🔔 Reminder:

OurNetwork is co-hosting our 1st Data HackathON with Artemis – a 1-day Data Dashboard Building Competition.

We're inviting the industry's best data analysts, builders, onchain researchers, and ecosystem power users to create and present your best charts that showcase a story only data can tell – winners get cash + prizes!

📅  When:  Tuesday, Oct. 1 

📍  Where: NYC 

📊  What:   A full day of crypto data, chart building competitions, a chance to meet your fellow onchain analysts & of course, food.

Sign up to participate in the competition here.

Space is limited so please RSVP ahead of time to be approved to join.

Note: The best submissions will be compiled and published into a OurNetwork Hackathon Mega Issue to our 33,000+ subscribers 👀.

See you there!

– ON Editorial Team

Lens | Farcaster | pods.media | Zora | Friend.tech

• Onchain social is an emerging consumer category that allows users to build and compose their following, also called a "social graph," from one application to another without having to start from zero. The space continues to march towards all-time highs in terms of daily active users, developer activity, and fundraising. While Farcaster and Lens are often seen as the market leaders of this category, the APAC-based OpenSocial Protocol surged past 100k daily active users this week, more than Farcaster, 65k, and Lens, 25k, combined. Solana-based DSCVR also passed 60k DAUs while remaining largely under the radar.

Zora Network is an app-specific L2 built to support the Zora Platform where users can share, mint, & collect NFTs from a curated social feed. It can most easily be described as "Onchain Instagram." Zora splits the mint fee from collections with creators which has garnered 3,586.5 ETH (~$8.5M) in creator revenue since July 2023, with 350 ETH (~$830k) distributed to creators in August 2024 alone. 

• Friend.tech, once a darling of the SocialFi category, continues its descent towards irrelevance. At its peak in October 2023, Friend.tech regularly touted more than 10,000 daily active users and brought in daily revenue of $100,000+. Revenue even broke above $1M on Sept. 14 2023. Yet, over the last 4 months since May, new user inflows (just 3 on Sept. 4) along with total volume & fees collected on key transactions and club transactions are all down 95%+. $FRIEND, the native token of the platform, is also down 85%, to $0.120 from $0.887, since the team announced its migration from Base to their own L2, Friendchain on June 9 — that plan has been scrapped. Daily trading volume is sitting at just $7.6k after hitting $10M+ in mid-May.

• Lens, an onchain social protocol which brings social actions like posts, follows, and profiles onchain, has ~20k daily active users. That figure is up by a multiple of three, year-over-year, but is down 50% from the 40k all-time high reached back in June 2024.

• The dominant app in terms of active user count is Phaver, with 50% of users. The dominating app in terms of monetizing users is Orb however, with a ~60% share — it's notable that, even though Orb represents less than 10% of users, those users make up the highest quality.

• Lens generates revenue through profile mints, similar to Farcaster, and through a 5% fee on collecting posts on the network. So far ~$500k has been generated for Lens' treasury, mostly through profile mints on the network.

• Farcaster is a social media protocol enabling applications to be built on top of it. The platform uses FIDs (Farcaster IDs) for user identification and allows for cross-platform interactions. From March to September 2024 daily casts, similar to "posts" on social media, increased from 200,000 to over 1.4M with reactions peaking at nearly 5M. After a stabilization period in June and July, September figures settled at 550,000-600,000 daily casts, 1.5-2M reactions, and 200,000-300,000 link shares, significantly higher than March levels.

• Farcaster has daily activity of 604,786 casts and 1,584,278 reactions based on 30 day averages. The platform has also added 898,015 signers, a feature which allows users to securely delegate actions to apps without risking their entire account. Individual creators like @cryptohindio and @cryptoteluguo have garnered attention as well, both receiving over 30,000 reactions on posts. However, the platform does faces challenges with maintaining user activity. The daily active users/monthly active users ratio has been fluctuating between 0.2 and 0.4 over the past year, indicating potential issues with enduring user retention.

• Farcaster users' transactions from March to September 2024 heavily favor the Base network, accounting for 70-80% of all activity with an average of 1,000 daily transactions. Ethereum Layer 2 solutions generally, particularly Optimism and Arbitrum, also show significant adoption — Zora too, gained traction for NFT-related activities while Ethereum mainnet maintains a steady 5-10% of total transactions. This pattern reflects users' preference for scalable, cost-effective solutions while engaging with a diverse blockchain ecosystem.

• Pods.media is a crypto-native publishing platform that allows creators to 1-click publish podcasts as collectible NFTs. Traditional RSS feeds can also interact with the podcasts on web2 platforms. The NFT-aspect allows creators to earn revenue, recognize their true fans, and extend a podcast's utility. Since Q3 2023 Pods has onboarded 70 shows, publishing 945 unique episodes which 109k unique wallets have collected.

• Monthly protocol revenue has grown from 175x from $800 in January to $140k in Aug across 30+ active shows.

• The top 3 shows boast ~60% of the revenue. Mint by Adam Levy leads with 49%, generating $448k in revenue and Coop Records is second with 8.8% ($81k).