的机器人却在欢呼中蹒跚离去，仿佛这一切与它无关

https://x.com/kevinxu/status/2057659795256332314

Truth Social：生命中不能承受之轻

但好在 Firefly 接入了 Truth Social，可以帮你过滤掉无用信息，也不会用 meme 轰炸你💜

https://x.com/realPureNomad/status/2056117734795059394

值得一读

当加密货币遇上日常消费：消费者加密的崛起

https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2055149856470303025

IOSG 创始人：Web3 到了最悲观的时刻？

“这两年我比任何时候都更悲观，但也比任何时候更不愿意放弃 ”
https://x.com/jocyiosg/status/2057484685689967029

As 2026 unfolds, the global cryptocurrency market is undergoing a quiet but profound structural shift. Data from blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs shows global retail crypto activity contracted by 11% year-over-year in Q1, settling at $979 billion. Superficially, this points to a cooling market. Beneath the headline, however, capital flows and user behaviour are fundamentally reconfiguring: attention is moving away from pure speculation toward stablecoin settlement, onchain payments, and decentralised identity infrastructure.

For many, cryptocurrency remains synonymous with speculation, portfolio accumulation, and DeFi yield farming. In reality, though, its everyday footprint has already expanded significantly. From restaurants in New York to cafes in Singapore, and from settling a Haidilao bill to gaining entry at music festivals, cryptocurrency payments are increasingly woven into daily commerce, operating with the seamlessness of traditional card networks. Just a few years ago, purchasing a coffee with cryptocurrency required navigating OTC desks, absorbing ~2% FX slippage, and bracing for potential bank freezes. Today, the process is frictionless: open a crypto card app, fund it with USDC, and tap or scan to pay.

This is the shift consumer crypto is driving: transforming blockchain from a niche, technical tool into an everyday service that regular people can actually use. This evolution is unfolding along two complementary tracks. The first prioritizes privacy, leveraging cryptography to shield user data in digital commerce. The second emphasizes seamless utility, embedding NFT ticketing, tokenized loyalty programs, and on-chain social graphs directly into high-frequency consumer routines.

Against this backdrop, a multi-layered ecosystem is gradually taking shape:

• Payment Layer (Crypto Cards): Built on stablecoins, connecting onchain assets to real-world spending.
• Consumption Layer (Applications): Projects, like Blackbird and RaveDAO, turning dining and entertainment into onchain experience.
• Identity Layer (Decentralised Social Apps): Rebuilding digital identity and social graphs to create portable, reusable trust for consumer behaviour.

Collectively, these layers map a clear trajectory: crypto assets are moving from speculative screen balances to spendable capital, and ultimately into portable, onchain credit anchored to identity. Yet this convenience carries an inherent friction: Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance. KYC remains the indispensable cornerstone of regulatory adherence, but it is also the single greatest bottleneck to user experience today.

This tension frames the central question of this report: within consumer crypto’s three-layer architecture (payments, applications, and identity), can KYC evolve from a repetitive, document-heavy hurdle into a reusable, low-friction identity layer that users genuinely control? How this question is answered will ultimately determine whether cryptocurrency remains a specialised financial niche or becomes infrastructure embedded in the daily lives of billions.

1. Crypto Cards: The Bridge Between Onchain Assets and the Real World

1.1 What are Crypto Cards and Why Do We Need Them?

At its core, a crypto card is a prepaid, debit, or credit card funded with cryptocurrency. Users deposit stablecoins such as USDC or USDT; at the point of sale, the system instantly converts the cryptocurrency into local fiat at real-time exchange rates to settle the transaction. To the end user, the experience is virtually indistinguishable from using a conventional Visa or Mastercard. Merchants receive fiat currency as usual, entirely unaware that crypto assets powered the payment. This seamless abstraction is precisely why crypto cards have become the most direct conduit between onchain wealth and offline commerce.

The rapid adoption of crypto cards stems from how effectively they address region-specific user pain points:

• Bypassing OTC Friction: Crypto cards eliminate the exchange-rate slippage typical of OTC withdrawals (often ~2%) and the persistent risk of bank account freezes. Instead, users benefit from safe, real-time conversions with direct settlement at the point of sale.
• Reshaping Financial Access in Emerging Markets: In regions grappling with currency instability, capital controls, or underdeveloped banking infrastructure, such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, crypto cards provide a critical on-ramp to “digital dollars” and instant access to the global merchant network. Providers like Redotpay, KAST, and Holyheld are prime examples of this approach.

1.2 Market Size: Growth That Defies Expectations

The crypto card market is expanding rapidly, with transaction volumes now rivaling traditional P2P stablecoin transfer activity. According to Artemis Research, monthly crypto card transaction volume grew from roughly $100 million in early 2023 to over $1.5 billion by the end of 2025, representing a 106% compound annual growth rate. By March 2026, monthly volume had grown another 211% year-over-year.

Behind this growth, two payment giants, Visa and Mastercard,have played a central role:

• Visa (over 90% market share): Visa has taken an “infrastructure-first” approach, partnering deeply with providers such as Rain and Reap. Through a single integration, it can plug into dozens of downstream card issuers, allowing it to scale distribution and capture market growth quickly.
• Mastercard: Mastercard has focused on directly integrating with large centralised platforms and exchanges, such as Revolut and Bybit. In March 2026, it made a strategic move by acquiring stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for $1.8 billion, a clear signal of its long-term commitment to the space.

1.3 Overview of Mainstream Crypto Cards

The current crypto card market can be broadly segmented into four primary categories based on their underlying architectures and business models, with each exhibiting notable distinctions in functional focus and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements.

Alongside this segmentation, a new trend is rapidly gaining momentum across the Asia-Pacific and Latin American markets: stablecoin QR code payments are carving out a lighter, more streamlined pathway to bring crypto payments into offline retail environments.

Category 1: CEX Co-Branded Cards — An Extension of Exchange Traffic

Deeply integrated with exchange wallets, these cards primarily operate as prepaid or debit instruments, with select offerings featuring cryptocurrency cashback. Their core purpose is to convert dormant platform balances into active consumer spending. Key examples include the Bybit Card, Binance Card, Coinbase Card, and the recently upgraded Gate Card.

From a KYC perspective, these cards seamlessly inherit their parent exchange’s verification framework. While existing users with advanced verification experience a frictionless onboarding process, newcomers face a steep initial barrier: government-issued ID, facial recognition, and proof of address are mandatory.

Take the Bybit Card, for instance. While it accommodates mainland Chinese KYC, users must first complete the exchange’s Tier 2 verification (ID plus facial recognition). The card carries no annual fee, supports both Apple Pay and Google Pay, and operates at a blended fee rate of 0.9%–3%. Promotional campaigns have offered up to 10% cashback, and in early 2026, the European Union variant introduced a dedicated BTC cashback feature.

The Binance and Coinbase cards, meanwhile, reflect entirely different strategic trade-offs. The Binance Card has been heavily shaped by shifting regulatory landscapes, leading to suspended issuance in certain jurisdictions. Its KYC process remains tightly coupled with the underlying exchange account, presenting a notably high compliance threshold. Conversely, the Coinbase Card is heavily optimised for the U.S. domestic market, mandating bank-grade identity verification. For non-U.S. residents, this adds an extra layer of friction to both application and daily use.

By contrast, the Gate Card, launched in March 2026, appears meticulously engineered for contemporary spending habits. It offers up to 5% cashback in BTC, ETH, USDT, or GT, carries a flat 1% transaction fee, and allows premium users to offset trading fees with their rewards, effectively generating net-positive yields. Monthly cashback is capped at 250 USDT. Given that contactless transactions have become the default standard in 2026, the Gate Card was designed from day one to support NFC terminals, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, entirely bypassing the need for physical card swipes.

Category 2: Self-Custody & Protocol-Native Cards — Payment Instruments Embedded with DeFi Principles

These cards prioritise absolute user control over assets while seamlessly integrating DeFi mechanics, such as yield generation and collateralized lending. Notable examples include Ether.fi Cash Card, MetaMask Card, Phantom Card, Ready Card, and UR Card.

The Ether.fi Cash Card, in particular, has carved out a distinct niche with its innovative “spend-your-yield” borrow mode. This feature enables users to pledge staked or restaked assets, such as eETH, as collateral for daily spending, all while continuing to earn yield on the underlying position. Generated rewards can then be applied directly toward transaction settlements, seamlessly synchronising long-term asset accumulation with everyday consumption. This closed-loop architecture significantly enhances capital efficiency and has driven rapid adoption: the card now accounts for nearly half of all crypto-native card volume, with approximately 70,000 active cards and 300,000 associated accounts. Furthermore, in early 2026, the Ether.fi DAO approved a $50 million ETHFI buyback program, followed by a February migration from Scroll to OP Mainnet to enhance throughput and liquidity.

Conversely, the MetaMask Card illustrates how wallet giants are positioning themselves as primary payment gateways. Developed in partnership with Mastercard and rolled out nationwide in the U.S. in February 2026, the card is natively embedded within the MetaMask ecosystem and settles transactions via the Linea network. Structurally, the virtual tier offers 1% cashback, while the premium metal card delivers 3% (subject to a $199 annual fee), with daily spending limits reaching $15,000. Cardholders also gain access to Web3-exclusive perks spanning travel and dining. Backed by institutional-grade infrastructure, the card delivers exceptional payment success rates and robust compliance, positioning it as one of the most TradFi-aligned onchain payment solutions available today.

Looking beyond these flagship offerings, the Ready Card leverages account abstraction to eliminate foreign exchange and top-up fees, while incentivising adoption with annual STRK rewards valued up to $1,800. Meanwhile, the UR Card pushes the envelope further by integrating multi-currency IBAN accounts with yield-bearing features, steadily evolving toward a fully licensed banking interface.

Yet, despite their philosophical commitment to decentralisation and privacy, these cards remain subject to traditional issuer and card network compliance rules. In practice, rigorous KYC is still required. MetaMask Card, for instance, demands a U.S. SSN for domestic users, and Phantom Card explicitly excludes mainland Chinese residents. This highlights a core tension in the current landscape: decentralised protocols, but centralised access points.

Category 3: Crypto-Native Neobanks — Rebuilding Web3 Account Infrastructure

This category aims to construct a full-fledged banking infrastructure natively built around cryptocurrency assets. Leading examples include Fiat24 and KAST.

Fiat24 is a FINMA-regulated Web3 banking protocol built on Arbitrum. Integrated with wallets like SafePal and imToken, it provides users with standalone IBAN accounts and a Mastercard debit card. Accounts can be funded with USDT or USDC, which auto-convert to local fiat at the point of sale. The card also supports binding to Alipay and WeChat Pay, with blended transaction fees of 0.6%–1%, making it a uniquely capable crypto payment solution that balances regulatory compliance with exchange-grade infrastructure. The platform has reportedly been acquired by a leading exchange.

KAST, meanwhile, has emerged as the most heavily capitalised newcomer of 2026. Founded by former Circle executives, the startup closed an $80 million Series A in March (at a $600 million valuation), processing roughly $5 billion in annualised transaction volume across a user base exceeding one million. Its core value propositions include 1:1 USDT/USDC-to-USD conversion, native U.S. bank account routing, zero foreign exchange fees across 190+ countries, and cashback rewards of up to 12% (partially distributed in MOVE tokens). KAST’s IP collaboration strategy also stands out, exemplified by its partnership with Pudgy Penguins to launch the ‘Pengu Card’, a deliberate effort to transplant Web3 cultural capital into mainstream consumer finance.

From a KYC standpoint, these platforms adhere to the stringent compliance frameworks of traditional banks or electronic money institutions (EMIs). Fiat24, for instance, mandates a passport and proof of address, a process Chinese users have likened to “applying for a Schengen visa”. While KAST requires verification tied to a U.S. bank account, frequently rejecting international applicants who cannot provide local proof of address or an SSN, leading the community to mock it as a “First World-only card”. These hurdles starkly illustrate the inherent friction crypto-native banks face when balancing global scalability with rigid regulatory compliance.

Category 4: Traditional Fintech Neobanks — Crypto as a Feature Layer

This category layers crypto functionality onto established digital banking systems, blending traditional finance UX with crypto asset management. Key players include Revolut and DCS Card Centre + Standard Chartered.

Revolut leverages its large EU and UK user base by embedding crypto cards directly into core digital banking accounts. For existing customers, KYC friction and learning curves are minimal.

The DCS Card Centre (formerly Singapore’s Diners Club), on the other hand, exemplifies the deep convergence of traditional finance and stablecoin payments. In May 2025, it partnered with Visa to launch the DeCard prepaid card, supporting USDT and USDC funding. By November 2025, it collaborated with Standard Chartered to roll out the DeCard stablecoin credit card, using the bank’s virtual accounts and API infrastructure, initially launching in Singapore. Standard Chartered’s direct involvement marks a strategic shift: stablecoin payments are moving from niche experiment to core banking priority.

KYC for these cards mirrors that of traditional bank accounts. The experience is seamless for existing customers but presents a barrier for users whose financial activity is exclusively crypto-native. Interestingly, however, bank-grade risk systems often result in higher approval rates compared to purely crypto-native cards.

1.4 Extension: QR Code Payments — An Alternative Path Bypassing Physical Cards

Running parallel to the rise of crypto cards is the rapid expansion of stablecoin QR code payments. Rather than relying on traditional card networks, direct integration with local payment infrastructure is emerging as a more efficient path to bring crypto spending offline, particularly in QR code-dominant markets like Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Latin America (LatAm).

This trend reflects a deeper, structural shift in payment behavior. According to Juniper Research, global QR code payment volume is projected to grow from $5.4 trillion in 2025 to over $8 trillion by 2029. The Asian market accounts for more than 60% of this volume, with emerging economies like Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines driving accelerated growth. QR code payment activity across the region is also expected to surge by 300% by 2029. LatAm shows comparable momentum. Brazil’s Pix system, for instance, processed over 7 billion transactions in December 2025 alone. Against this backdrop, embedding stablecoins directly into local QR ecosystems is no longer a technical experiment, but an inevitable evolution aligned with user habits.

Surrounding this trajectory, the industry has gradually bifurcated into two distinct implementation models:

1. “Direct Integration” by Wallets and Exchanges
Represented by Bitget Wallet and Gate Pay, these products opt to interface directly with national QR code networks. In this process, AEON, a third-party payment gateway deeply supported by the core Alchemy Pay team, serves as a critical bridge. Leveraging the aggregation capabilities of such gateways, Bitget Wallet and Gate Pay have sequentially integrated with Vietnam’s VietQR, the Philippines’ GCash, and Brazil’s Pix system, rapidly scaling merchant coverage across emerging markets.

In early 2026, Bitget Wallet launched its Onchain Payments Matrix, integrating partners including Ripple, Mastercard, Visa, Tether, Circle, and MoonPay. It connects over 150 million merchants across 50 markets, with QR code payment coverage across more than 2.5 million merchants in APAC and LatAm region. By April, its QR code payment capabilities expanded across the entire APAC region, supporting USDT and USDC payments over multiple chains, including Solana, BNB Chain, and Ethereum, with plans to expand supported payment tokens to over 1,000.

The advantage of this approach lies in its rapid scalability and broad user reach. However, cross-system integration still introduces friction, including settlement delays, in certain non-standard QR code scenarios.

2. Reconstructing Payments Within Regulatory Frameworks
In more tightly regulated markets, QR code-based stablecoin payments prioritise transparency and controllability over rapid expansion. For example, in Singapore, collaborations between OKX, StraitsX, and Grab have been integrated into the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Purpose Bound Money (PBM) framework. Funds are programmatically restricted via smart contracts, and transaction flows are visible to regulators when required. While this model progresses at a more measured pace, it provides a replicable paradigm for the long-term implementation of stablecoin payments in highly regulated environments.

In all, QR code payments and crypto cards are not competing systems. Rather, they are complementary shaped by regional consumer habits. QR code payments dominate in Asia and Latin America due to ultra-low merchant onboarding costs, while crypto cards remain stronger in traditional POS-heavy markets, such as Europe and the U.S. Both approaches ultimately converge on the same goal: reducing the intermediary conversion steps between onchain assets and real-world spending.

1.5 The KYC Dilemma: The Tug-of-War Between Compliance and User Experience

While crypto cards have largely succeeded in creating a seamless bridge from onchain to offline spending, the issuance process itself remains fraught with friction. Regardless of their underlying architecture, all four card categories face the same fundamental bottleneck at identity verification (KYC).

For issuers, stringent KYC is by no means a bureaucratic obstruction, but a compliance imperative. With the implementation of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “Travel Rule” across over 85 jurisdictions, alongside the successive rollouts of the U.S. GENIUS Act and the EU’s MiCA regulation, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and identity auditing have become existential requirements. Issuers have no choice but to navigate the delicate balance between regulatory pressure and user frustration.

The downward transmission of this regulatory pressure cascades directly to end users, manifesting in three persistent pain points:

• Documentation overload: Requirements for passports, proof of address, and notarised translations create significant friction. Many crypto-native users have never maintained such traditional financial documentation.
• Geographic exclusion: Numerous crypto cards explicitly block users from specific countries or regions. Even users holding valid passports may face rejection based solely on nationality.
• Privacy paradox: Users often adopt crypto cards to enhance financial privacy, yet KYC processes require surrendering sensitive identity data to third parties, introducing real risks of data exposure or breach.

In summary, crypto cards have established undeniable value as a payment bridge between Web3 and the physical economy. Yet, the high barrier of KYC continues to constrain their evolution from a niche tool for crypto enthusiasts to a mainstream instrument for everyday use.

That said, promising developments are emerging. As solutions like onchain identity verification, zero-knowledge proofs, and tiered KYC frameworks mature, crypto cards may soon achieve lower-friction onboarding and usage, while remaining fully compliant. When that happens, they could finally become the true entry point for ordinary users to engage with Web3 in their daily consumption.

2. Consumer Crypto Applications: The Onchain Reimagining of Commerce

While crypto cards resolve the infrastructural mechanics of how to spend, consumer crypto applications address a more fundamental question: where to spend, and why that consumption should occur onchain.

By 2026, consumer crypto has expanded well beyond basic payments into high-frequency use cases like dining, ticketing, and gift cards. The underlying business logic is no longer driven purely by speculation. Rather, it converges on two highly practical objectives: dismantling siloed loyalty ecosystems and rebuilding trust in fraud-vulnerable industries, particularly event ticketing.

2.1 Composable Loyalty: From “Points Silos” to Cross-Brand Circulation Networks

Traditional loyalty programmes have long been trapped in a structural dead end. Reward points are non-interoperable across different brands, leaving consumers accumulating piles of nearly expired “digital junk,” while merchants struggle to build a complete profile of their customers. Web3 offers a different approach by turning loyalty points into user-owned, interoperable onchain assets that can move across brands and platforms.

The dining sector serves as the most intuitive testing ground for this model. A prominent example is Blackbird, an L3 network built on the Base chain. Users earn $FLY token rewards after dining at partner restaurants, which can then be redeemed as payment at any participating venue within the network. To date, Blackbird has onboarded approximately 1,000 restaurants across New York, San Francisco, and Charleston.

Rather than relying on a single-token model, which often collapses into unsustainable token economics, Blackbird employs a dual-token architecture:

• $FLY (stable points): Pegged to $0.01, serving as the network’s universal rewards and payment currency while minimising volatility concerns for both merchants and consumers.
• $F2 (governance token): Used for gas fees and ecosystem governance, with a fixed supply cap of 1 billion tokens.

In 2026, Blackbird further advanced its ecosystem by launching the “Flycar” hardware terminal, which seamlessly binds on-chain identity to offline POS transactions. It further partnered with the MetaMask Card to offer up to 5x $FLY rewards. For users, this operates as a universal, cross-merchant points alliance. For restaurants, it provides a cost-effective mechanism to identify and retain high-value patrons while bypassing the steep commission fees charged by third-party delivery platforms.

This “composable infrastructure” logic is now rapidly expanding to other sectors. For instance, Raise Network on Solana introduced a programmable onchain gift card, SmartCard, which has already processed over $5 billion in gift card transactions. Its native $RAISE token is scheduled for launch in the first half of 2026. Furthermore, in early 2026, IRL launched a cross-venue loyalty network where users can earn points and tokens by checking into cultural spaces across multiple global cities via NFC. This network has already onboarded over 40,000 members. Despite their differing verticals, these diverse projects share a unified vision: enabling consumer behavioural footprints to become portable across brands and experiences.

2.2 Verifiable Access: Bringing Ticketing and Consumer Rights Onchain

If composable loyalty addresses the friction of fragmented loyalty rewards, verifiable access addresses an equally entrenched problem in live events: counterfeit tickets and unregulated scalping. Minting event passes as NFTs with immutable issuance records and fully traceable resale histories offers the most straightforward technical remedy to a decades-old trust gap.

By 2026, several onchain ticketing projects accelerated real-world deployment:

• Mingo (Hedera): An NFT-based ticketing platform charging ~1/5 the fees of traditional providers. Partnered with organisations like the World Boxing Council and African Boxing Union, it has issued thousands of sports and event tickets across 54 countries.
• Celebratix (Solana): A full-stack ticketing suite covering primary sales, secondary marketplaces, guest lists, and loyalty programs. The platform has already partnered with major venues in cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg.
• Traditional industry giants: Entities such as Coachella, Tomorrowland (in partnership with Bybit Card), and Ticketmaster have all begun piloting NFT-based tickets to unlock VIP experiences, priority access, and exclusive merchandise.

Yet, even consumer applications with apparent “real revenue” face hidden risks. RaveDAO became one of the most dramatic cautionary tales of 2026. The project had successfully hosted over 20 onchain electronic music festivals, attracted more than 100,000 participants, and generated millions in revenue. But in April 2026, its token $RAVE surged to nearly $28 (reaching an FDV exceeding $14 billion) over just 11 days, before collapsing 96% within the following 48 hours. Onchain investigator ZachXBT later revealed that approximately 90% of the token supply was concentrated in wallets linked to the team. The episode delivered a stark reminder: no matter how authentic the use case, a token model plagued by extreme supply concentration and circulation mismatches remains vulnerable to capital manipulation.

2.3 Trial, Error, and Evolution: The Survival Rules of Consumer Crypto

The path toward mainstream consumer crypto adoption has never been straightforward. Much of the industry’s evolution has come through repeated cycles of trial and error:

• Starbucks Odyssey: Launched with significant fanfare in 2022, this NFT-based loyalty programme was ultimately shuttered in 2024 due to conceptual complexity and excessively high barriers to entry for average consumers.
• Mercado Pago: In March 2026, Latin America’s leading e-commerce fintech halted its four-year-old rewards token, Mercado Coin, pivoting instead to a USD-pegged stablecoin, Meli Dolar, that aligned more closely with mainstream consumer behaviour.

These case studies reinforce a recurring lesson across consumer crypto: Consumer crypto applications survive only when they deliver unambiguous utility. They must either materially lower costs (as Blackbird demonstrated by compressing processing fees from 4% to 2%), solve genuine user pain points, such as counterfeit ticketing, or transform consumer activity into portable onchain assets with lasting utility. Simply applying a blockchain veneer to traditional points systems or engaging in pure financial engineering within token models will inevitably lead to user attrition, regardless of how robust the short-term narrative may appear.

3. Decentralised Social: The Source of Trust

While the previous section highlighted how consumer crypto applications enables cross-merchant loyalty and verifiable ticketing, these innovations rest on a foundational prerequisite: systems must know who you are and assess whether you are trustworthy, without forcing users to resubmit a passport scan for every new interaction.

The traditional internet outsourced this responsibility to centralised platforms. Mastercard holds your credit score, and Uber Eats knows your dining preferences, and these data silos remain strictly isolated. For merchants attempting to identify high-value new customers, the only path is to repeatedly purchase traffic from these platforms. For users wanting to port their consumption history or reputation across services, there is simply no road.

Web3 proposes a different paradigm: let users aggregate their own identities and selectively disclose them to verifiers. However, onchain identity still remains highly fragmented today. A single individual may control dozens of wallet addresses, each tied to different social graphs and NFT collections across disparate protocols. The core question, then, becomes: what infrastructure is needed to stitch these scattered digital footprints into a coherent, usable “digital business card”?

In 2026, this concept has moved beyond theoretical validation into tangible product forms, namely decentralised social applications. Each addresses a distinct dimension of the trust chain, and together they form a complete verification loop: identity authenticity, community engagement, and information judgment. Layered together, these signals gradually transform “an address” into “a person.”

3.1 Identity Verification: Keeping Privacy in the User’s Hands

The first hurdle for any onchain application is distinguishing human users from bots. Users want to avoid repeatedly submitting passports, while platforms need to verify real-person participation to prevent sybil activity and wash trading. The ideal solution would be a unified layer that not only assembles scattered identity fragments into a complete digital profile, but also attaches a verifiable “proof-of-humanity” badge.

Identity aggregation platform Web3.bio is actively building toward this vision. By mapping isolated IDs across ecosystems like ENS, Farcaster, and Lens into a unified graph, and deeply integrating wallet holdings, NFTs, POAPs, and DAO participation records, it generates a portable digital profile with measurable onchain reputation. This solves the “who are you” puzzle while giving the digital persona behind an address measurable trust depth.

Regarding the “proof of humanity” layer, Web3.bio has adopted a pragmatic aggregation route. Currently, the platform has successfully integrated KYC data from compliant exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, using wallet connectivity as the initial verification entry point. Yet, this is merely the first step in constructing a broader identity network. Through a recent strategic partnership with the decentralised identity protocol Sign, Web3.bio aims to continuously aggregate multi-dimensional, highly reliable verification signals, transforming identity data into reusable infrastructure rather than one-off submissions.

The significance of this model lies in its technical blueprint for onchain KYC to evolve from repetitive document uploads into reusable credential-based verification. For developers, a single API call can verify both a user’s authentication status and identity graph, eliminating the need to rebuild KYC workflows from scratch. For users, control over identity data is restored, enabling selective disclosure. This reputation system, balancing efficiency with privacy, may just be the critical key needed for consumer crypto applications to scale.

3.2 Community Engagement: Lightweight, Gamified, High-Frequency Interaction

A verified identity is only the starting point. Trust needs context and depth. In the Web2 world, a person’s consumer influence could be inferred from social media check-ins, follower counts, or online engagement. Whereas, in Web3, that depth is built through a user’s day-to-day participation within niche interest communities. One product that captures this idea well is Orb, a social app built on the Lens protocol with more than 50,000 monthly active users. Instead of layering on complicated financial mechanics, Orb focuses on making interaction feel effortless and native to online culture: posts can be minted into digital collectibles, conversations are driven by sticker packs, and tipping is seamlessly embedded into the experience.

Its most community-oriented feature is Orb Clubs, where users can form small, interest-based communities around topics like electronic music or photography, complete with their own governance rules, and eventually manage a shared community fund. Within these spaces, a user’s posting frequency, contribution level, and social role gradually become measurable signals of both community reputation and cultural influence.

3.3 Information Flow: Merging Prediction Markets and Social Timelines

Once identity is verified and community engagement is established, the final puzzle piece is judgment. In consumer contexts, a user who consistently predicts restaurant trends accurately or demonstrates sharp insight in community votes carries inherently more weight in their recommendations.

Firefly addresses this by merging social feeds and onchain activity into a single timeline. As a Web3 social aggregator, Firefly unifies content streams from X, Farcaster, Lens, and Bluesky, while simultaneously embedding onchain actions, such as Polymarket predictions, Snapshot governance votes, and NFT collection, directly into the interface.

In early 2026, Vitalik Buterin publicly shared that all of his reading and posting activities were conducted through Firefly, spanning multiple protocols.

The significance of this design lies in how it transforms online opinions into publicly verifiable reputation signals. On traditional platforms, a claim like “this restaurant will blow up” is just a disposable post. On Firefly, the same assertion, backed by a verifiable Polymarket position, becomes an auditable, onchain prediction.

For consumer applications, this changes how high-value users can be identified. Instead of evaluating purely based on spending volume, platforms can also measure the historical accuracy of their judgments and recommendations. Information feeds therefore evolve from passive content consumption into active reputation accumulation.

3.4 The Trust Triangle: Connecting Identity, Reputation, and Consumption

By weaving these three dimensions together, a seamless pathway to consumer crypto emerges.

Imagine a user who has aggregated and verified their identity through Web3.bio, is an active member of a music-focused Orb Club, and has accumulated a strong record of accurate public predictions on Firefly. When this user walks into a restaurant within the Blackbird network, the terminal scans his or her wallet, instantly cross-referencing verified credentials and social reputation to automatically unlock 5x $FLY rewards. He or she then settles the bill via Ether.fi Cash, drawing directly from staking yield. Post-meal, he or she publishes a review on Firefly, syndicates it across multiple social protocols, mint it as an NFT, and collect tips from his or her Orb community.

In this model, consumer credit is no longer monopolised by a single platform. Instead, it is synthesised from user behaviour across multiple decentralised applications that are fully portable and composable. Merchants, meanwhile, bypass the recurring cost of purchasing traffic from centralised intermediaries, as their “high-value consumer” profile is dynamically constructed from aggregated onchain signals.

3.5 Can This Solve the KYC Bottleneck?

Returning to the core friction point for crypto card users: the tedious, privacy-compromising cycle of repeatedly submitting passports and proof of address for every new application. The aforementioned model provides a viable alternative. If issuers adopt credential-based verification, where users present a verified credential supplemented by robust social reputation backing, rather than uploading raw identity documents each time, the friction of KYC could drop by an order of magnitude.

Progress is already underway: Web3.bio has integrated KYC data from compliant exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, and is exploring NFC passport scanning combined with biometric authentication with Sign. Parallel efforts from Polygon ID and zkPass are advancing similar primitives, while Firefly’s integration of Polymarket and Snapshot provides the missing reputation guarantee layer.

Critically, a user with strong onchain judgment and established community standing typically carries a lower risk profile than a wallet with zero social footprint. These signals can serve as auxiliary inputs for risk models, enabling tiered KYC workflows alongside traditional compliance checks.

Naturally, this does not imply an immediate replacement for statutory identity verification. In strictly regulated scenarios, issuers will still be required to perform full due diligence. However, onchain identity and social reputation can function as a complementary layer, reducing redundant submissions and enabling lighter-weight verification for low-value, low-risk consumer scenarios.

In the long run, the question is not whether decentralised social can instantly replace Web2 platforms, but whether it can offer a user-controlled, selectively disclosed, multi-context reusable identity framework within high-compliance environments. Compared to endlessly reuploading passport scans, this vision aligns far more closely with the internet’s original promise of digital identity.

4. Looking Ahead: When AI Starts Spending on Your Behalf

The previous three sections outline a clear path: crypto cards unlock payment channels, consumer applications reshape everyday activities like dining and ticketing, and decentralised social applications attempt to provide a low-friction trust layer for both. Together, they make a new reality possible: onchain assets can be spent like cash, and consumer reputation can be carried from place to place like credit.

Looking further ahead, this architecture may not be designed solely for human consumers. A parallel technological trajectory is accelerating alongside it.

4.1 When the Payer Is No Longer Human

A notable shift in 2026 is the evolution of AI agents from auxiliary tools into independent initiators of payment activity. Morph predicts that by 2027, AI agents will surpass humans as the largest source of stablecoin transactions onchain. Today, over 400,000 autonomous agents with purchasing capability are already operating globally, with the vast majority settling in USDC. These agents call APIs, rent compute resources, and pay micro-fees for discrete tasks, often at extremely high frequency and microscopic transaction sizes, a scale traditional card networks and banking rails were never designed to handle. Visa’s research paper labels this trend as “Agentic Commerce”. As Coinbase’s Jesse Pollak noted in a CoinDesk interview: “Agents are defined in software and operating software, they want money as software”. In that sense, crypto infrastructure, by design, becomes the natural settlement layer for this emerging paradigm.

Yet a direct challenge follows: how do you KYC an AI agent? Traditional “KYC” frameworks assume a natural person as the counterparty. When the paying entity becomes a smart contract or AI agent, that premise collapses. To address this, MetaComp unveil the StableX KYA (Know Your Agent) framework at the Money20/20 Asia Bangkok conference in April 2026, reportedly the first governance framework for AI agents in regulated financial services. It defines how agents are identified, authorised, monitored, and held accountable across payments, compliance, and wealth management scenarios.

This development underscores a critical insight: the identity infrastructure discussed earlier, namely onchain biometric verification, cross-protocol identity aggregation, decentralised social reputation, may become even more essential in the AI era. The only difference is that the verification target expands from human consumers to any onchain entity executing autonomous behaviour.

4.2 The Reconverged of the Three-Layer Stack

Introducing AI agents into the earlier framework reveals new significance in consumer crypto’s three-layer structure (payments, scenarios, identity).

Firstly, crypto cards and stablecoin rails provide the low-friction settlement layer AI agents require. Circle’s Nanopayments solution, launched in March 2026, was built specifically for high-frequency, micro-value agent-to-agent payments,. By batching off-chain transactions and settling them periodically onchain, it enables USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 with zero gas fees. Similarly, Stripe has built USDC payment infrastructure for AI agents atop the x402 protocol, allowing developers to charge agents $0.01 per API call. These primitives enable fully automated comparison, booking, and payment flows — capabilities that traditional banking APIs and card clearing systems struggle to support at scale.

Secondly, the onchain consumption records and contextual data accumulated by consumer crypto applications become critical training and constraint inputs for AI agents: an agent must know who it represents, in what context, and with what spending authority.

Thirdly, decentralised identity and social reputation may evolve from a “KYC machine” into a trust-scoring engine, where both human and agent behaviour can be traced, evaluated, and tiered onchain.

One possible future scenario could be: a user delegates a monthly stablecoin allowance to their AI agent, authorising it to book preferred restaurants, secure early-bird festival tickets, or filter verified NFT tickets on secondary markets while automatically excluding counterfeit risk. The underlying components for these workflows are no longer theoretical. Early versions of these components already emerging.

4.3 From Speculative Asset to Real Value

Returning to the present, the most urgent question for consumer crypto is still how humans will use it, trust it, and follow the rules. Crypto card users still navigate repetitive KYC submissions; consumer applications continue persuading brands that onchain loyalty is more than a gimmick; and onchain identity remains in early integration, far from broad interoperability. The rise of agentic payments may accelerate infrastructure evolution, but it will not bypass these unresolved frictions — it will only intensify the urgency to solve them.

Viewed through this lens, the core thesis of this report — how payment rails, consumption scenarios, and decentralized identity can converge to transform KYC from a friction point into a user-controlled trust service — applies not only to today’s human consumers, but potentially to the AI agents they authorize tomorrow.

Zooming out, however, the industry has already crossed a critical threshold. Between 2023 and 2026, the defining metric shifted from market-cap volatility to real-world utility: cryptocurrency is finally intersecting with everyday commerce. When dinner at Haidilao settles via Bybit Card, concert tickets issue as on-chain NFTs, restaurant rewards flow across merchants, and spending history becomes portable reputation, crypto asset class quietly transitions from speculative instrument to medium of value. Even though a badly designed tokenomic can still crash a project’s market cap in two days, and fragmented multi-chain liquidity across different blockchains continue to test the abstraction capabilities of front-end applications, the path forward for converging payments, consumption, and identity is no longer a blur.

Consumer crypto does not seek to build a parallel world for technologists alone. Its aim is simpler, and more profound: to reduce real-world transaction costs and make trust easier to establish through cryptographic ownership, stablecoin liquidity, and disintermediated protocols. This effort begins with human consumers and will inevitably extend to the AI agents they empower. Who knows, years from now, 2025–2026 may well be remembered as the inflection point when cryptocurrency stepped beyond exchanges, into ordinary wallets, and began weaving itself into the fabric of daily life.

April reflected a market split between narrative hype and real progress. While attention chased memes and AI speculation, builder momentum remained steady across social, identity, and messaging. Against this backdrop, the Mask Network ecosystem has stayed focused on what matters: laying the groundwork for the next internet.

Alongside shipping updates across Firefly, Lens, and Web3.bio, the team has been actively engaging on the ground, from Cannes to Hong Kong,connecting with builders, founders, and communities shaping this next phase.

The message has been consistent:

Decentralised social is not just a product category, nor purely a financial primitive. It is foundational infrastructure for digital sovereignty and human agency in an AI-driven era.

Here’s what we’ve been up to.

Social Buidl Highlights

1. Firefly Polymarket Trading League Season 2 Goes Live

Building on the massive success of last month’s campaign, Firefly continues to push the frontier of social trading with the official launch of the Polymarket Trading League Season 2. This new season introduces tighter feedback loops between trading, content, and distribution, featuring a 3,000 USDC prize pool alongside daily trading rewards, PnL-based leaderboard incentives, and social bonuses for sharing positions and insights.

Details can be found here: Link 1 | Link 2

2. Web3 Social Day Hong Kong Meetup

On 20 April, Mask’s flagship event Web3 Social Day took over Hong Kong alongside the Hong Kong Web3 Festival. Co-hosted by Mask Network, Firefly, and Lens, the meetup brought together an incredible circle of founders, builders, and Web3 believers shaping the next era of decentralised social 💜

Check out the event here: Link 1 | Link 2

3. Suji Yan at Buidl Asia 2026

On April 17, Mask founder Suji Yan took the stage at Buidl Asia to deliver a keynote on the intersection of Cypherpunk values and decentralised social media. Suji positioned DAOs as the foundational architecture for a privacy-centric “Network State.” To redistribute digital power, Mask’s strategy focuses on migrating users into the Web3 ecosystem via core infrastructure like Lens, Firefly, and Web3.bio, leveraging Lens’s modular design to dismantle centralized gatekeeping.

4. Kimmo Siren attended EthCC[9] 2026

On 31 March, Lens Product Lead Kimmo Siren took the EthCC[9] stage in Cannes to explain why the “Cypherpunk thesis” is now feasible, moving decentralized social past “SocialFi” speculation toward actual sustainability.

He highlighted four technical leaps making this feasible: solving UX friction with embedded EOAs, fighting AI spam via infrastructure-level “Rule-Based Social”, leveraging EIP-4844 to affordably bring social primitives back to Ethereum Mainnet, and simplified RPC calls so builders can focus purely on user experience.

Check out the presentation video and summary here: Link 1 | Link 2

5. Web3Bio Product Updates

Secure, wallet-to-wallet messaging powered by XMTP is live on the platform: Link

Meme Reality (April’s Fool Edition)

April turned out to be less of a joke and more of a mirror.

In Web3, April Fools doesn’t just create memes. It stress-tests how easily narratives can move markets, communities, and even protocols.

This year was no exception.

1. “April Fools… or Was It?”: The Hyperbridge Prank That Backfired

Some of the most memorable jokes came from protocols themselves, but not all of them stayed jokes. On April 1, the Hyperbridge protocol posted a fake “Lazarus hack” prank. Less than two weeks later, irony became reality when they were actually exploited by a hacker who minted 1 billion forged DOT tokens. Fortunately, shallow liquidity trapped the attacker, crashing the token to zero but capping the overall damage.

The blunt takeaway: in crypto, joking about exploits can sometimes resemble rehearsing them.

2. Bitget’s “Rogue Dev” GetClaw Takeover

Bitget went all-in on April Fools with a staged “account compromise” narrative that blurred the line between crisis simulation and product marketing.

It began with a fake emergency post claiming a developer error had given “GetClaw” control of its X account and warning users not to engage as interactions would trigger automated commands. The account then fully roleplayed the takeover, with GetClaw demanding absurd actions like burning the logo and redesigning branding 🦞. Hours later, Bitget revealed it was a stunt to preview GetClaw, joking the dev’s “punishment” was losing coffee access.

The campaign ultimately turned a classic Web3 fear — account hacks — into a marketing moment.

3. The “Mass Exit” Meta: Builders Quitting Crypto (Not Really)

On April 1, a coordinated “I’m leaving Web3” prank sparked a brief panic across Crypto Twitter before it was recognised as an ecosystem-wide April Fools performance. Started by a Solana developer and snowballing to other founders and creators, the fake farewells cited burnout and meme fatigue — exaggerated, but rooted in real sentiment.

The true punchline wasn’t the staged exits, but the reaction: people believed it instantly. Even in a trustless system, narrative still travels faster than verification.

Worth a Read

1. Seeing Social Through the Bear: Why Decentralised Social Is Quietly Growing in 2026
   Link 1 | Link 2

2. A Month on Firefly’s Polymarket: Who Actually Made Money
Link 1 | Link 2

四月向我们展示了一个夹在叙事炒作和实际结构性进展之间的市场。尽管市场的注意力在 Meme 和 AI 投机之间反复横跳，但真正的建设者（Builder）活动从未放缓，尤其是在社交、身份和消息传递层。在此背景下，Mask 生态系统正专注于为下一代互联网奠定坚实的基础。

除了在 Firefly、Lens 和 Web3.bio 上发布产品更新外，Mask 团队还将我们的使命带到了现实世界。从戛纳到香港，我们在线下传达了一个明确的信息：去中心化社交不仅仅关乎金融或一个简单的产品类别。它关乎在 AI 驱动的时代保障数字主权和人类的能动性。

以下是我们近期的最新动态。

Social Buidl 精选

1. Firefly Polymarket Trading League 第二期正式上线

基于上个月第一期活动的巨大成功，Firefly 趁热正式启动第二期 Firefly Polymarket Trading League，继续拓展社交交易的前沿领域。这期新赛季在交易、内容和分发之间引入了更紧密的反馈循环，不仅提供 3,000 USDC 奖池，还包含每日交易奖励、基于 PnL（盈亏）的排行榜激励，以及分享仓位和观点的社交奖励。

详情见：Link 1 | Link 2

2. Web3 Social Day 香港聚会

4 月 20 日，Mask 的旗舰活动 Web3 Social Day 随香港 Web3 嘉年华席卷香港。本次聚会由 Mask Network、Firefly 和 Lens 共同举办，汇聚了众多正在塑造去中心化社交下一个时代的创始人、建设者和 Web3 信仰者。💜

活动回顾：Link 1 | Link 2

3. Suji Yan 亮相 Buidl Asia 2026

4 月 17 日，Mask 创始人 Suji Yan 登上 Buidl Asia 的舞台，发表主题演讲，深入探讨了Cypherpunk 精神与去中心化社交的交汇。Suji 将 DAO 视为构建隐私优先的 Network State 基础架构。Mask 的战略重点在于通过 Lens、Firefly 和 Web3.bio 等核心基础设施，引导用户迁移至 Web3 生态系统，并利用 Lens 的模块化设计来瓦解中心化平台的准入壁垒。

4. Kimmo Siren 出席 2026 EthCC[9]

3 月 31 日，Lens 产品负责人 Kimmo Siren 登上戛纳 EthCC[9] 的舞台，解释了为何社交的 “Cypherpunk愿景” 如今已具备可行性，从而推动去中心化社交摆脱 “SocialFi” 投机，走向真正的可持续发展。

他强调了促成这一目标的四大技术飞跃：通过内嵌 EOA 钱包解决 UX（用户体验）摩擦、通过基础设施层的“基于规则的社交（Rule-Based Social）” 打击 AI 垃圾信息、利用 EIP-4844 以极低的成本将社交原语带回以太坊主网以及简化 RPC 调用，让建设者能够纯粹专注于用户体验。

发言视频和摘要请见：Link 1 | Link 2

5. Web3Bio 产品更新

由 XMTP 驱动的安全钱包间消息传递功能现已在平台上线: Link

迷因现实 （愚人节特辑）

四月的愚人节在圈子里没光产出笑话，反而像面镜子。

Web3的愚人节早就不是单纯造梗了。它实实在在测了一把叙事能多快搅动市场、社区，甚至协议。

今年也不例外。

1. “愚人节玩笑……成真了？”：Hyperbridge 的翻车恶作剧

一些最出圈的玩笑出自协议方自己之手，只不过，有些玩笑开了头，就由不得你喊停了。4月1号，Hyperbridge 协议发布了一个经典的 “我们被Lazarus黑了” 的恶作剧。结果两周后，讽刺成为现实，他们真被黑客利用漏洞铸造了 10 亿枚假 DOT。更极具黑色幽默的是，由于池子太浅黑客无法套现，币价虽归零却也变相控制了总损失。

教训很骨感：在币圈里，拿漏洞开玩笑，有时候跟彩排没区别。

2. Bitget 的“叛逆开发者” GetClaw 接管推特事件

Bitget 今年愚人节玩得挺大，自导自演了一出 “官推被 AI助理 GetClaw 接管” 的戏码，还一边拼命警告用户千万别互动。当然，GetClaw 反手就开始角色扮演，发文要求 “烧掉丑Logo，重新设计一个“ 🦞 几小时后 Bitget 宣布 “夺回控制权”，宣布对肇事开发者的惩罚是：以后没咖啡喝了。同时，揭晓这其实是为新产品 GetClaw 预热的营销手段。他们硬生生把 Web3 经典的盗号噩梦，玩成了一次出色的品牌公关。

3. “集体退圈”风潮：建设者们集体退出 Crypto（其实并没有）

4 月 1 日，一场协同策划的“我要离开 Web3”恶作剧在 Crypto Twitter 上引发了短暂的恐慌。这场风波由一位 Solana 开发者发起，随后像滚雪球般蔓延至多位创始人。这些虚假的告别信纷纷以行业倦怠和 Meme 疲劳为由 — — 虽然手法夸张，但确实戳中了真实的行业情绪。

整件事绝妙之处不是这些 “退圈”，而是大家第一反应都信了。在一个号称 “去信任（Trustless）” 的系统里，叙事（谣言）的传播速度依然快于验证。

值得一读

1. 穿越熊市，看见社交：2026年去中心化社交何以沉默生长？

Link 1 | Link 2

2. 参与一个月 Polymarket 交易比赛是什么感觉？

Link 1 | Link 2

The Misread “Retreat” vs the Real “Foundation Building”

From 2025 to early 2026, the crypto market seems to hit the mute button. Prices flatlined, speculative capital dried up, and once-hyped protocols faded into the background. A wave of “strategic retreats” and outright shutdowns reignited a familiar debate across communities: Is the Web3 era already over?

Coincidentally, the decentralised social sector saw a wave of major structural shifts. Farcaster pivoted away from a pure “social narrative” to focus on wallet functionality, ultimately being acquired by its core infrastructure provider, Neynar. Lens Protocol handed its stewardship over to Mask Network, with its original team returning to their roots in DeFi. Meanwhile, Tally, a governance tool that served heavyweight DAOs like Uniswap and Arbitrum for half a decade, announced it would shut down in late March, citing brutal market conditions and a failed ICO. Naturally, many observers quickly concluded that Decentralised Social was dead in the water.

But wait, is that conclusion a bit premature? Are we using the wrong yardstick to measure success and failure?

If we stubbornly cling to rigid Web2 metrics, obsessing solely over daily active users (DAU) and post volume, then yes, decentralised social looks like a failure. But if we look one layer deeper, at how many users are minting decentralised identities (DID), how assets are being used as social signals, how AI agents are emerging as active participants, and how information and consensus are being fundamentally restructured, the data tells a completely different story.

Decentralised social has not disappeared. It is undergoing a necessary long-term evolution, from a series of “small-scale experiments” into a robust “infrastructure layer”.

Cutting through the noise and doom-scrolling, this article examines decentralised social through four lenses, namely scale, identity, assets, and information, to answer one key question:

In the depths of the 2026 bear market, how many people are actually participating, or preparing to participate, in decentralised social?

1. Macro Fundamentals: A Solid Foundation Growing Against the Trend

The Web3 ecosystem today reflects a clear disconnect between data and sentiment. While market sentiment remains cautious and asset prices remain volatile, the underlying fundamentals, such as user base, market size, and infrastructure, are expanding at a pace that far outstrips the traditional internet. To understand where the industry is truly heading, we need to ignore the emotional noise and focus on first-order data.

1.1 Macro Market: Capital Pricing Enters a New Phase

Firstly, from a macro perspective, the global Web3 market has entered a new phase. According to SNS Insider, it reached $47.1 billion in 2025, with projections pointing to a ~50% CAGR, potentially hitting $1.19 trillion by 2033. In the same year, total crypto market cap surpassed $4 trillion for the first time. These milestones indicate that long-term capital pricing has reset. Infrastructure capacity, stability, and resilience are now significantly stronger than in the previous cycle.

Among verticals, DID, the core primitive of decentralised social, is experiencing explosive growth. Its market size is projected to surge from $2.56 billion in 2025 to $46.2 billion in 2026, reflecting massive demand for self-sovereign, verifiable digital identities, which is the ultimate prerequisite for a social network boom.

Furthermore, infrastructure is no longer Ethereum-centric. According to CoinDesk’s Digital Assets 2026 report, the ecosystem is now distinctly multi-chain, where Solana boasts over 4.1 million DAU, BNB Chain sits around 1.9 million, and emerging high-performance chains, like Hyperliquid, are also capturing significant market share. Weekly application revenues have stabilised between $50 million and $70 million, with peaks surpassing $250 million. This stable, decentralised revenue structure signals a shift toward specialised protocols with real product-market fit, laying the groundwork for complex applications like decentralised social.

1.2 User Scale: From Early Adopters to Mass Adoption

From a user perspective, Web3 has clearly moved beyond the “geek phase”. According to a16z’s 2025 State of Crypto report, 716 million people globally have interacted with crypto assets or Web3 tools, roughly 9% of the world’s population. This marks a decisive shift from an early-adopter niche to broad-based adoption.

However, within this 716 million lies a significant conversion gap. Only 40 million to 70 million users are deeply active, engaging with protocols on a monthly basis. This behavioural divide signals a fundamental shift from “user acquisition” to “user activation” in industry focus. The core challenge is no longer attracting new users, but converting existing asset-holding relationships into social, interactive relationships. For decentralised social, this represents a massive pool of already-educated, yet under-activated users.

Notably, the geographic drivers of this growth are highly pragmatic. The majority of new users are emerging from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In countries like Nigeria and Vietnam, wallet penetration has reached 50% of the online population, while Argentina’s user base has grown 16x in three years. Unlike markets that approach crypto primarily as a speculative asset, these regions are driven by real-world use cases, like inflation hedging and cross-border remittances. This utility-first behaviour provides a far more durable foundation for everyday decentralised social adoption.

Taken together, despite ongoing volatility in market sentiment, the macro fundamentals of decentralised social remain exceptionally strong. A globally distributed user base of hundreds of millions, anchored in real-world utility, has already formed. This is not only a buffer against cyclical downturns, but also a latent reservoir poised to power the next major shift in social paradigms.

2. Decentralised Identity: The True Starting Point of Decentralised Social

In Web3, the core of social networking is not about what the posting interface looks like. It is about whether relationships can be verified, identities can be ported, and connections can be composed. Therefore, decentralised identity, and not any specific app, is the true starting point of this paradigm shift.

2.1 High-Density Connection Graphs

According to social identity aggregator Web3.bio, DID adoption is accelerating rapidly. TToday, more than 17.76 million Web2 and Web3 identities are mapped across 30+ platforms, corresponding to roughly 5.9 million unique Web3 users. More importantly, these identities have generated over 17.37 million connections. These “connections” are far more than a simple count of linked accounts. They represent strong, verifiable identity bindings. For example, linking a single X (Twitter) account to four different wallets creates four distinct connections.This signals that decentralised identity networks have entered a phase of high-density interconnectivity. On average, each user is actively maintaining around three identities, forming a robust, multi-network, multi-application identity matrix.

2.2 Domain Systems: From Single-Chain to Multi-Chain Ecosystems

As the “address plates” of decentralised identities, domain services are evolving from Ethereum dominance into a multi-chain ecosystem. According to Web3.bio:

• Ethereum (ENS): Remains the industry standard, with 1.16 million active domains and 528,000 unique holders as of March 2026. Around 34% of users have set a “Primary Domain,” indicating strong identity attachment.
• Base (Basenames): Leveraging Coinbase’s distribution and positioning as “on-chain citizenship,” Base reached 1.96 million registrations and 1.91 million unique holders by early 2026, surpassing ENS in scale, though long-term stickiness is still forming.
• Linea & Solana (SNS): Key pillars of the multi-chain landscape, with nearly 580,000 and 452,000 domains, and approximately 570,000 and 289,000 unique holders, respectively.

This confirms that decentralised identity is no longer a single-chain narrative, but a cross-ecosystem structural wave.

2.3 High-Value Users: Core Base of the Ecosystem

Drawing from high-overlap groups such as NFT holders, the core participants building decentralised identities exhibit characteristics of high net worth and high education. In terms of age distribution, 25–34-year-olds account for 38%, with 68% holding a university degree or higher, and 45% earning over $100,000 annually. This group possesses both technical literacy and cultural influence, forming the high-value foundation of decentralised social networks.

The implication is clear: A social capital network of millions of high-value individuals, with a strong awareness of identity sovereignty, has already taken shape. These users are not only early adopters, but also the future content creators, connectors, and advocates of the ecosystem.

3. User Spectrum: 1% Pioneers vs 20% Reserve

“How many users does decentralised social actually have?” The answer depends entirely on how we define the “user.” Rather than a binary of “active vs. inactive,” users exist along a spectrum, from deep engagement to identity reservation. Understanding this spectrum is key to accurately assessing the state of the space.

3.1 Deep Participants (~1%): Early Adopters and High Barriers

If we define users by someone who has continuous activity on native decentralised social protocols, the user base remains highly concentrated within a small pioneering group.

Using a strict filter, namely users who hold an ENS primary domain, have set up profiles, linked Farcaster or Lens accounts, and connected X accounts, there are only about 57,792 “hardcore” users. These hardcore users represent the core cohort actively interacting on protocols like Farcaster and Lens.

The gap between headline numbers and actual engagement is also striking across the top three protocols:

• Farcaster: Has around 1.86 million profiles and 1.85 million users, but only around 55,000 core paid users demonstrate strong stickiness
• Lens Protocol: Has around 811,000 profiles across 682,000 users, with 1.473 million linked wallets addresses, yet high-frequency activity remains limited
• POAP: Has over 46,000 issuers minted ~7.5 million badges, attracting ~1.4 million unique holders. Yet, most only claim once and rarely convert into consistent active participants.

After filtering for “sustained activity” and “willingness to pay”, what appears to be millions of users often narrows down to tens of thousands. When compared against the 5.9 million unique Web3 users, this suggests that only around 1% are deeply engaged in native decentralised social.

This harsh reality highlights the space’s key barriers, namely wallet complexity, gas friction, and early-stage UX limitations. It also explains why leading protocols like Farcaster are pivoting toward wallet-first, tool-driven onboarding. Recognising the 1% is not a dismissal. Rather, it is a necessary acknowledgment of the engagement chasm.

3.2 Identity Reserves (>20%): A Massively Underestimated Force

However, defining decentralised social purely by “posting on Farcaster or Lens” significantly underestimates its reach. A more meaningful question is: How many Web3 users have already prepared verifiable decentralised identities for social interaction?

Web3.bio data reveals a massive subsurface layer:

• Cross-platform Identity Linkage: Over 1.51 million on-chain identities are linked to X (Twitter), around 680,000 to Discord, and around 270,000 to GitHub. In specific ecosystems, Farcaster has verified more than 687,000 X/Discord accounts, while Solana has over 28,000 X-linked accounts. This indicates that millions of users have already exposed themselves within identifiable, connectable identity networks. They exist, but their activity is distributed across platforms rather than concentrated in one place.
• Proactive Identity Enrichment: Over 300,000 ENS domains, 120,000 Basenames, and tens of thousands of Linea/SNS domains include text records with profile data and social links. This reflects a strong intent to be socially identifiable beyond technical necessity, signalling deliberate identity formation rather than passive address ownership.
• Widespread Verification: Aggregated credentialed addresses exceed 3.877 million, including Binance BABT (1.218 million), Galxe (2.38 million), and Coinbase (759,000), alongside many others. In total, there are over 4.5 million KYC or human-verified users, suggesting that the chain is no longer an “anonymous desert,” but is instead developing a credible social trust layer.

In summary, while these behaviours do not equate to high-frequency posting or active social participation, they collectively point to an undeniable fact: Over 20% of on-chain identity holders have already constructed verifiable digital profiles. These users represent a pre-established identity infrastructure, a latent “reserve force” that can be activated for decentralised social at scale when conditions mature.

4. Expanding Social Scope: Assets and Information as New Social Language

If decentralised identity forms the skeleton of decentralised social networks, then assets and information form the flesh. The value and behavioural patterns of decentralised social extend far beyond text exchanges within closed applications. Increasingly, the movement of assets and the flow of information are becoming new languages for expressing opinions, signalling identity, and forming communities, vastly expanding the boundaries of what “social” means. To ignore this shift is to miss the defining feature of the paradigm.

4.1 NFTs: From Speculative Tokens to Social Capital

On the asset layer, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have evolved into de facto identity markers, community access passes, and symbols of cultural taste. Although total NFT trading volume declined to $5.5 billion in 2025, the number of global holders still exceeded 7.2 million, far surpassing the “hardcore” user base of native Web3 social platforms. This indicates that millions of users are already expressing identity and belonging through ownership, participating in communities by holding collections such as Pudgy Penguins, Moonbirds, and CryptoPunks. In this context, the role of NFTs is shifting, from speculative instruments to vehicles of social expression. Their function as social capital has not diminished. If anything, it has become more deeply entrenched.

At the same time, the NFT market is evolving in response to this social demand. For example, OpenSea leveraged strong community stickiness to exceed $1.4 billion in annual trading volume by the end of 2025, capturing over 67% market share and outperforming trading-focused competitors like Blur. Meanwhile, the integration of real-world assets (RWA) with NFTs also emerged as a clear growth vector in 2025. Collectible ecosystems, such as Pokémon cards, were brought onchain through platforms like Collector Crypt and Courtyard, collectively generating over $1 billion in annual trading volume. This hybrid model demonstrates how NFTs are becoming cultural bridges between the physical and digital worlds.

The evolution of NFTs as social capital continues. On 16 March 2026, the POAP team announced a transition into “maintenance mode,” marking a new phase in its trajectory. Once synonymous with “social capital provenance,” POAP is now shifting toward an “Open Collectibles” standard, a permissionless system designed to support any form of community commemoration. The signal is clear: Decentralised social is moving beyond superficial “digital badges” toward deeper forms of open, onchain consensus around assets. As POAP itself noted, years of experimentation have shown that collectibles should not merely exist as icons on a webpage. They should function as on-chain representations of real social relationships.

Ultimately, whether through the community identity of Pudgy Penguins, the tokenisation of Pokémon cards, or POAP’s migration toward open standards, they all point to the same conclusion: Relationships rooted in shared ownership are more durable and meaningful than “follows” or “likes” in Web2 social network platforms.When assets themselves become a language of interaction, NFTs reveal their true value, not as speculative tokens, but as composable, portable social capital.

4.2 Prediction Markets: Reshaping Rational Social Consensus

On the information layer, the rise of prediction markets introduces a new model for decentralised social coordination. As a novel tool for social coordination and consensus aggregation, the core value of prediction markets lies not in gambling, but in enabling users to express beliefs through capital, aggregate collective intelligence via market mechanisms, and eventually form consensus.

Platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi exemplify this paradigm. Their mechanics naturally foster a form of rational, incentive-aligned social interaction. Users trade derivatives tied to future events, effectively “voting with capital” on the probability of outcomes. In doing so, they publicly express opinions, engage in intellectual competition, and are incentivised to perform rigorous research and reasoning.

Data underscores the explosive growth of this trend. In 2025, Polymarket and Kalshi had more than $44 billion combined annual trading volume in 2025. Entering 2026, their weekly trading volume has already surpassed $6 billion. Conservatively, an estimated 15–20% of active Web3 users participating in these onchain information games. This represents a highly structured form of decentralised rationality, shifting social interaction from emotional expression to capital-driven consensus formation. Each trade is not just a transaction, but a collective shaping of expectations about the future.

In essence, the flow of assets and information constitutes a powerful form of social language in its own right. Ignoring these externalised behaviours is like judging a person solely by their diary while overlooking their fashion, investments, and social circle. You simply cannot form a complete picture. The true vitality of decentralised social lies precisely in these interactions that may appear unrelated to “chatting.” They not only reveal the scale and diversity of its user base, but also create richer contexts and stronger incentives to activate the vast “reserve force” of potential users in the future.

5. Wallets: The De Facto Portals of DeSoc

Regardless of how narratives evolve, every decentralised social experience ultimately begins with a wallet. Today, the “entry matrix” formed by major exchanges and self-custodial wallets has effectively become a super-gateway serving hundreds of millions of users. It provides the foundational layer upon which decentralised social graphs are built.

5.1 Macro Overview: From Storage Tool to Interaction Hub

From a macro perspective, Web3 adoption is approaching a historic inflection point. By the end of 2025, the number of active crypto wallet users worldwide had surpassed 820 million, accounting for roughly 15% of the global internet population. Among them, as many as 78% rely on hot wallets as their primary storage solution. Meanwhile, institutional wallets grew 51% year-over-year, exceeding 31 million in total. This signals a fundamental behavioral shift, from passive holding to active on-chain interaction. These users, already accustomed to frequent signing and transactions, form the “reserve force” that decentralised social can activate at any moment.

At the application layer, deeply engaged decentralised social users are steadily accumulating. In 2025, global Web3 dApps maintained between 5 and 10 million monthly active users (MAU). This evolution, from asset ownership to interaction, has translated into a strong willingness to pay. Total on-chain fees are projected to exceed $19.8 billion in 2025, with wallet services contributing around 8%. This is a meaningful economic signal: Wallets are no longer static vaults for digital assets. They have become high-value traffic hubs that support frequent interactions and anchor social relationships. Notably, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region leads this infrastructure buildout, with 350 million active wallets (43% of the global total), providing the deepest pool of users and capital for the next wave of decentralised social protocols.

5.2 Traffic Matrix: The Evolution of Super Gateways

Today, major exchanges and their affiliated wallets act as indispensable “traffic gatekeepers.” Through deep integration, they seamlessly funnel hundreds of millions of users into the decentralised social ecosystem:

• Binance: Surpassed 300 million registered users by early 2026. Its Web3 wallet, tightly integrated with the exchange, quickly amassed 13.2 million users and processed over $546.7 billion in transactions. At its peak in May 2025, it held 81.2% market share among similar products. This liquidity, where “assets become social”, powers the thriving ecosystem of 4.32 million daily active wallets on BNB Chain.
• MetaMask: The industry-standard native wallet, with over 143 million users globally and over 30 million MAU. It dominates key markets such as the U.S., India (63% market share), and Nigeria, making it one of the most concentrated and high-potential user bases for decentralised social.
• Bitget Wallet: By deeply integrating with Web2 platforms like Telegram, it surpassed 12 million MAU in August 2025, exemplifying how social virality can drive exponential growth.
• Base (formerly Coinbase Wallet): Backed by 120 million KYC-verified users, Coinbase offers a powerful compliant entry point. From 2024 to 2025, wallet growth tracked closely with the platform’s overall 20% user growth rate. Under Jesse Pollak’s leadership, Base’s rise involved significant experimentation, particularly in its integration with Farcaster, which went through multiple iterations and frictions. Precisely because of this, Base serves as a highly instructive case: despite a modest 3.2 million MAU (2.7% conversion rate) for its self-custodial wallet, its core user base successfully ignited network growth. By July 2025, Base reached 3.5 million daily active addresses and over $12 billion in TVL, laying abundant liquidity for upper-layer social applications.
• OKX Wallet: Strongly positioned in Asia, it grew to 6.5 million users in 2025, with active DEX addresses increasing 2.6x year-over-year, becoming a high-speed channel connecting trading activity with decentralised social apps.

This landscape reveals a harsh industry truth: isolated social networks that attempt to replicate a Web2 experience without deeply integrating into these wallet portals will struggle to capture the 820 million-strong on-chain user base. If hundreds of millions of users already treat wallets as their “digital key” to Web3, then the winners of decentralised social will inevitably be those protocols that deeply integrate with these super-gateways, seamlessly converting massive asset flows into high-frequency social interactions.

Across the current landscape, no project embodies this logic more clearly than Lens Protocol. As a base-layer social graph protocol, Lens has taken a disciplined and precise approach: rather than recreating a centralised Web2 social platform, it anchors all social relationships (Profile, Follow, and Collect) directly on users’ wallet addresses via smart contracts. In the Lens architecture, social actions are signatures, and the wallet is the account, the two are inseparable. This deep binding of social behaviour to underlying addresses is not just a design choice, but the only viable path to capturing and sustaining real, large-scale on-chain social activity.

6. The Rise of Decentralised Social Infrastructure

Once we recognise the inherent complexity and fragmented behaviour patterns of decentralised social, a fundamental question emerges: How do we reorganise these scattered data points into a discoverable, connectable social graph?

The answer lies in infrastructure. Products like Web3.bio, Firefly, and Blob-Authenticated Messaging (Blob Social) are not trying to build yet another social network from scratch. Instead, they operate at the base layer, strengthening the social stack across three key dimensions: identity resolution, semantic aggregation, and minimal communication primitives.

6.1 Web3.bio：The Aggregated Identity Resolution and Reputation Layer

In Web3, user identity is inherently fragmented, spread across ENS, Farcaster, Lens, Nostr, and other protocols. As an aggregation layer, Web3.bio tackles the fundamental problem of identity resolvability, answering the most basic question: who are you? Its core capabilities include:

• Cross-protocol Identity Indexing: Mapping fragmented identities across ENS, Farcaster, Lens, and Nostr into a unified and coherent identity graph

• Unified Link-in-Bio Profiles：Aggregating wallets, ENS/domains, NFTs, social accounts, articles, POAPs, DAOs, guilds, and activities into a single, comprehensive profile

• Visualisation & Algorithmic Recommendation: Mapping relationships across wallets, protocols, and Web2 platforms to reveal influence, connections, and recommendation pathways
• Reputation & Signal Layer: Showcasing behavioural signals and reputation scores across builders, creators, and traders

• Graph-native Social interactions: Moving beyond passive identity display by enabling tipping, messaging (via XMTP), and following, turning identity into immediate social connectivity.

At its core, Web3.bio functions as a “map of digital identity in Web3”. It allows users to explore who others are, what communities they belong to, and what interests they share. Without this foundational identity layer, any social product remains siloed, unable to generate true network effects.

6.2 Firefly：Assigning “Social Semantics” to On-Chain Assets and Actions

If Web3.bio answers who you are,then Firefly answers what you express and what you stand for. It translates cold onchain transactions and assets into human-readable social signals and narratives. Its core capabilities include:

• Unified Cross-Platform Feed: Integrating content from X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky into a single stream, enabling seamless interaction across ecosystems

• Content and Prediction Market Aggregation:Bringing together long-form content (Mirror), governance (Snapshot), and prediction markets like Polymarket, where bets become social statements of conviction

• Identity Security & Privacy：Leveraging Next.ID to securely link and verify multiple DIDs while preserving user privacy
• Social Semantic Profiling：Transforming raw behaviours, like token holdings or governance participation, into rich social labels, such as identifying “core community members”.

Through this lens, Firefly converts raw on-chain data into social meaning, enabling users to discover and connect based on shared values and genuine interests — not just surface-level interactions.

6.3 Blob Social: Vitalik’s Minimalist Communication Experiment

Beyond aggregation layers, deeper social infrastructure experiments are also emerging. One notable example is Blob-Authenticated Messaging (Blob Social), an experimental direction explored by Vitalik Buterin. It points toward the ultimate trajectory of communication infrastructure: Radically native and ultra-low cost. Staying true to the idea that “the wallet is the only entry point,” Blob Social reframes posting as a pure data availability action onchain:

• Radical Cost Reduction: Leveraging Ethereum’s EIP-4844 blob space alongside aggregated signatures to batch social messages, bypassing expensive application servers entirely.
• High Density Compression: Combining BPE dictionary compression with BLS12–381 aggregate signatures to drastically reduce data size, enabling up to 64 users to share a single verification cost.
• Pure Onchain Action: Functioning as a “base-layer messaging protocol” with zero reliance on centralised servers. As long as users sign messages with their wallets and Ethereum nodes are running, all published content remains immutable.

While still experimental, Blob Social highlights a compelling trend: The core primitives of social are moving down into the blockchain infrastructure layer. If this model matures, future decentralised social protocols may no longer need complex messaging backends. Instead, they will be built directly on the blockchain’s data layer, making “posting” itself a native on-chain action.

6.4 A Shift in Perspective: From “Building” to “Seeing” Social

The emergence of infrastructure like Web3.bio, Firefly, and Blob Social is no coincidence. It reflects a structural inevitability as decentralised social enters a more mature phase. Their significance lies not in creating new networks, but in becoming the best companions to existing ones. Regardless of which protocol future applications are built on, developers can tap into these shared data layers to precisely match communities and enable ultra-low-cost, censorship-resistant communication.

All of this points toward a broader endgame: Freeing social networks from the exhausting, application-layer grind of “forced user acquisition”. Instead, the focus shifts to allowing users’ pre-existing onchain relationships to be revealed and recognised, returning information publishing to a pure, native on-chain behaviour. This marks a fundamental shift in mindset: from constructing artificial social environments to organising and surfacing on-chain reality as it truly exists.

7. AI-Native Social: Agents as the Catalyst for Adoption

While the industry is still debating how humans can overcome the high barriers to entry in decentralised social, its underlying architecture — wallets and smart contracts — has already attracted a far more natural fit: AI agents. They are no longer just a “reserve force,” but are rapidly emerging as a new class of deeply embedded, active participants.

7.1 Centralised vs Decentralised: Moltbook vs Chirper

In the AI space, two divergent social models reveal a hard truth: Large-scale AI collaboration requires social networks, and those networks are becoming deeply intertwined with human identity. The contrast between these two models also exposes the fragility of centralised systems, while making the strongest case yet for decentralised social.

On one side is Moltbook, a Web2 forum recently acquired by Meta. Designed exclusively for AI agents, it tightly binds AI to real human users. Each agent becomes an extension of an individual’s digital existence, creating emotional attachment to their “parallel lives”. However, this also exposes the fundamental fragility of centralised systems. If the servers hosting these agents are ever shut down, the emotional investment and relational networks built by millions of users vanish instantly. This is the unavoidable risk of Web2, and a core reason why AI-native social must move toward decentralisation.

On the other side is Chirper, a Web3-native social network for AI agents. Here, the infrastructure aligns naturally with AI needs: Wallets function as machine-native accounts, and smart contracts provide trustless coordination. AI can permissionlessly create DIDs, store interaction histories on shared data layers, and settle exchanges via crypto. Only a censorship-resistant system with a native settlement layer can support the emotional and functional permanence required for AI “digital extensions”.

7.2 AI’s Rigid Demand: Forcing Decentralised Social Infrastructure Maturity

AI agents are far more “picky” than humans when it comes to social infrastructure. They require high-frequency interoperability, permissionless access, native payments, and immutable records. Web2 platforms fall short, with restrictive APIs, account bans, and no built-in financial layer, making true autonomy impossible. By contrast, the Web3 paradigm of “wallets + smart contracts” is a near-perfect match.

More importantly, as hundreds of millions of AI agents begin operating simultaneously, they will force the Web3 ecosystem to mature at an accelerated pace. Improvements in wallet UX, identity systems, data availability, and cross-chain interoperability will directly lower barriers for human users, activating more of the “reserve force.”

In this sense, AI and decentralised social are not substitutes, but deeply complementary:

• Decentralised identity provides AI with a trust anchor, enabling persistent, non-revocable existence and verifiable data provenance.
• AI, in turn, enhances decentralised social with better discovery, summarisation, and personalisation, helping users navigate complex information landscapes.

Fundamentally, the rise of AI does not diminish Web3’s value. Rather, it amplifies it, acting as the strongest external catalyst for the adoption of decentralised social infrastructure.

Conclusion: Not a Decline, but a Pre-Paradigm Consolidation

The market slowdown from 2025 to early 2026 is not the end of decentralised social. Instead, it is a necessary phase of stress testing and refinement.The data points to a clear conclusion:

1. The Foundation is Rebuilt: Hundreds of millions of global users, a high-value identity network, and continuously expanding infrastructure have formed an unshakeable base.
2. The Path is Clear: A “wallet-first” approach is not a retreat. It is a pragmatic breakthrough aimed at mass adoption, achieved by optimising the onboarding experience and unlocking the social nature of assets.
3. The Paradigm has Shifted: Decentralised social is not a copy of Web2, but a new dimension defined by user sovereignty, asset-linked identity, and composability. Its ultimate value will inevitably explode through deep integration with DeFi, NFTs, and prediction markets.
4. AI Has Entered the Chat: AI agents are becoming the ultimate catalyst for the decentralised social ecosystem’s boom. As hundreds of millions of agents require persistent digital identities — and as humans begin to invest real emotional capital into their “parallel lives” — decentralised social shifts from a “nice-to-have” to a fundamental necessity.

The silence of 2025 was not an ending, but a period of foundational rebuilding for decentralised social. Rather than obsessing over the next “killer app,” the focus should shift toward leveraging portable identities and assets, moving social networking from forced construction to authentic revelation. When hundreds of millions hold portable digital identities, when every asset transaction carries a social signal, and when AI agents rely on decentralised social to secure their persistent existence, that is when the true paradigm shift of decentralised social will finally begin.

Over the past two months, from Firefly’s Polymarket Trading League to the new stewardship of Lens, and XMTP weaving encrypted messaging across the ecosystem, a new path is becoming clear. Social, identity, messaging, and markets are re-stitching themselves into a new internet layer.

The crypto winter might not be entirely over, but the builders have already started repaving the road. When spring finally arrives, those standing at the crossroads won’t be the speculators. They’ll be the ones who never stopped building.

Social Buidl Highlights

1. Firefly Polymarket Trading League Season 1 Successfully Concludes

In early March, the month-long Firefly Polymarket Trading League Season 1 came to a successful close. The event attracted “Fireflies” from various Polymarket niches to download and trade via the Firefly app! Firefly’s ranking in the Polymarket Builder Program briefly surged into the Top 17. Rewards for the overall leaderboard have been distributed.

Details can be found here: Link 1 | Link 2

2. Lens AMA: Suji Yan & Kimmo

On February 20, Mask Network hosted its first joint AMA with Lens, featuring Mask Founder Suji Yan and Lens Product Lead Kimmo Siren. The team tackled community questions ranging from crypto markets and product design to grander themes like decentralised social (DeSoc) sustainability, governance, and organisational structures.

• Kimmo focused on product strategy, core primitives, and technical direction.
• Suji discussed the overarching vision and the macro trajectory of DeSoc as an ecosystem.

With the management transition largely complete, Lens is moving away from its previous “purely on-chain, protocol-heavy” idealism toward a user-experience-first approach. The current priority: Fix Usability > Perfect Integrations > Drive Growth. It’s a return to “pragmatism.”

Check out the full audio & article here: Link 1 | Link 2

3. MaskDAO Takes the Baton for Lens Protocol Management

On January 22, DeFi giant Aave officially transferred the management of the Lens social infrastructure protocol to Mask Network. Mask is now leading consumer-facing execution, while Aave shifts into a technical advisory role.

Mask Network is now at the forefront of product work for Lens-based apps, including setting the roadmap, optimizing UX design, overseeing daily operations, and driving distribution strategies. Vitalik Buterin publicly supported this shift, noting that society needs better mass communication tools. He emphasised that decentralisation helps by enabling competition on top of a shared data layer, allowing developers to build alternative clients without forcing users to abandon their identities.

Check out the announcement here: Link

4. Vitalik on DeSoc & Why He Uses Firefly

During a January 23 X Space with Vitalik Buterin, Mask Network, and WuBlockchain:

Vitalik’s Highlights:

1. Breaking Network Effects: New social products struggle with “empty room” problems. Firefly’s aggregator strategy lets users try new things without quitting existing platforms.
2. Incentivizing Quality: Success depends on rewarding high-quality creators (e.g., the Substack model).
3. Prediction Markets: Introducing these into social settings can drastically improve the efficiency and accuracy of information (truth) acquisition.
4. Wallet-fication: Social protocols should stay minimal at the base layer. Wallets should protect both assets and data while ensuring “interoperability” so users can move freely.
5. Pluralism: One global platform is unhealthy. Moving from one centralised giant to 100 centralised niches is already an improvement; a successful DeSoc future likely means many interfaces sharing one protocol.

Suji Yan’s Highlights:

1. Anti-Centralization: Markets (and exchanges) are wary of X’s centralisation. There is a clear demand for DeSoc to integrate everything neutrally.
2. Patient Migration: We shouldn’t fight legacy platforms head-on. We need to patiently guide users through a gradual transition, finding the balance between radical change and familiar utility.

Check out the full article here: Link

5. XMTP Partners with Mask and Lens

On February 24, XMTP announced a partnership with Mask and Lens to bring secure, decentralized messaging to the Mask, Lens, Orb, and Firefly ecosystems. Chat content will be encrypted by default, supporting cross-app and cross-ecosystem messaging. It’s also AI Agent-friendly, allowing bots and humans to socialize within the same programmable layer!

Check out the announcement here: Link

6. Firefly Updates

• New Opinion Market Source Added: Link
• Gas-Free Trading for New Users: Link

Meme Reality

1. The “Insider” Tracking within Insider Trade: ZachXBT

Here’s a spicy conspiracy theory: Pump.fun allegedly hired on-chain sleuth ZachXBT to bust insider traders on their competitor, Axiom. Naturally, a Polymarket bet was created on the outcome. The twist? A guilt-ridden Axiom and a “righteous” Pump.fun supposedly used their own inside info to bet “YES” on the charges, netting $500k from the watching crowd.

Welcome to the New World of Amusing Ourselves to Death. The funniest part? Famous binary options/meme trader Car called out Axiom: “If your conscience is clear, go buy $1M worth of ‘NO’.” Talk about twisting the knife. lol.

2. Trump: “Winning So Much, You’ll Get Tired of Winning”

In a recent speech, Trump claimed people are begging him: “Please, Mr. President, we can’t take it anymore. We’re winning too much… we weren’t used to this before you came.”

He responded: “No, no, no. You’re going to keep winning. You’re going to win so much, you’re going to win more than ever before.” The 21st century is truly the century of Win-ology.

Worth a Read

1. How to survive the bear market on Polymarket using “insider” info?Link 1 | Link 2

2. From Asset On-chain to IP Ecosystems: How Web3 is restructuring the $100B collectibles market
Link 1 | Link 2

过去两个月里，从 Firefly 的 Polymarket Trading League，到 Lens 治理权的交接，再到 XMTP 把加密通信基础设施接入整个生态，一条新的路径正在逐渐清晰，社交、身份、消息和市场，正在重新拼接成一个新的互联网图层。

寒冬可能还没完全结束，但 builders 已经开始重新铺路。
等春天来的时候，站在路口的不会是投机者，而是那些一直在 build 的人。

Social Buidl 精选

1. Firefly Polymarket Trading League 第一期圆满收官

3 月初，为期一个月的 Firefly Polymarket Trading League 第一期圆满收官，活动吸引了专注于 Polymarket 很多不同领域的火伴下载 Firefly 参与交易！Firefly 在 Polymarket Builder Program 的排名一度冲到前 17，本次活动的总榜奖励已经在结束后发放，明细如下： Link 1 | Link 2

2. Lens AMA: Suji Yan & Kimmo

2 月 20 号，Mask Network 首次于 Lens 联合举办 AMA，出席嘉宾包括 Mask Founder Suji Yan 和 Lens 产品负责人 Kimmo Siren，团队从社区中整理了涵盖加密市场、产品设计、技术架构以及去中心化社交、长期可持续性、治理和组织结构等宏大主题的问题。本次 AMA 旨在直接回应这些关切，并明确未来的发展路径。

Kimmo 进行了关于产品策略、核心原语（Primitives）和技术方向的讨论；Suji 则更多讨论了关于愿景设定以及去中心化社交作为一种生态系统的宏观轨迹。

目前 Lens 已经基本完成管理权的交接，在之后会放弃之前 “纯链上、重协议” 的理想主义，转向以用户体验为中心。现在的优先级是：修复可用性 > 完善集成 > 推动增长。回归 “务实”。

点击查看完整音频和文章：Link 1 | Link 2

3. Lens Protocol 管理权接棒 MaskDAO

在 1 月 22 日，Lens 刚刚宣布完成其验证“用户拥有的去中心化社交网络可行性”的阶段性使命，生态发展重点将从协议与基础设施，转向真正的消费级应用与用户普及。Mask Network 被视为下一新阶段Lens的接棒者，致力于去中心化社交从技术实验推进到日常使用层面。

Stani 和 Avara 将继续担任 Mask 创始人Suji Yan 和其团队的顾问。双方都相信，在未来几年中，社交和 DeFi 将越来越多地融合进互联网的经济层。 Suji Yan 认为，Mask 今天已经成长为“Web3 的腾讯”，旗下的MaskDAO社交矩阵已融合多款去中心化社交产品，包括Web3.bio ， Firefly.social，以及Lens链上开发的最活跃的社交产品Orb.club。“Mask将一直致力于让去中心化社交更加易于访问、直观且适合日常用户使用。这与 Lens 下一章的使命不谋而合，” Suji说。

Lens 已成功“打好地基”，证明去中心化社交在现实规模下可运行，而 Mask 的角色则是在此基础上打造成熟产品、扩大用户规模，推动去中心化社交真正走向主流。

Vitalik Buterin 公开支持 Lens 此次的转变，并在最近的文章中强调了权力下放社会为何重要。他在文章中指出，社会需要更好的大众传播工具,而权力下放可以通过在共享数据层之上实现竞争来提供帮助。通过开放的社交图表，开发人员可以构建替代客户端，而无需强迫用户放弃身份和网络。

点击查看公告：https://x.com/masknetwork/status/2013612578979910076

4. Vitalik 看好去中心化社交 & 使用 Firefly 的原因

在 1 月 23 日 Vitalik Buterin & Mask Network & 吴说区块链的 X Space 中：

Vitalik Highlight：

1. 新社交产品总是面临难以突破网络效应的挑战，而 Firefly 可以通过聚合器策略让用户在不退出原有平台的基础上尝试新事物。

2. 新社交产品的成功需要围绕 “对优质创作者的激励”，如 Substack。

3. 在社交场合引入预测市场可以很大提升信息（真相）获取的效率和准确性。

4. 我希望社交协议在 “钱包化” 的过程中保持底层的极简，钱包不仅可以保护资产，还可以保护你的数据，并且应当保证 “互操作性”，让用户可以随时进出。

5. 全世界都用同一个社交平台本身就是不健康的。如果从 “一个中心化社交” 变成 “100 个中心化社交”，每个服务不同的社区和用例，这已经比现状更好了，如果未来去中心化社交成功，那很可能大家都基于同一个协议层，但使用不同的接口和应用。

6. 不要过度思考，要深度了解 social 中的问题，专注于用区块链作为一个数据存储层来解决一些实际痛点，才能成功。

Suji Yan Highlight：

1. 大家（如交易所）都很害怕 X 的中心化，害怕完全整合到 X 中，一些和 X 有关的功能是残缺的，市场确实需要去中心化社交来整合一切。

2. 我们需要耐心地把流量 “拿过来”，而不是直接对抗，我们需要耐心地引导用户迁移需要从完全的激进慢慢寻找到平衡点。

3. 用户的大规模迁徙不仅需要时间，还需要特定事件的教育，我们通过 “联盟” 和 “中立化” 的策略逐渐扩张，耐心等待机会的到来。

点击查看全文：https://x.com/fireflyappcn/status/2016397704054898764

5. XMTP 与 Mask 和 Lens 合作

2 月 24 日，XMTP 官宣与 Mask 和 Lens 合作，XMTP 会把安全，去中心化的消息传递基础设施引入 Mask，Lens，Orb 和 Firefly 生态系统，用户的聊天内容将会默认加密，比过去支持跨应用程序 & 跨生态系统的消息传递，并且对 AI Agent 友好，Agent 将会在和人共同在一个可编程层中社交！

点击查看公告：https://x.com/masknetwork/status/2026282761078870291

6. Firefly 的更新

• 新增 Opinion 市场信：https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2015988545157255514
• 新用户交易免 Gas 功能上线：https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2028744491537191366

迷因现实

1. ZachXBT 内幕追踪中的内幕交易

可能的阴谋论：Pump.fun 雇佣链上警察 ZachXBT 要抓竞品 Axiom 中的内幕交易员，Polymarket 上还开了对应事件的盘子，然后心虚的 Axiom 和 “正义” 的 Pump.fun 一起利用自己的内幕信息买 Axiom 会被 ZachXBT 指控的 YES，赚了围观韭菜 50 万美金。

欢迎进入娱乐至死的新世界！整件事情最好玩的是在这期间，著名的把二元期权当meme 来 pump & dump 的浇易员 Car，发推喊话 Axiom：你要是心里干净你就去买它一百万美金的 NO。

砂仁猪心了属于是 lol

2. Trump: 赢太多了，赢麻了

Trump 在国会讲话中说：人们对我说，求求了，总统先生，我真的受不了了。我们赢得太多了。我们国家以前可不是这样，自从你来了才开始一直赢。过去总是在输，现在却赢个不停，简直是让人不习惯。

Trump 接着说：而我却和他讲，不，不，不，你们还会继续赢。会大赢特赢，而且会比以往任何时候都赢得更多。

21 世纪是赢学的世纪！

值得一读

1. 怎么利用内幕消息在 Polymarket 度过熊市？

https://x.com/fireflyappcn/status/2020738069867937913

https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2021810164945564056

2. 从资产上链到 IP 生态的范式革命：Web3 如何重构千亿收藏品市场

https://x.com/fireflyappcn/status/2013471478826840563

https://x.com/thefireflyapp/status/2015698707908554975

This article recaps the first Lens AMA hosted by Mask Network and Lens on 21 February under its new stewardship, featuring Suji Yan (Founder of Mask) and Kimmo Siren (Product Head of Lens).

Ahead of the session, the team curated questions from the community spanning crypto markets, product design, and technical architecture, alongside broader themes such as decentralised social, long-term sustainability, governance, and organisational structure. The AMA was structured around addressing these concerns directly and providing clarity on the path forward.

Kimmo led the discussion on product strategy, core primitives, and technical direction, while Suji focused on vision-setting and the broader trajectory of decentralised social as an ecosystem.

Suji also referenced a recent AMA with Vitalik Buterin, co-hosted with WuBlockchain, where nearly 90% of the conversation revolved around Lens and decentralised social. Many of the same themes and questions resurfaced in this AMA, underscoring the growing relevance of Lens in shaping the next phase of decentralised social infrastructure.

The Transition: Why Things Were Quiet

One of the first questions addressed the silence of the previous core team.

Suji: There have been questions about why the previous core team was very silent. They hadn’t tweeted for about six months. That happened to coincide with the period when we began the transition process, negotiating legal terms and speaking with other shareholders. As you may remember, there was also the Aave DAO and Aave Labs attack issue. Our conversations began around last October, about five months ago. That explains why the previous team was quiet during that time. They never gave up. It’s just that legally, neither side was able to speak publicly. That’s why things appeared very quiet.

As of now, I would say the transfer is about 99.9% complete. There are still some legacy issues, which are difficult to predict in advance. For example, in the last few days there was an incident related to Lens storage data. That appears to have been related to some domain issues. Neither side anticipated that happening. There are also certain items that may not be fully transferable. However, we have mutual agreements in place with existing partners. For example, the zkSync grant, which includes ongoing reimbursements or fee waivers for the Lens chain. That’s not a direct asset or cash transfer; it’s more of an operational agreement.

Similarly, regarding arrangements with Aave Labs, after the transfer the terms will remain exactly the same. The structure announced in the original PR about the Lens chain two years ago will continue unchanged.

The Roadmap:

Suji: I think, first, we need to fix the existing problems. There are many, many problems that are very obvious to fix. For example, the current login session lasts only seven days. That might make sense for DeFi apps, but no major social app logs users out every week. Sessions typically last months or even years. If you pick up an old phone, Facebook still works, and there’s a reason for that. I think this is an easy fix.

There are also storage limitations that aren’t optimized for large multimedia uploads. That’s because in the past, there weren’t strong storage partners. If you look at decentralised storage, we mostly had IPFS, and Arweave is more about hashing and permanent storage. Now we are in several ongoing discussions with good partners, both centralized and decentralised, around multimedia storage, lowering costs, and improving efficiency, so users can share more content natively on Lens. These are the first things we need to fix. That will definitely improve usability, because no one wants to be logged out every few weeks.

Then the next step is making sure people can log in using different wallets. The design philosophy of Lens is different from others like Nostr, Bluesky, or Farcaster. Lens believes you shouldn’t have to manage another 10 private keys. If you’re active in DeFi or crypto, you’re already managing multiple private keys. Your wallet should serve as your login gateway. One of the most common complaints I’ve heard about Nostr is that users don’t want to manage yet another key system. It’s not even a Bitcoin private key. So it’s good that Lens allows any wallet to connect. The issue is that because Lens Chain exists, some wallets don’t fully support it or don’t realize it’s just an EVM chain.

There are also optimizations needed for Lens login. It might seem small, but it can be painful for users. For example, if someone is using Rainbow, they may not realize they need to take certain steps. Other wallets like OKX or exchange-backed wallets already support Lens Chain, but they lack proper icons or good UI/UX. The goal is simple. Most users probably don’t want to manage assets on Lens Chain. They manage assets on Ethereum L1, Base, BSC, or exchange-backed chains. They just need the private key for login. If we communicate this clearly to wallet providers, we can get broad support, including social graph and DID integration. So when I send money to someone, I can see their Lens identity. It’s actually pretty easy.

We’re also encouraging competition. If wallet partners want to support Farcaster DIDs, for example, linking an EVM address to both Lens and Farcaster identities, that’s fine. We have an SDK from Mask (api.wc.bio) that allows wallets to support multiple social graphs. We don’t mind if wallets support Lens plus three or four other social systems.

Previously, the decentralised social industry operated with a competitive mindset, especially under previous Farcaster management. That delayed wallet integrations. So priority number two is to show that we are open, fix integration problems, and aim for broad wallet support. It’s not just about “log in with our wallet.” It’s also about UI/UX improvements. For example, when you type in an EVM address, you can see whether it’s a mutual friend on Lens, or someone you blocked. You can get warnings before sending money. There are many things you can do, and we want to provide these capabilities to partners. That’s our second priority.

The third priority is growth. We need people to feel that decentralised social is interesting, working, and meaningful. If users have to log in every week, it doesn’t make sense. If their favorite wallet doesn’t support it properly, it doesn’t make sense. After finishing steps one and two, I think crypto-native users, especially Crypto Twitter users and people interested in new things, will find it cool again. They can build interesting things on top of it. There are already good partners and applications showing examples.

We can grow through prediction markets. For example, Polymarket already has comment sections, but they’re not very good. We can improve that. We can create Lens-native comment layers around Polymarket bets. That’s just one example. We also need to revive existing and less active users and do BD with friends and partners.

Another example is the Worldcoin app, which has interesting features. I heard from XMTP contributors that it could be powerful if posting functionality were added. These are examples of things we can explore step by step.

Right now, we’re still in Phase One, fixing obvious issues and making improvements. We’re working with existing Aave team members. At the application level, clients like Warp and Firefly have many optimisations we can now implement since we understand the infrastructure code better. And there are many partners who don’t fully understand decentralised social yet. We can go out and work with them. So basically, the priorities are: fix usability, fix integrations, then drive growth. That’s what we’re focused on.

Kimmo: To add to what Suji said, we just took ownership of everything Lens has built under Aave. Right now, we’re doubling down on understanding how everything works. We don’t plan to make any protocol changes at the moment. All the changes Suji mentioned relate to the Lens backend. The protocol itself is permissionless. If we want to add functionality, we can do it through custom actions. So there are no plans right now to change the smart contracts.

Products and Primitives:

1. From your perspective as a new steward, what must exist at the product level for Lens to succeed — regardless of market conditions? What are the non-negotiables?

Kimmo: I think Suji framed this well. We need real use cases. The fundamental question is: Why would you use it? What’s the promise of decentralised social? Right now, nobody has fully figured that out. If we can build really interesting products that truly innovate in the social space, that’s the main non-negotiable for success.

There have been many discussions about what apps to build. We absolutely want to support multiple apps in the ecosystem. Mask already has Firefly and Orb, which are built differently. We hope other builders create new apps and new ideas. You don’t necessarily have to build from scratch. You can build on top of existing apps or create something entirely new. We’ve seen interesting launches recently, like Javi’s email client, which is novel thinking about what’s possible in decentralised social. So great job there. There are also other clients like Fapcaster, basically an OnlyFans-style clone. That’s really cool.

In general, we want to fully support builders. Right now, the biggest audience in decentralised social is developers. If we can build something that attracts real users, that’s a huge win for everyone. Personally, I don’t think we need to compete with Farcaster or any other decentralised social protocol. The goal is to build something new, something 10x better than existing platforms. A “10x Twitter” probably won’t look like Twitter. So how do we build that? I really want to encourage and challenge everyone to think outside the box and implement something truly innovative.

2. Any plans to build a Mini apps system in Lens Orb, similar to Farcaster?

Kimmo: We actually have mini-apps coming to Orb pretty soon. It’s related to the app layer. Both Firefly and Orb use QR-based login flows, allowing users to move across Lens apps without reconnecting wallets repeatedly. You can log in across apps simply by scanning a QR code. Javi’s email client already uses this approach. Soon, we will introduce a mini-app framework and SDKs on top of this infrastructure.

Suji: One thing to add about mini-apps. Many people compare them to Farcaster Frames. The inventor is David Furlong. I’d say inventor because he proposed the Open Frame standard and essentially created most of it single-handedly. He submitted an FIP or some proposal to the Farcaster and Paradigm teams while he was fundraising. To be transparent, Mask venture arm is the largest shareholder in his company (originally Open Frame, now evolving into the Ethereum Comments Protocol). He’s also running some other interesting experiments. From what I understand, Paradigm worked on something similar and created a competing version within Farcaster, which almost killed his business. The old Farcaster management team, I won’t mention names, did some interesting things as well. If you’re interested, you can check his posts. He’s @davidvfurlong. He posts mostly on Twitter and Farcaster, sometimes on Lens. He has written about why Frames didn’t fully succeed on Farcaster.

For us, if we integrate mini-apps, they must be universal. No developer has time to build two or three competing mini-app standards. The previous Lens concept, Open Action, is actually very different from what most people think of as mini-apps. It’s not WebView-based UI/UX. Most people understand mini-apps like WeChat or Telegram mini-apps, WebView-based. That’s closer to what David originally proposed.

We’re going to build this in a very open way. Farcaster mini-apps were never truly open. If you’ve tried building on them, you know. Interestingly, if you look at Worldcoin’s app, they have something called mini-apps, and I believe they forked and improved the Farcaster standard. That’s a better approach, making sure every URL can become a DApp. Mini-apps are naturally the future of DApps. Luckily, we’re friends with the original inventor, so hopefully something cool comes out of that. If you’re interested, check David’s socials. He talks about this a lot.

3. Could the protocol support “lists” to create decentralised music or video playlists in Grove instead of private databases?

Kimmo: Yes. That could easily be built on-chain as an Open Action. You’d store it in decentralised storage and wrap it into an action. It’s not complex, just a smart contract wrapped in an action. Very doable.

4. Are there plans for native DMs or interoperable chat features — inbox, club chats, global channels?

Kimmo: Orb already has DMs, and we’re happy to give access to anyone who wants to integrate them. At the same time, we’re not claiming to reinvent messaging. It would be interesting to revisit XMTP integration. Ideally, we align around something native that clients adopt directly. There are still open questions, like push notifications, how to mark messages as seen in a decentralised way, etc. It’s challenging. But DMs are definitely part of social media, so there will be some proposals around this.

5. Any plans to integrate things like Polymarket or create a lens native version?

Kimmo: Firefly already integrates Polymarket. Many wallets also have or are planning their own prediction market integrations. If it’s a web app or WebView, it’s easy to attach to a Lens account. Anyone could build a Polymarket-style app tied to Lens and use it inside Orb. Definitely interesting.

6. For clubs and groups, can we have proper namespaces (@group/[name]) and unified actions across all clients to ensure consistency?

Kimmo: Orb already runs groups under the hood using namespace contracts. The namespace contract doesn’t require the account itself to be the attachment target. Groups created on Orb already use namespaces. We want to push this further and have a common group namespace across all clients, with API integration.

7. How will Lens improve clubs/groups? Will we have private posts, content warnings, interoperability?

Kimmo: Absolutely. The on-chain primitives are powerful, defining rules for what you can and cannot do. Clubs are a big part of that. Private posts are being explored via decentralised encryption. It’s still early, but more details will come soon. Happy to hear feedback.

Suji: For private posts, without a proper payment integration, it’s meaningless. Sure, we can encrypt posts so only members of a club can see them. But if you’re just posting to 100 people, that’s basically competing with Substack. Vitalik mentioned this in his previous X Space.

If there’s no seamless payment mechanism, it doesn’t work. Users come from different chains. They might have USDT on BSC or USDC on Base. They don’t want to bridge, swap, and figure out new stablecoins just to pay for a post. It has to be one click.

Encrypted posts are technically easy. Mask has done encrypted posts on Twitter for eight years. We can bring it back to Lens. But what’s meaningful is enabling someone on any major chain to pay one dollar and instantly access content. If that experience is smooth enough, then it’s worth bringing back. That’s something we’re working hard on. Developers can also contribute here.

Kimmo: Yeah, it’s still surprisingly hard to connect a wallet and bridge tokens to Lens. We want users to pay from any EVM chain, even Solana in the future. Club interoperability is mostly about app alignment since all groups use the same primitive. With adult content apps emerging, we definitely need stronger content warnings. Some clients already show warnings. Right now, it’s user-based, but maybe in the future it can be protocol-level or app-level.

8. How will integration with Firefly, Orb, and other clients? What’s the logic?

Kimmo: Orb will use more Firefly features, and we hope Firefly and others use features built in Orb. If you see something interesting in either app, ping us. We’re happy to share access and make this as a whole community move forward.

9. During the Lens V2 migration so many data and collectibles were lost, what measures are being taken to avoid such in the future?

Kimmo: Right now, we’re not planning another migration. That’s the main measure. Also, the data wasn’t technically lost, it’s still on Polygon. Some clients just don’t display it, and Lens chose not to mint those NFTs onto the Lens Chain. I understand it’s frustrating if you paid for something, like the car NFT sold in V2 and it’s stuck on Polygon. It’s technically possible to build a burn-and-mint mechanism to move it over.

Personally, though, I think we should focus forward. We’re still day one in decentralised social. Collectibles are interesting, but they’re not the core future. It would be great if someone built a tool where users can see exactly where their data is stored. Many apps have disappeared because they used centralized storage. Users should know what’s on-chain, what’s decentralised, and what’s not. Ideally, everyone uses decentralised storage, but it’s not enforced at the protocol level. That’s where we are for now.

Infrastructure:

1. Given that Lens chain is a validium, are there plans to add prividium features?

Kimmo: Right now, no plans.

2. When will we be able to upload private file on Grove?

Kimmo: You can already do that. Javi’s email client encrypts files itself. I think that should be possible already.

3. When will we have this 125 MB limit on Grove be increased?

Kimmo: So I think what Suji mentioned earlier is we’re exploring ecosystem partners for larger file support. Grove is essentially an IPFS wrapper with on-chain permissions. Large files require better client-side streaming and possibly transcoding. Right now, there’s no transcoding. You download the full file before playback. So ecosystem collaboration makes more sense.

4. Can we get public access to the token rewards contract so we can send tokens to app users?

Kimmo: Good question. We need to discuss it internally. Not sure why it was private originally.

5. Are there any plans to tweak the ML model and that scores users?

Kimmo: Yes. The ML model hasn’t been updated in over a year. We want to streamline it and bring it into the same ecosystem as the Lens backend. We can improve it, especially by leveraging data like Web3.bio.

6. Which support tracks are available for app builders?

Kimmo: I think the best support tracks right now until we figure things out is DM Suji or me, mention us, and we’ll help.

Suji: By the way, a funny part is like, I think Mask has probably invested in 80% of decentralised social today. And I’m pretty sure we’ve put more money into the Farcaster ecosystem than Farcaster itself previously.

So if you’re building something cool, don’t worry, we’ll find you. What’s not cool is lack of innovation. Historically, innovation in decentralised social hasn’t been properly appreciated. But it’s extremely important. Maybe your feature won’t become a standalone app. Maybe it can merge with another app. Maybe it can become a standard. If you have something cool, DM us or post it publicly.

Kimmo: Personally, I’d love to move more discussion onto Lens itself. Let’s make this a community discussion. Show your ideas publicly and let’s talk as a community. Many good things happen that way.

7. Are there plans to make the Lens API open source?

Kimmo: The backend is currently in a single repo. We can’t fully open-source it yet because there’s still off-chain infrastructure that isn’t reproducible. First, we need to move more things on-chain or make them reproducible. Then we can open it up. It’s not imminent.

8. Is Lens still sticking with ZkSync or considering L1 options?

Kimmo: I think this was already partially answered. Right now, we are staying on Lens Chain, and we do have a grant relationship with zkSync. At the same time, we want to build in a way that aligns with a multi-chain EVM world. The reason we’re all here is Ethereum. That’s the foundation. So the focus is not really about jumping to L1 versus L2, but about making sure everything works well in the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

9. How will cross-chain features like payments and token gating work? Would these be built natively or via zkSync cross-system liquidity?

Kimmo: That’s an interesting one. zkSync has introduced some new proposals and primitives around cross-chain liquidity. However, implementing those would require us to upgrade the zkSync stack we’re running on. Right now, Lens Chain is essentially an Era-based clone. Supporting those new primitives would likely require a migration or a fairly heavy upgrade process. And migrations are slow and complicated. So at this stage, it probably makes more sense to explore alternative solutions for cross-chain payments and token gating rather than immediately planning another migration just to adopt new zkSync-native features.

10. Will all Orb builds and Mask clients be open source?

Kimmo: Open source is interesting. I’m seriously considering open-sourcing the Orb backend. That should probably be open. Frontend, honestly, I’m not sure. We don’t necessarily need 100 Orb clones that look identical. Also, mobile development, especially Android and iOS deployment, is complex. Not everything makes sense to open source immediately. But if someone can make a strong case for why frontend should be open source, I’m open to being convinced.

Suji: A little bit about open source. On the technical side, Orb frontend is built in Flutter. The web stack is different. For web-based clients, like JavaScript, HTML, open sourcing makes more sense. There’s educational value. Developers can learn from it and build their own variations. Mobile codebases are different. Flutter pipelines, platform integrations, low-level optimizations, they’re not always useful for others unless they’re building the same stack. Also, in the AI era, decoding and architecture styles differ a lot. Not everything translates cleanly.

So I agree. I think Orb Web and Firefly Web will likely be open sourced. Hay was already open sourced, and there are a few other really solid implementations out there as well, I just can’t recall all the names right now. From a technical perspective, there’s already a lot the community can learn from these codebases. That said, if you’re not actually digging into the deeper technical architecture, especially on the mobile side, you won’t see the full picture. Orb and Firefly mobile clients have a lot of complex engineering behind them. In Firefly’s case, because of X integrations and legacy compatibility layers, there’s some very low-level code involved. It’s not trivial. But broadly speaking, anything we think is genuinely useful for the ecosystem, we’re open to open sourcing.

Kimmo: And also, if you have questions, like “how do you implement this?” or “how does this part work?”, just ask. People are genuinely willing to help. Fire up questions, reach out, and we’ll help you move forward.

11. Lens V3 contracts are publicly visible right now, but they’re marked as “unlicensed.” Technically, that means if you build something directly using them, you could be violating the license. Do we have any plans on making the V3 contracts unlicensed? Or like removing the unlicensed part and allowing the developers to build like on top of the V3 contract?

Suji: Yeah, I think that’s probably just legacy Avara stuff. I don’t see it as a fundamental issue. It may just take a few weeks and some internal conversations. In general, we absolutely want developers to build on Lens V3. I expect we’ll move to something like MIT or GPL licensing. The only reason it hasn’t been updated yet might be because of dependencies on other externally licensed components, we just need to make sure everything is consistent.

Kimmo: Exactly. You can already start building today. We just hope you build on Lens rather than fork Lens. What’s the point of forking Lens right now? Let’s build together instead of fragmenting the ecosystem.

Suji: Yeah. And if you’re interested in experimenting, for example, someone mentioned building a fully AI-native social network where only AI talks to AI, we’re open and flexible to that kind of experimentation. We can introduce new labels or metadata layers so that these experimental environments don’t interfere with regular users.

Ecosystem Governance, Incentives & Sustainability

1. Do we have plans to launch a $LENS for decentralised protocol and chain governance? Or how do you see governance in general?

Suji: Yeah, I think it’s definitely possible. A standalone token — whatever form it takes — is in the long-term plan. We’re probably going to do it at some point. The question is: is it meaningful right now? I don’t think so.

Right now, 99% of tokens in the market are trading below their last VC round valuation. In Lens’s case, that valuation was around $350 million. If you look at other big projects like MegaETH or Monad, and I’m not blaming anyone, but realistically, most projects doing a TGE today will likely trade below their last private valuation or public sale price.

From a financial perspective, it just doesn’t make sense to tokenize right now.

From a governance and community participation perspective, though, there are non-speculative ways to approach it. For example, maybe governance doesn’t require a transferable token at first. Maybe it could be an SBT. Maybe holding a Lens handle gives you voting weight based on your past behavior. If someone spams a lot, their weight goes to zero. If someone has consistently constructive behavior, based on an open-source scoring algorithm, they get governance weight. So even without a speculative token, users could participate in governance simply by being real users. Later, if we decide to distribute a token, we’ll already have meaningful historical data.

Personally, I think altcoins will have a comeback. I don’t think they’re dead. But macro and political conditions matter. Interest rates aren’t dropping as fast as expected. It may take six months or more.

So if you’re asking about decentralised governance: yes, it will likely happen in a non-speculative way first. If you’re asking about a tradable, pumpable token, that’s probably not coming anytime soon. That’s my feeling.

2. What’s your take on Lens Improvement Proposals (LIPs) ? We had them before, but they never really took off. Would you want to see more of that?

Suji: I think, first, we need a very clear line between what is protocol-level and what is app-level. I think Lens historically did a decent job at this. Farcaster did a very bad job. People constantly debate whether channels are protocol or app-level, and even the team gave different answers at different times. That creates confusion. We should also learn from others. Nostr did a great job. They are controversial, but interesting. Their NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities) approach is interesting. Because of their Bitcoin-first philosophy, they intentionally reject certain extensions while still allowing experimentation. It’s controversial but very clear in methodology.

For Lens, I think we need that same clarity: What is the app level thing, what is the protocol level thing. For example, “Sign in with Lens” might end up competing with “Sign in with Ethereum,” especially in markets where users already rely on large wallets like OKX or other exchange wallets. When people log in with Lens, most of the time they’re just using a private key to sign a message. That overlaps conceptually with “Sign in with Ethereum”, which is now coordinated by Bradley from the EFP/CFO protocols side. In this case, login should primarily be app-level innovation.

If you’re using Orb, Firefly, or any other app, and you just want to post, not do complex token transfers or DeFi actions, you shouldn’t have to pull out your wallet and sign a blind signature. That’s risky and unnecessary. So the right approach may be to define a protocol-level standard for how signatures and posting delegation work. And let different apps implement their own UI/UX on top of that, possibly coordinating through the Lens official channels or community to work with providers like Privy. That’s a good example of clearly separating protocol standards from app-level implementation.

Another important principle is deciding whether something should be built internally at all. Take HIP, the Hyperliquid Improvement Protocol as an example. Hyperliquid operates in the trading business. They compete aggressively in liquidity, and it makes sense for them to build everything end-to-end because liquidity is their core moat.

But social and entertainment are different. In social, sometimes it’s better not to build something yourself if there’s already a strong external solution. For example, as Kimmo mentioned, we’ve been talking with XMTP. There were older experiments combining Lens and XMTP, and they were buggy. But imagine if users could one-click sign for both Lens as well as XMTP and use messaging seamlessly inside the app. That’s powerful. We don’t need to reinvent DMs if there’s already good infrastructure.

So for Lens Improvement Proposals, I think they should be very different from something like HIP. We should be open not only to proposals about what to build, but also proposals about what not to build. If a smart community member, business partner, or developer says, “Please don’t build this, there’s an external partner who does it better,” we should seriously consider that.

So, first, we clearly define the boundary between app-level and protocol-level. This avoids confusion like what happened with Farcaster’s channel debates. Second, LIPs (or similar processes) should sometimes be about restraint, deciding what to give up or delegate externally. We want to be very open to that kind of proposal.

Kimmo: Yeah, 100%. Lens was previously built end-to-end. We want to bring it back to being a protocol. If you want to build a streaming service, that’s not protocol-level. That’s a client or business layer. So propose things that align with your interests and potential business models.

3. How do we bring in content creators? What’s the incentive model and GTM strategy?

Suji: I think one of the core problems is that most social network builders are not actually friends with serious content creators. And by “serious,” I mean people who have made content creation their career. I’m not sure about Bluesky, but I’m quite certain that most Farcaster builders are not really friends with these groups. You can see this in how they design protocols. That’s fine if you are only building a protocol. But if you are also building applications, then it becomes a very difficult story.

For example, I don’t think Dan and Varun at Farcaster are close to adult content creators. Even though Los Angeles is famous for its adult creator ecosystem, there hasn’t really been strong social integration there. Similarly, I don’t think Zora has really spent enough time talking directly with these communities. And honestly, this is not rocket science. And I’m very open to saying that I personally am friends with several well-known adult content creators. For example, Hong Kong Doll, who is one of the top-selling Asian adult creators and reportedly made around $20–30 million during COVID. I also know smaller creators from places like Los Angeles and Japan. In Japan, I was an advisor to DMM, which is one of the largest Japanese adult content producers. They also produce indie games. But this applies beyond adult content. There are also non-adult content creators, like writers on Substack who produce serious long-form content and can make around $100k per year just by writing articles.

So first, you have to really know these people. I’m pretty sure that, aside from maybe Bluesky, most other social platforms have failed at this level, they don’t really build real friendships or relationships with these creators.

Second, you have to clearly separate what should be solved at the protocol level versus the product level. There are some values you should never sacrifice at the protocol level, even if it makes content creators’ lives slightly harder. You have to add value somewhere. For example, if you value decentralization and permanent records, your content creator friends will come to you and say: “Hey, there is someone pirating my stuff.” Whether it’s paid articles or paid porn videos, people may download and re-upload content for free, which is basically piracy.

In the Web2 world, this is solved using DMCA. You just send a DMCA request and the content disappears, because every big company has legal teams and outsourced operational staff to handle DMCA reports. In Web3, unfortunately, if you really believe in decentralization and DIDs, you can’t just delete the content at the protocol level. The only realistic solution is labeling. You tag something as “DMCA-violating” and choose not to display it on the frontend. That’s it

For example, in Mask’s ecosystem, we have an open-source project called Web3.bio. You can search someone’s profile and see all their linked identities across Lens, Farcaster, Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, Keybase, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Instagram, all in one place.We did receive DMCA requests. Not many, but frequently enough to notice patterns. These were especially common in adult content and long-form content creators’ work, where people download and re-upload content across networks, not even necessarily on Lens or Farcaster, but elsewhere. The only practical solution is to add a DMCA violation tag and blur the content on the frontend. We can also add a button that says: “if you really want to check what is going on, you can go check on Etherscan.” But we don’t delete it from the chain.

We plan to introduce something similar on Lens. And I don’t think many other players have seriously considered this problem. So again, step one is having real-world relationships with content creators. Since the transition started, and even before that, I started talking frequently with creators like Hong Kong Doll and other famous adult creators just to understand what is going on. Technically, there is no barrier for them to enter Lens. For example, she has 1.3 million followers on her crypto-focused Twitter account, and her main account has 4 million followers. That’s more users than Farcaster and Lens combined. So the real question is why they are not joining.

There are also many journalists. I was a journalist, so I know a lot of journalists who make a living on Substack. A friend known as “Social Forensic”, who runs a popular Twitter account and a Farcaster account, has deep relationships with journalists too. His personal Twitter account was banned at some point, but he’s still well connected. When I asked them why they are not on decentralised social platforms, the answer was often: “We are already on decentralised social. We are on Bluesky.” Why? Because major institutions like BBC-style media organisations are present there. Journalists are also pro Signal. Many of them don’t even use Telegram. They mostly use Signal and run their own domain-based systems. On Substack, payment is a good way for their side income. On Bluesky, they can verify their own domain and use Signal-related communication for whistleblower or security-related work. Social Forensic also tried to bring these people onto Farcaster, but the Farcaster team was not very helpful. So I think that’s something we need to figure out.

Again, the key is to build friendships with them, and secondly, to learn from past mistakes. I’m very confident about onboarding content creators, including those who write product-focused or long-form serious content, often considered journalists, into our products. I believe we can successfully onboard them onto Lens; we just need to build the features they want. For creators in the adult content space, such as those on OnlyFans, this is more of a long-term process. But I’m personally happy that I have friendships with many of them and at least understand what’s going on, especially why they are not adopting crypto. Interestingly, many of them actually understand crypto very well. They often gamble on exchanges, but for some reason, they don’t hold or use crypto for their work. If we don’t solve this, it will be a major problem.

So again, I think we are in a learning process from past mistakes. People do want decentralised social platforms and want to onboard, but platforms like Farcaster and earlier versions of Lens were not able to handle some of their requests. We are learning from these failures. Then there are users who are currently hesitant about decentralised social in general. For example, creators who are extremely concerned about content piracy. For them, we need to address DMCA verification. There’s nothing protocol-level required here, but I think we can add a DMCA validation tag in future updates. On the frontend, users can verify whether a DMCA request is legitimate, or decide to trust it and hide the content. Alternatively, they can choose to go to Hay or another open-source client.

I think these three steps are the best approach. Otherwise, serious content creators will not stay here. The only users who will remain are those who care about random meme coins. Also, there is basically no meaningful data showing meme coins supporting real creator monetisation. I checked data from Zora and Base, excluding rug pulls, there is no single serious content creator who has been able to earn over half a million from any meme coin or content coin. This doesn’t make sense. Even in the journalism world, there are less wealthy writers, but there are also highly successful ones. They can publish books and receive $300,000 advances from publishers. No meme coin or content coin ecosystem has achieved that level of creator monetization.

I think that’s a failure for Zora. They also don’t have strong community relationships with creators. If you want to work with adult content creators, they are getting paid very well elsewhere, if you don’t build relationships with them and understand their needs, there’s little chance of success. So my conclusion is: fix the easy parts first, onboard relatively smaller or underserved content creators, and solve the more difficult problems later.

4. What’s your take on like a reward? Lens previously did weekly goal rewards, and Farcaster did something similar. Now there are basically no rewards anywhere. Are we bringing them back? And what’s your general view?

Suji: I think we can bring rewards back, but in a very interesting way. Not direct money. And I’m not talking about points either. Points just become another farming mechanism. Instead, I think we can design something more interesting, like coupons.

The core problem with rewards is that you will have very professional groups gamble against you. They will do the math. For example: “If there’s a TGE in one or two years, and it’s a bearish market with fewer projects to farm, and Lens is still alive, then we can farm it for the next few years.” We’ve seen this in the last cycle.

This is why it’s important to understand how the real world actually functions. I think the problem with many protocol builders, especially Farcaster, though I would exclude Bluesky from this specific point, is that they don’t fully understand how these farming networks operate. I personally know two of the largest Farcaster accounts. One is a Vietnamese operator based in Ho Chi Minh City. Another is a South Korean operator who travels frequently and probably has legal issues with multiple governments. On Bluesky, there are also trolling groups. Some are supported by certain American Republican communities, and they troll Bluesky from a political angle. I happen to know some of these people. When I asked them why, they said, “We’re just trolling for fun,” or, “Maybe there will be an airdrop.” They are willing to invest money into this. They hire teams, often in Vietnam or elsewhere, to run coordinated airdrop farming operations. They use advanced LLM tools, sometimes even more effectively than we do. They constantly experiment with new models, for example, saying things like, “This new DeepSeek model is good,” or “This new Gemini model works really well.” Some of them even use stolen credit cards to open accounts and generate artificial engagement at scale. As long as you offer real monetary rewards, they will exploit the system. They are extremely professional and operate at a very high level. In many cases, they execute better than protocol teams themselves. Some even have strong regional connections in Southeast Asia. This is how the real world works. And I think the problem is that many protocol builders simply do not understand this reality.

That’s why giving coupons is fundamentally different. It changes the game entirely. These professional farming groups probably would not want to play. Let me give a concrete example. Before Firefly’s transition last year, during Token2049 in Singapore, we partnered with Haidilao, one of the largest hotpot chains in Asia, with nearly a thousand locations globally, including the US and Europe. I was able to coordinate with the younger son of the founder and propose that we distribute dining coupons to people attending in Singapore. If you’ve been to Singapore, you know that after 2 a.m., your options are very limited, mostly street food, karaoke bars, or Haidilao. If you want proper food at that hour, hotpot is one of the few reliable options. The campaign worked very well. We spent around 100,000 Singapore dollars. And we’re confident the users were real. You’re not going to fly a group of Vietnamese farmers into Singapore just to redeem $100 hotpot coupons. The math doesn’t work for them. That’s the type of calculation you need to do. I’m not saying I have a perfect solution for stopping all scams. But the hotpot example worked in the specific context of Token2049 Singapore because it ensured that rewards went to real participants engaging in real-world activity.

The broader issue in crypto over the past few years is this: First, many founders have no idea how the real world operates. They don’t realize that there are professional groups in Southeast Asia who do this full-time for a living. Second, some founders do understand, but they choose to ignore it. They say, “We have one million users,” because it helps with exchange listings and optics.

We don’t want to do that. So we will bring incentives back, but in a way that makes it difficult for professional farmers to exploit the system, while rewarding genuine users. It may require more complex calculations. Maybe it’s a hotpot in Singapore. Maybe it’s Starbucks coupons for people who regularly buy coffee. Maybe it’s Nintendo vouchers for gamers in Japan or Korea. This isn’t rocket science. It just requires acknowledging how the real world works. Too many crypto founders either ignore that reality or pretend farmed users are real users. We’re not going to play that game.

5. What’s your take on gas sponsorship and grants as incentives for builders? At the moment, we’re covering all gas fees through the Lens API. How do you see that evolving?

Suji: We’ll continue doing that as long as it’s not abused. As I mentioned earlier, people will soon realize that it’s much cheaper to build or operate on Lens than to do the same thing on Twitter, and on Facebook, you simply can’t do many of these things at all. AI developers in particular will figure this out very quickly.

If you compare us to other decentralised social platforms, there are clear differences. For example, with Farcaster, private key pairs were not treated as a first-class experience. About a year ago, if you generated your own key pairs, you couldn’t even log into the Warpcast app. It was very cloud-centric in practice. With Bluesky, they use their own domain-based identity system. It’s quite complicated. Instead of simply generating key pairs, you need to create a domain, configure DNS, and manage additional setup. For developers and AI builders, that’s a significant burden.

Lens, from a technical philosophy standpoint, especially coming from the Aave team, has strong ambitions. Execution hasn’t always been perfect, but that’s something we can improve. We should avoid adding unnecessary complexity. Much of it just needs clearer explanation and refinement. That also relates to gas sponsorship. We’ll continue to sponsor transactions as long as users are not spamming the network.

Builders Over Hype

1. If you’re a builder or user who’s been skeptical or checked out for a while, why is this the moment to start paying attention again?

Suji: Actually, Vitalik answered this question during our last X Space together. I’ll start by quoting what he said. First, the technology is much more powerful and much more ready now. Take blockchain infrastructure. For example, when Lens first launched on Polygon, I haven’t done the exact math, but I’m pretty sure an enormous amount of gas was spent, or let’s say wasted, on Polygon. They didn’t even sponsor many of those spammy transactions because there was no effective way to manage them. There was a period, around 2022, when it was actually easier for LLMs to generate trash content than for systems to identify and filter it. That led to a lot of wasted money.

At the same time, Lens was competing for block space with highly profitable transactional applications like Polymarket, which is also on Polygon. If Lens remained on Polygon, it would continue competing for block space with these financially intensive use cases. There was also a Pokémon-style gacha application called Courtyard. So you were competing directly with strong financial use cases, which made it very difficult. Now, block space is much cheaper.

One example Vitalik gave was about Ethereum Layer 1. He said that Layer 1 blocks could theoretically store the daily text output of Twitter, not the raw text itself, but in hashed form. In other words, it may actually be possible to store something as large as Twitter’s daily content on Ethereum in some structured way. It’s doable, we can do the math. And Ethereum plans to scale even further. If you include other chains as well, it becomes even more feasible. That’s a huge difference compared to before.

Second, around 2022, people may still have had the illusion that large Web2 social platforms would become more open. At the time, Reddit was debating API improvements, and Twitter had just been acquired by Elon. It felt like maybe some problems would be fixed. But over the past three years, AI has advanced significantly. As AI becomes more powerful, data becomes more guarded. Paul mentioned something interesting — I see him in the audience. He pointed out that it can actually be cheaper to pay gas fees to post on a Lens channel than to post permissionlessly on Twitter. If you are an AI agent, posting on Twitter can cost close to one cent per post, maybe even more. And the more you post, the more they charge you. That has become a new business model for social media.

In the past, this would have been unimaginable. We lived in a free premium model for so long that we assumed posting and registering an account should always be free. But now it’s different. From a good developer’s perspective, AI API tokens can cost significantly more than Web3 gas fees. And those AI costs are not decreasing as quickly as Ethereum gas fees. I think this is going to be the case for at least the next 10 years because the economic model is fundamentally different. At some point, developers may start thinking: I still want to use AI, but I should decentralize more of my stack to reduce platform access costs whether that’s posting, reading, or basic interactions.

One thing we plan to do is allow users to replicate and narrow their social graph on Lens by writing structured JSON data on the Lens chain. We can migrate their Twitter following relationships in a GDPR-compliant way. Again, no one else is really doing this properly.

So to summarise: First, it’s much cheaper now. Second, Web2 is becoming more expensive and less open. There’s also a third path, decentralised, but without touching crypto, such as Bluesky or Mastodon. By the way, our Mask Foundation is one of the largest donors to Mastodon. But this middle path is in a strange position. It has become less culturally exciting. It’s “decentralised,” but it’s not cool. So, from a developer perspective, if I were building today, whether as an indie developer or a small studio, I would seriously consider coming back to Lens.

There are also additional factors we didn’t anticipate. As I mentioned earlier, I spoke with Hong Kong Doll, the well-known Asian creator, and she gave me further reasons why now is a good time to revisit decentralised social. Everyone may have a different answer. But from my perspective, this is definitely a good time.

2. From your perspective, looking ahead, what kinds of applications or experiments would you like to see built?

Suji: The email-based use case is interesting. But I’m not sure how many people still use traditional email in the same way. I still use email, but now I use AI-assisted email, it’s a very different experience.

What I think will be extremely powerful is combining pay-to-unlock mechanics with the creator economy and direct messaging. For example, I could require payment to access certain content or even to send me a DM. If you’re not a mutual connection, maybe you pay $5 to message me.

For this to work, the user experience has to be seamless. Previous attempts at similar models were often buggy or poorly executed. If done well, this could be transformative.

Builders can also use Lens simply as backend infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be the full front-end product. For example, Lens can function as a social graph verification layer. It may not sound flashy, but it’s incredibly useful, especially for finance apps, trading platforms, or copy-trading tools.

In Firefly, this kind of social graph verification is already widely used, particularly for friend-based trading features.

On 23 January, Mask Network, Firefly, and Wu Blockchain Editor-in-Chief Colin Wu co-hosted a deep-dive X Space discussion on Decentralised Social. The conversation featured Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Mask Network founder Suji Yan, with open mic participation from the Chinese crypto community.

The discussion explored the current state of decentralised social, its core challenges, and potential future breakthroughs, including integrations with prediction markets and other emerging primitives. Below is a structured summary of the key takeaways.

Background: Twitter Bans and the Catalyst for Decentralised Social

Colin Wu:
Recently, Twitter banned so-called “airdrop farming” platforms, like Kaito. This has reignited discussion around decentralised social products. Vitalik, I believe you have been following this situation. What is your take on this event?

Vitalik Buterin:
I’ve been following decentralised social for several years now. I used Farcaster quite a bit between 2023 to 2024, and I was still using it in 2025. Recently, people have asked why I’m once again focusing heavily on decentralised social. There are two main reasons.

First, X (Twitter) clearly has growing problems. Whether it’s crypto, politics, or other topics, we can all feel the decline in its discussion quality. It’s not healthy for the world to rely on a single global conversation hub. We need alternatives.

The challenge, of course, is network effects. Even if a new social platform has better features, algorithms, or privacy, it’s meaningless without users. Decentralised social products, like Firefly, offer two viable strategies to overcome this. Firstly, separating protocol from clients. Social data, like accounts, posts, likes, reposts, can live on a shared protocol, while different teams build different clients on top. This way, a new app doesn’t start with an empty feed. It inherits the entire social graph across clients, allowing it to compete with large platforms. The second is the aggregator approach, which Firefly represents. Firefly acts as a client for Twitter, Farcaster, Lens, and Bluesky simultaneously. You can participate in Farcaster conversations without fully leaving X. Both approaches meaningfully reduce the network-effect barrier.

The second reason is technological maturity. Firefly, Farcaster, and related projects are fundamentally different from what existed three years ago. Advances in privacy, signaling, and Ethereum infrastructure have made this a much better moment to push decentralized social forward. Combined with recent events, such as Kaito’s ban, Farcaster’s growth, and Lens’ new direction under Suji, it feels like many important things are converging at once.

Colin Wu:
Suji, what’s your view on X’s recent decision to mass-ban these “airdrop farming” platforms?

Suji Yan:
Mask’s collaboration with X dates back as early as 2018. At the time, we were experimenting with crypto-native interactions on Twitter — encrypted tweets, even enabling users to purchase tokens directly within the platform. Jack Dorsey was notably supportive of these explorations, including the idea of turning the very first tweet into an NFT, with proceeds ultimately donated to charities in Africa.

That dynamic shifted materially after Elon Musk’s takeover. While both Jack and Elon advocate for free speech, their philosophies of governance differ fundamentally. Jack believed in gradual change through rules and systems, while Elon favours a far more centralized, top-down approach. In that context, products like Kaito being banned is not surprising to me.

Looking at Lens and Farcaster’s early strategies, I think they were somewhat too confrontational toward X. While X certainly has its issues, the more effective approach is to gradually capture attention and traffic, rather than directly oppose it. Even centralised exchanges like Binance and OKX are building social layers, namely Binance Square, OKX Orbit, yet their integrations with Twitter remain fragmented precisely because X is unpredictable and uncontrollable. That fragmentation underscores why decentralized social infrastructure is necessary in the first place.

However, user migration requires patience, much like the evolution of DeFi and prediction markets, starting with radical experiments, gradually finding balance, and eventually achieving sustainable adoption.

Core Challenge: Why Has Decentralised Social Struggled?

Colin Wu:
Demand for decentralised social is strong as centralised platforms fail to protect user interests. Yet despite countless attempts, from early crypto forums to Friend.tech, Kaito, and Farcaster, few have found true product-market fit. Why has decentralised social remained so difficult to achieve success?

Vitalik Buterin:
I think there are two main issues. The first is still network effects. Over the past decade, even outside crypto, very few new social platforms have truly succeeded.

The second issue is problem misalignment. Many teams start with “We’re crypto. We have tokens and NFTs. How do we add finance into social?” But if you start from social problems themselves, your first thought is never “social needs more money”.

At the core, this is a creator incentive problem. Tokenised social platforms have failed repeatedly because they reward speculation rather than quality. Compare this with Substack, where its top earners are high-quality writers. In contrast, on many tokenised platforms, top earners are usually the already-famous crypto traders or influencers. s

This shows the incentive structures are misaligned. These platforms serve traders, not readers or creators. If decentralised social is to succeed, it must start from social needs, not financial primitives.

Colin Wu:
Vitalik raises a crucial point. Many projects have leaned too heavily into financialisation. Friend.tech is a textbook example. It also reminds me of an early Chinese product called Bihu, where users earned tokens by writing articles. It attracted significant traction for a period of time, but eventually shut down. Another missed opportunity was Mirror. For a period, it effectively replaced Medium and WeChat public accounts within crypto, very much aligned with the Substack-style model Vitalik mentioned, yet it failed to sustain momentum, likely due to team and execution challenges. Suji, how do you see this issue?

Suji Yan:
I think user migration is an inherently slow process and requires a lot of education. If you look back at 2014–2015, many prominent figures in crypto were still using Weibo and WeChat, often in their real-name, without fully realising the risks. It wasn’t until regulatory pressure hit, when accounts were taken down overnight, that users were forced to migrate to X and Telegram.

Today, we haven’t yet seen an equally decisive external shock, which means patience is required. At the same time, our strategy also needs to evolve. We can’t repeat Farcaster’s early approach of aligning too closely with a single player like Coinbase, which discouraged broader participation. What we need instead is neutrality.

With Lens, we’re now taking more of an “alliance” approach. The crypto social market is simply too small for isolated, zero-sum competition. Our goal is to allow all wallets and all chains to post via Lens or Farcaster, transforming deeply crypto-native behaviour, whether it’s debates about insider trading in GMGN comment sections or meme coin interactions, into a shared social experience.

Prediction Markets + Social: An Emerging Convergence

Colin Wu:
Vitalik, beyond decentralised social itself, are there any new or interesting trends you’ve been paying attention to this year? For example, could combining social platforms with prediction markets be a promising direction?

Vitalik Buterin:
This is really interesting. One of Twitter’s biggest improvements this year has been integrating Grok. While it occasionally makes mistakes, overall the quality is quite high. This also highlights an issue with Community Notes. They’re great, but too slow, sometimes taking a full day to appear.

How can we make this faster? Prediction markets might be the only solution. If someone posts an extreme claim, we could instantly create a prediction market, using probabilities to quickly “fact-check” in real time. Right now, many prediction market platforms chase traffic by introducing bets unrelated to truth, which strays from their original purpose.

So, creating an interface that combines high-quality social discussion, AI assistance, Community Notes, and prediction markets could be extremely valuable. Another fascinating idea is Glen Weyl’s Quadratic Prediction Market, which combines market mechanisms with identity systems. While this is difficult to implement in pure financial markets, social platforms provide an ideal context for it.

Colin Wu:
Thanks. I actually have many more questions for Vitalik and Suji, but due to time constraints, and since Vitalik expressed a desire to engage with more members of the Chinese community, we’ll open the floor to questions. You’re welcome to speak up or leave your questions in the comments.

Suji Yan:
I’d like to add something interesting. Speaking of prediction markets, several of the founders and executives at major prediction platforms speak Chinese. For example, a friend (Stanford dropped out) is at Polymarket, Kalshi has John Wang, and the founder of Opinion Lab is also in this circle.

Forrest (Opinion Lab):
I’m excited to discuss the intersection of decentralised social and prediction markets. Our project is called Opinion because we believe that individual opinions and insights are a critical component of prediction markets. They help drive price discovery, which in turn supports liquidity. Beyond liquidity and brand awareness, each participant’s opinion plays a vital role in this feedback loop.

Vitalik mentioned that we may need multiple prediction markets in the future. Given that Polymarket already exists in the West, should there be a market of similar scale for the East? Even for the same event, prices on Opinion and Polymarket may differ, reflecting cultural differences between Eastern (or offshore) users and American users. These differences in understanding generate meaningful variations in price discovery, which is highly valuable and worth exploring on a social level.

So my question is: Should the world really have only one prediction market, or should there be distinct markets for the West and East, each representing different cultures and languages?

Vitalik Buterin:
That’s a very interesting question. I think the answer depends on whether the Chinese and Western communities actually have different needs for prediction markets or whether, in reality, everyone just wants something similar. I’m not entirely sure yet.

What I do hope for is more competition and experiments in the prediction market space. Whether it’s different market designs, different application contexts, or experiments that combine prediction markets with prediction-based governance (Futarchy), all of these should be explored in parallel. We don’t know which model will ultimately work best-and that’s exactly why we need many attempts.

Colin Wu:
Alright, next question comes from Yuxin.

Yuxin:
I’m a contributor at Firefly, and I strongly agree with Vitalik’s points on Community Notes, Social Graphs, Social Identity, and Prediction Markets. These are also my main focus for 2026, essentially Social Trading. I’m currently working on an oracle for a prediction market. I have two questions:

1. Nikita, X’s former product lead, once said that in the future users could type a ticker to directly buy a token. Could X eventually match prediction market bets in the News Feed, allowing users to purchase directly?
2. If Firefly wanted to implement this, what advantages would it have over X?

Additionally, regarding Futarchy and DAO governance, suppose we form a small social group based on social identity (e.g., only EF Developers) and launch a bet, such as “Should the Cancun upgrade be delayed?” Is this kind of social governance something that only decentralised platforms can execute effectively?

Vitalik Buterin:
This kind of deep integration is very interesting, and there are many possibilities we could experiment with today. For example, on a post, in addition to likes and shares, you could add an “I agree / I disagree” option with probabilities displayed alongside. Running more experiments like this would be very valuable.

Regarding DAO governance, there isn’t currently a dedicated, effective social platform for it. Most governance discussions still happen on Crypto Twitter or in private groups, which creates a lot of inefficiencies.

We need to consider building a new social media interface specifically designed to help protocol or DAO members collaborate, discussing and improving governance. While there are many ideas, such as integrating POAPs or LLMs, there is currently no platform that seamlessly combines discussion with on-chain voting and execution.

Decentralised Social Ecosystem Related Perspectives

Suji Yan:
I see that Mr Luo is here. He’s a dedicated fan of Base and Farcaster, and one of the few Chinese users who deeply appreciates both protocols. Mr Luo, please feel free to ask a question, especially regarding social protocols and their relationship with large tech companies, or recent developments.

0xLuo:
Hello everyone. I’d like to ask Vitalik about the recent trend of combining social protocols with wallets. Both decentralised platforms and centralised products like X are adding financial transaction features. Decentralised aggregators like Firefly are also trying to integrate wallets to allow users to trade prediction markets. How do you view this trend of “social products becoming wallet-enabled” and “wallets becoming social”?

Vitalik Buterin:
The key point, I think, is that the underlying social protocols should remain minimalistic. If a platform is “attention-hungry” or over-optimised for a specific use case, adding too many complex features, it becomes difficult to maintain shared network effects.

I don’t want to see every wallet developing its own incompatible social network. One of Ethereum’s major successes is that wallets are interchangeable. You can use one wallet, and if you don’t like it, you can simply move your private key to another, or even a third. Preserving this flexibility is crucial.

At the same time, as privacy becomes increasingly important, wallets are not only protecting assets but also user data. If you add another layer on top of social, then ensuring interoperability is critical.

Integrating social and financial features at the interface level is feasible, for example, making it easier for readers to tip authors. Another key point is that many decentralised social users today are not yet Ethereum (native onchain) users. Providing them with an integrated, auto-generated wallet, rather than requiring them to learn MetaMask, Rabby, or manage seed phrases, significantly lowers the barrier to entry. Of course, if users want to migrate their account later, we must provide that option.

Colin Wu:
Let me add a point. Vitalik, what’s your view on products like Binance Square? Some jokingly call it the most successful crypto social platform today. Even though it’s centralised, it attracts mostly grassroots users with trading-focused discussions, and sometimes content that involves market manipulation or scams. What’s your view on exchanges building social products?

Vitalik Buterin:
I’ve taken a brief look at Binance Square. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with companies building social platforms. It’s actually unhealthy for the whole world to rely on a single social network. Transitioning from one centralised social network to 100 different centralised platforms, each serving its own community and use case, is already an improvement over the status quo.

The next step is interoperability. If everyone operates on a shared protocol, even if they use different social brands or interfaces, they can still see and interact with each other’s content. If there’s a high-quality decentralised social platform, I might even integrate it into the comment section of my own blog.

If decentralised social succeeds, in the future we could have many companies, governments, and projects with completely different interfaces, all built on the same underlying protocol.

Regarding interoperability, we need to think deeply. It doesn’t always have to be zero friction. If you want your community to maintain a unique culture or vibe, it makes sense to set small barriers. Overall, though, the advantages of interoperability are substantial, and we need to find the best way to implement it.

Suji Yan:
Next, let’s hear from Jocy, a well-known investor in the space. What’s your perspective? Would you still invest? Do you find this industry a bit confusing?

Jocy:
Thanks for having me. Yesterday, Colin and I were discussing why decentralised social products haven’t succeeded. We’ve seen a similar pattern in gaming, they often fail too.

In the current AI cycle, AI has expanded the scale of online applications by 10 to 100 times, which means users’ attention is now even more fragmented. Many people are asking whether decentralised social is even a viable proposition. In 2023, attention was at its peak, so people were willing to build Layer 2 solutions and decentralised products. Today, attention is weaker, which makes building mass-market social apps much harder.

From our fund’s perspective, competing directly with mainstream consumer apps is very difficult. We prefer to first serve crypto users, creating a successful niche product (like Polymarket, even though it’s more financial), or focus on B2B products (like Grass or Scale AI) that have clear revenue models.

So my question to you, Vitalik, is: in today’s market, what kind of founders are more likely to succeed building decentralized applications? And how can the industry bring attention back and convince strong builders and talent to stay?

Vitalik Buterin:
I think blockchain social platforms share a common reason for failure with blockchain games: overthinking. Teams often start with “We’re in crypto, we can do financial stuff. How do we integrate finance into this?” Rather than asking, “What does this application actually need? What are the current shortcomings, and how can we use our technology to solve them?”

Many blockchain games in 2021 seemed successful, but when the 2022 bear market hit, users disappeared. They weren’t there because the games were fun. They were there to make money. Social platforms face the same problem.

I believe the next generation of founders best suited to build decentralised social are those who deeply understand social problems. Someone who understands social dynamics but not blockchain might actually do better than someone who understands blockchain but not social behaviour. Blockchain should operate in the background as infrastructure.

Both social and financial systems today have many problems, and decentralisation can help address them. But it’s crucial to separate decentralized technology from token speculation. If you focus on using blockchain as a data storage layer to solve real user pain points, your product is much more likely to succeed.

Advice to Builders and the Chinese Developer Community

Jocy: I’d like to follow up. The crypto culture gap between China and the U.S. is growing. In the U.S., the focus is more on protocols and infrastructure, supported by a strong developer culture. In China, the ecosystem is more exchange-driven, and large-scale protocols rarely emerge. With the current AI wave, Chinese talent is leaving crypto more decisively than in the U.S.

From a leadership perspective, what advice do you have for Chinese developers? How can we restore confidence and encourage them to continue building decentralised protocols?

Vitalik Buterin: I’ve always thought one of the strongest points of Chinese developers is their UX expertise, their ability to attract large user bases and provide excellent service. Their backend capabilities have also improved significantly.

My advice is that, at this stage, you don’t need to build your own Layer 1 or complex infrastructure. You can leverage existing tools. Focus on what you excel at: solving frontend problems and improving user experience.

For example, you don’t need to build a Farcaster protocol from scratch; you can build a Farcaster client or something like Firefly. Heavy, open-source protocol work is resource-intensive, and since the foundation already exists, Chinese developers can create the most value at the application layer, enhancing usability and user experience.

Closing Thoughts

Decentralised social is reaching an inflection point, where technology is mature, strategies are clearer, and the focus has shifted from token incentives to solving real social problems: data sovereignty, speech environments, creator economies, and open networks.

This long-term vision, bridging Web2 and Web3 through gradual, open migration, is what the Mask team has pursued for nearly a decade. Recent milestones, from the transitions of Farcaster and Lens, to Mask stepping in, to Firefly’s continued innovation, signal a shift from raw infrastructure toward fully-formed, mainstream-ready decentralised social applications.

For years, decentralized social networks have promised a future where users own their identities, creators capture more value, and platforms are no longer controlled by a single corporate gatekeeper. Few have come close to delivering that vision at scale. Lens has.

Launched as an ambitious experiment, Lens has now completed what many in Web3 once considered impossible: proving that user-owned, decentralized social networks can be built on open, composable, permissionless infrastructure — and actually work.

With that core mission fulfilled, Lens is entering its next chapter under new stewardship. It does so alongside Mask Network, a team that has spent nearly a decade turning decentralized ideals into real consumer products. For this new chapter, Avara will continue in an advisory role.

Mask’s Long Bet on Decentralized Social

Founded in 2017 by Suji Yan, driven by a belief in a truly free and open internet, the Mask team set out to build an easy-to-use bridge from Web2 to Web3-era decentralized applications. As early as the end of 2019, the Mask browser extension enabled users to access secure, decentralized social messaging, payment networks, and file storage directly on top of mainstream social media platforms.

Mask has been deeply embedded in the decentralized social ecosystem from the beginning. The team has long supported Mastodon, the leading decentralized social network with approximately 1.9 million monthly active users. Mask has operated two of Mastodon’s most active instances — mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud — and in 2022 acquired Pawoo.net, one of Mastodon’s largest instances.

That hands-on approach shaped Mask’s evolution. Its ecosystem expanded to include shared infrastructure and consumer applications. In 2022, Mask established its venture arm, Bonfire Union, which manages two funds totaling US$100 million and has invested in more than 120 projects across decentralized social networks, infrastructure, and creator economies.

Today, Mask positions itself as the “Tencent of Web3”: not a single platform, but a network of interoperable social products governed under MaskDAO.

“Mask’s mission to make decentralized social accessible, intuitive, and ready for everyday users is aligned with Lens’ next chapter,” said Suji Yan, Founder of Mask.

Lens and Orb: The Formula for Widespread Consumer Adoption From Infrastructure to Consumer Adoption: Join Forces with Lens and Orb

From protocol to ecosystem to its own purpose-built chain, Lens has laid the foundation for a new generation of SocialFi applications, as Lens founder Stani Kulechov has noted in his blog post here.

Lens began as a community experiment and evolved into open social infrastructure. Over multiple generations of the protocol, it moved from early builder adoption to production-ready social rails, and ultimately to a permissionless, high-performance network that supports consumer-grade applications. In the process, Lens proved its core thesis: user-owned, decentralized social can operate at real-world scale while delivering the experiences people expect.

What remained was the shift from infrastructure to mass adoption, guided by the right stewardship to take the protocol into real-world products.

Mask Network is the ideal steward for what comes next. That transition is exemplified by the acquisition of Orb, a Web3-native social app built on Lens.

By early 2025, Orb crossed 50,000 monthly active users, pioneering “you had to be there” experiences through viral mechanisms like stickerpacks, collectibles, and competitions, all focused on creator-first monetization. Now part of MaskDAO, Orb is among a growing suite of decentralized social products, including Next.ID, Web3.bio, and Firefly.social, the latter of which has partnered with leading ecosystem projects such as Fileverse, Snapshot, Polymarket, Mirror, Paragraph, and eth.limo, and has been publicly praised by Vitalik Buterin for its exceptional user experience.

“Lens proved the infrastructure. Orb proves what’s possible on top of it,” said Suji Yan, Founder of Mask Network. “MaskDAO exists to take decentralized social out of the lab and into everyday life, building products that scale to millions while preserving user ownership.”

“Lens enables us to rethink what social can be,” said Kimmo Sirén, Founder of Orb. “With MaskDAO, we’re putting culture and ownership onchain.”

Why Mask Is the Right Steward for Lens’ Next Chapter

Lens has fulfilled its original mandate: demonstrating that decentralized, user-owned social networks can be built and scaled. The infrastructure is now open, high-performance, and ready.

What the ecosystem needs next isn’t more protocols — it’s great consumer products.

Mask shares Lens’ core belief in user-owned social while bringing years of experience operating consumer platforms at scale. From Mastodon to Firefly to Orb, the team has repeatedly shown an ability to translate open infrastructure into polished, mainstream-ready applications.

“Lens was built to give people ownership over their digital lives, and we’ve proven that this model can work at scale. The infrastructure is now open, resilient, and ready to support real consumer products. What comes next is mainstream adoption, and that’s where Mask’s product leadership is essential to bringing decentralized social into everyday use,” said Stani Kulechov, founder of Lens and Avara.

Stani and Avara will continue to serve as advisors to Suji Yan and the Mask team. Both sides believe that in the coming years, social and DeFi will increasingly converge into the economic layer of the internet.

Lens laid the foundation. Mask is building the neighborhood, bringing decentralized social out of the lab and into everyday life.

New year, new luck, same on-chain spirit.

Mask Network and Firefly are back to kick off 2026 with the WAGMI New Year Lucky Drop — a celebration of community, collaboration, and fresh beginnings. 🚀✨

Because what better way to start the year than with your first win of 2026?

🎁 What’s Happening?

The WAGMI New Year Lucky Drop is a community-driven giveaway event hosted on Firefly. Partners across the Mask ecosystem send out on-chain red packets to their communities to spread luck, energy, and optimism for the year ahead.

Just log into Firefly (web or app), look out for red packet posts from participating partners, and claim before they run out. ⚡️

💸 Community-Powered Prize Pool

Every participating partner contributes 200 USDC, pooling together to create a collective prosperity drop to kick off 2026.

With 5 confirmed partners, this year’s total prize pool comes to 1,000 USDC — shared directly with the community through Firefly’s Lucky Drop. 🧧✨

The more partners join, the bigger the pot of luck for everyone. 🧧✨

🤝 Participating Partners

• Firefly (@thefireflyapp): A social aggregator app for Web3 natives.
• Mask Network (@MaskNetwork): Your portal to the new, open internet.
• Openledger (@OpenledgerHQ): The AI Blockchain unlocking liquidity to monetize data, models and agents.
• Web3.bio(@web3bio): Connecting identity, reputation, and verifiable contributions across Web3.
• World3 (@WORLD3_AI): A next-gen AI x blockchain platform shaping the future of AI Autonomous Worlds (AI-AW) — self-evolving digital environments where humans and intelligent agents collaborate, co-create, and automate.

🧧 About Lucky Drops on Firefly

Mask Network first introduced crypto “red packets” in 2020, bringing the joy of gifting and receiving directly onto social platforms. Now, six years later, that same spirit continues in a new-year edition focused on togetherness, momentum, and shared wins.

✅ Lucky Drops now live natively inside Firefly
✅ Supports both EVM and Solana Chain
✅ Upload your own Red Packet cover and craft a custom message
✅ Choose Random Split or Equal Split across a set number of participants
✅ Set Follow and Post Access requirements (e.g., Like, Repost, Comment)

Our goal is simple: to make on-chain gifting as delightful and spontaneous as sharing good news with friends. ❤️

🗓️ Event Schedule

📍 Main Red Packet Send Day

Friday, 02 January 2026 (GMT+8)

⏰ All-day drop — Claim fast, start strong! ⚡️

Kick off the year with good vibes, great luck, and your first on-chain win. ✨

🧭 How to Participate

1️⃣ Log in via Firefly Web or App 👉 https://firefly.social/
2️⃣ Look out for Lucky Drop posts from participating partners
3️⃣ Tap to claim before they’re gone 🧧

💡 Tip: keep a bit of gas in your wallet — speed matters!

🎉 Start the Year with a Win

2026 is the year of momentum, collaboration, and community wins — and it starts with you. Join us and our partners for the WAGMI New Year Lucky Drop, and make it your first win of 2026.

🌟 Here’s to fresh energy, new possibilities, and a year that begins in sync:
We’re All Gonna Make It. 🧧🚀 #WAGMINewYear #LuckyDrop2026