The role of NFTs in SocialFi

SocialFi is the confluence of social networks and decentralized finance. As a result of this blend, building decentralized social media applications is possible. 

Social media of web2 has severe problems like inadequate data security, lack of user privacy, and censorship issues. Content creators don’t own their work on these platforms, and there are limited direct monetization opportunities. SocialFi can fix these problems. 

NFTs’ primary role in this emerging area is to facilitate new ways to monetize content. Let’s look at some SocialFi pioneers to understand how they position NFTs in their initiatives. 

The SocialFi metaverse Torum builds an ecosystem where teams of crypto projects and users meet. It’s built on two elementary components: an NFT marketplace and Torum Finance. 

The finance component enables sending and receiving crypto gifts. Thanks to the integrated NFT marketplace, artists can use their profiles as showrooms to display their premium collections to the community. Moreover, NFTs can be shared on social media for greater exposure. 

A special feature of Torum is programmable NFTs that function as unique virtual identities. Users can choose from several themes and rare components to customize these avatars by changing the background and different types of accessories. In the future, more NFT-related activities, like forging to create rarer NFTs, will be possible. 

Subsocial: Turn your posts into NFTs to make a profit

Subsocial is not a social network but a platform for building social networks by acting as the base layer. It uses Substrate technology as the underlying blockchain framework. 

Decentralized social media apps developed on Subsocial enable its content creators to sell and rent content as NFTs. In the case of renting, the renter earns income when other users visit the content, while the creator still owns the NFT and receives royalties. This is a valuable way of using NFT technology, particularly if the NFT gets high traffic. 

DeSo:  A layer 1 blockchain explicitly built for decentralized social media 

The open-source blockchain DeSo was developed from the beginning with the scaling of social media apps in mind. Using DeSo, it’s possible to create apps where each profile has social tokens that earn profits from NFTs that content creators mint.

200+ dapps are using DeSo. One of the most well-known is Bitclout, a social network owned by its users. Another is Diamond, a platform where creators meet their fans and build communities. Apart from minting content as NFTs, gifting NFT airdrops, and creating your social token to collect more incentives are possible. You can view the whole list of dapps built with DeSo here.

Lens protocol: Path to many forms of NFT-enabled social networks

The decentralized social graph Lens protocol is also a tool other apps use to create social experiences that enable creators to own their content. It has powerful tools for SocialFi NFT integrations, including

• Profiles, publications, and comments can all be minted as NFTs.
• Content creators can monetize their work by allowing others to collect it. 
• Users who follow an account are given Follow NFTs that content creators and developers can use to encode additional features.
• These Follow NFTs work with DAO-related components to enable the creation of voting strategies.  

Developers can leverage these capabilities to build different types of social networks that allow the right connections for collaborations, content curation controlled by platform users and not by the social media platform, and collective live music events where playlists are curated together.

Many social network dapps were already built using the Lens protocol. They include Clipto, an application that allows fans to mint personalized video NFTs of their favorite creators, and Phaver, a share-to-earn social platform. 

Final words

SocialFi NFTs play vital roles in creating decentralized social networks that are monetizable while protecting creators’ ownership over their content and digital identities.