About the editor: Spencer Noon is co-founder of Variant Fund. If you fit one of these personas, reply to this email and say hi 👋
This week’s on-chain coverage: Web3 Social Media
① Lens
👥 Cody Garrison
📈 Lens surpasses 100k profiles and 2M posts
🔗 Website | Discord | Jobs | Dashboard
Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph, incubated by Aave Companies. Despite being launched in May 2022 – days after the UST collapse – Lens saw steady growth to nearly 100k profiles over its first 6 months. However Daily Actions in the form of Posts (+200% YTD), Comments (+500% YTD), and Mirrors (+9,000% YTD) have seen considerable growth in Q1.
New Profile Mints have declined in 2023, while Monthly Active Profiles sit in an uptrend with 100% MoM growth from January to February.
Lens uses NFT assets on the Polygon network to mint and trade profiles, collect posts, and bring your following across apps. Over 250k MATIC (~$269k) has been used for gas fees to-date – with isolated high volume events anchoring the bulk of the fees.
② Web3 Social & Credentials Landscape
👥 denze
📈 3.7M+ web3 social & credential users
🔗 Dashboard
NFTs are increasingly being used to represent on-chain identities, credentials and more – not just for art and PFPs. Currently, the market is dominated by Galxe, POAP, and ENS. For example, 1m+ wallets own POAPs (representing digital mementos), while 600k+ wallets have an active ENS name (representing their web3 username). Importantly, while wallet counts can signal how much, and how quickly the broader landscape is growing, each project will have their own metrics that matter.
The fastest growing projects in the space only launched over the past year, including Galxe, 101, Gateway and CyberConnect. While ENS and POAP took ~2.5 years to reach 500k wallets, 101 are almost there after 1 year, and Galxe needed less <6 months – a trend showing how much activity there currently is.
Over the last year, most first-time users across the web3 social and credentials space started on Polygon, which accounted for as much as 90% of new users in certain weeks. However, in the last few weeks, BNB has been responsible for 30%+ of new users – thanks to growth in CyberConnect.
③ Lenster
👥 Sixdegree
📈 Lenster has 32.5% of users in Lensverse
🔗 Website | Discord | Dashboard
As Lens is still quite young, users are focused on building social graphs, with Follows accounting for 38% of Lenster activity. Interactions between creators and followers (Likes, Comments, Mirrors, Collects) make up 52%. While creators are an emerging percentage, they engage heavily by posting content and fostering interactions. Collecting social content is emerging as a more prevalent behavior than Commenting or Mirroring.
The number of daily active users on Lenster has grown since last month, reaching a new all-time high of 15k active users on February 14. Despite Lens profile being limited since November of last year, Lenster has continued to experience growth and retained users.
With a user base comprising 32.5% of total users across all applications, Lenster is the largest application in the Lensverse ecosystem. Its daily active user count is particularly impressive, solidifying its position as the dominant app within the Lensverse community.
④ CyberConnect
👥 Abhi Raheja
📈 CyberConnect crosses 300k+ unique users
🔗 Website | Discord | Jobs | Dashboard
The number of weekly active users (more than 1 on-chain transaction) has consistently risen throughout February, welcoming new communities and their users into the CyberConnect ecosystem - partly due to the developer incentives offered in Connected 2023 Web3 Social Hackathon.
Since publicly opening the minting of ccProfile, CyberConnect’s on-chain identity standard, users have been rushing to create their profiles and engage with their ecosystem dApps. ccProfile minting is open and free for handles 12 characters or longer during the Connected 2023 Web3 social hackathon.
ccProfiles for handles shorter than 12 characters are still available on a paid basis, and over 27k users have paid in ETH or BNB to mint their handles. This has generated over $450k in revenue for the CyberConnect protocol.
⑤ Phaver
👥 Joonatan Lintala
📈 Lens app Phaver reaches 180k unique installs
🔗 Website | Discord | Jobs | Dashboard
Phaver's mobile app provides the gateway to Web3 social, where users can access Lens Protocol and soon CyberConnect content even without a wallet. While Phaver offers an on-chain feature set for Lens, 150k+ users are still waiting to receive their whitelist and are following and engaging with Lens content off-chain. Besides social graphs, users have also connected 30k+ NFTs and SBTs to build their social reputation and unlock token earnings from Phaver’s gamified loyalty program.
There’s 21k Lens profiles connected to Phaver, and those users are active with up to 80% WAUs making 60k+ weekly posts. Phaver also gets another 140k weekly posts from the 45k weekly off-chain users, showing the Lens users are actually even more active posters.
Phaver users can connect their NFTs to Phaver both to increase their credibility score and show them in a certified way on profiles and as PFPs. Excluding easier-to-reach SBTs, the most connected collections are DegenScore Beacons and ByWassies, both of whom have partnered with Phaver officially.
