About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor. Looking to get in touch? DM him on Telegram or reply to this email and say hi 👋
This Issue Is Powered By Polygon 💜. Check out the new hyper-scalable DeFi hub emerging on Polygon zkEVM.
EXCLUSIVE ONCHAIN COVERAGE:
Web3 Social 🍿
① Farcaster 🟪
👥 Vincent | Website | Dashboard
📈 Farcaster becomes permissionless, crosses 24.2k total users
Farcaster is a protocol for decentralized social apps. It migrated to Optimism in late August and went permissionless 2 days ago. 2.5k users signed-up since Farcaster went permissionless. There are 24.2k registered users, average total daily "casts" (post) over the past 30 days is ~4.7k, average unique daily casting users is ~1k.
Since its launch in early June, the "channels" feature on the Farcaster protocol has gained traction, with about 30% of all top-level casts now made inside channels. This week's most popular channels are Farcaster, memes, Nouns, AI, and music, which together account for ~1.3k top-level casts.
Purple DAO, a community-led DAO to proliferate the Farcaster ecosystem, has deployed ~60 ETH to fund builders building on the Farcaster protocol. It has a Nouns-style auction, and in the past 30 day, auction winner had to pay on average ~0.14 ETH to join the DAO.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This is a Farcaster Storage Rent transaction: user horsefacts.eth rented two units of storage. To use the Farcaster protocol, a user must rent storage. 1 storage slot allows each user to make 5000 casts, 2500 likes, and 2500 follows. Storage costs $7 in ETH, valid for 1 year. Operating social network requires money and storage spend goes to Farcaster’s treasury. When a user exceedes the storage limit, the protocol will prune user's old messages (Last In, First Out basis). sammdec.eth built an app to purchase Farcaster storage: Farcaster Storage.
② friend.tech 👯
👥 whale_hunter | Website | Dashboard
📈 friend.tech breaks through $419M trading volume, 430k users
SocialFi is emerging as a new category in the world of blockchain application sectors, with friend.tech being the clear leader in the space. The platform allows users to trade "keys", which grant holders access to private chatrooms with influencers, which are called "subjects". In just two months, the project attracted more than 430k lifetime users and recently had around 15k daily active users.
Despite a surge in user activity, daily trading volume has declined from its peak of $20M to an average of approximately $4M in recent weeks, potentially due to subdued market dynamics and reduced risk appetite. Notably, volume spikes can be observed every Friday/Saturday, coinciding with "points" airdrops for platform activity.
Trading timestamps reveal an even distribution across all hours of the day, suggesting that users from all timezones are engaging with the platform. In every hour of the day, 3000 users who execute around 1000 trades can be observed.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: To climb the leaderboard, users are purchasing their own keys, betting that a potential future airdrop will offset the 10% trading fee. For instance, Twitter user @xiaozhouchonga acquired 150 of their own profile keys, marking the platform's largest single-trade key volume.
③ Lens Protocol ☘️
👥 Sixdegree | Website | Dashboard
📈 Creators have made $489.4k in profits on Lens Protocol
Lens has long been committed to the creator economy, helping creators maximize their value on a decentralized social network. To date, creators have earned over $489.4k on Lens Protocol with an average revenue of $38.49. 95% of this revenue comes from collecting posts, a unique form of social interaction. The revenue chart shows a consistent growth rate.
Lens V2 introduced ERC-6551. This enables Lens profile NFTs to function as smart contract wallets, providing them with their own social connections, expression, and monetization opportunities. Currently, 5k Lens profiles have embraced ERC-6551, with over 3.3k holding valuable NFT assets.
Lens enjoys an impressive retention rate, with the half-year retention ranging from 31% to 75%. This demonstrates the strong user loyalty to the Lens Protocol. With more and more dapps being developed on Lens, users find growing enjoyment in exploring and utilizing the Lens Protocol.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: On November 10, 2022, Yoginth made a post on Lens announcing his decision to resign from his job and commit his full-time efforts to maintaining the Lenster frontend. This post gained significant traction, with 20.4k people collecting it. The Lens community demonstrated their love and support by contributing a total of $41.8k towards Yoginth's endeavor.
④ NEAR Social 🕸️
👥 Ario | Website | Dashboard
📈 NEAR Social crosses 278k+ in Transaction, 16.6k+ users
NEAR Social, a decentralized social network on NEAR Protocol. It prioritizes decentralization, transparency via blockchain-recorded transactions, and user data ownership. Innovative widgets empower developers to craft unique social experiences. Notably, it's recorded over 278k transactions by 16.6k users since its inception, with a consistent influx of over 50% new users each month, marking the steady growth of this blockchain-driven social revolution.
Among the 278k transactions, 26% are linked to Deploy Widget, 24% to Following, and 21% to Liking. Widgets empower developers to craft innovative social experiences, such as games and interactions with decentralized applications, enhancing user engagement.
User Retention, a critical metric in social networks, showcases positive trends for NEAR Social. Users who joined in October 2022 maintain a retention rate of over 27% after twelve months, while those who joined in January 2023 show a 23% retention rate after eight months (as of September).
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: In this transaction, a user with the wallet address "longphu.near" followed an account with the address "nearbrasil.near" on the Near Social on August 15, 2023. The transaction cost for this action was nearly zero (0.00093 $NEAR). A notification was sent to "nearbrasil.near" to inform them of this action.
⑤ CyberConnect 💭
👥 Ryan Li | Website | Dashboard
📈 CyberConnect crosses 516k ERC-4337 Wallet, 953k User Operations
CyberConnect is a web3 social network that empowers developers to build innovative social apps where creators own their identities and data, and grow their audiences in a decentralized environment. CyberAccount is an ERC-4337 compatible smart contract account, leveraging account abstraction to bring web3 to the world. 516k CyberAccounts have been deployed on Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base in the past three months, accounting for 58% of the total ERC-4337 smart accounts across all chains. 953k User Operations have been performed.
On August 15th, CYBER token claiming happened through CyberAccount. It is the first and largest ERC-4337 event in terms of user operations. Out of the 743,065 smart contract transactions on Optimism on that day, CyberAccount contributed 12.5% (93,044 transactions) bundling 147,723 User Operations.
CyberAccount utilizes a novel custom cross-chain gas tank system (paymaster) where users simply pre-deposit native gas tokens (ETH, MATIC, BNB) from one of the six supported chains and use it on any other chain as gas. So far, 189k accounts have deposited over $885k worth of gas.
💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This CyberAccount is the most productive wallet, in terms of sending user operations, within all CyberAccounts so far. This account has deposited 87 USD worth of gas and completed 386 transactions. Because the only UI supporting CyberAccount is CyberConnect's Link3, all of their transaction involve interacting with CyberConnect protocol minting ContentNFTs.