About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor & onchain analyst.

📣 Announcement: Today we’re piloting Substack’s new(ish) chat feature, giving ON subscribers a place to discuss the issue every week. It doesn’t matter if you are a pro investor, degen, or simply crypto curious— I’d love to see all of our readers jump in and join the conversation.

• 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. The ecosystem welcomed 35+ new social dApps at its 'Connected 2023' hackathon in March. In total, 1.2M+ users have signed up for a CyberProfile, 400k+ of whom conduct at least 1 on-chain transaction per month. 41k users have cumulatively paid over $750k for premium handles.

• EssenceNFTs are CyberConnect's ERC-721 primitive that are used to represent users' content. EssenceNFTs can be configured with rules like pay-to-mint, hold-to-mint, etc., and are often configured as non-transferable soul-bound tokens (SBT) to reward community member. Over 1.67M EssenceNFTs have been created over the past few months.

• One of key metrics for web3 social is audience engagement with creators. On CyberConnect, 53% of all collectors have collected 2 or more pieces of content, SBTs, etc.

• 🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Link3, the biggest app within CyberConnect by user activity, has become a laboratory for experiments among creators looking to monetize their audiences. A Russian content creator named Ukko raised 900 $USDT through a post on Link3 to fund his travel for a community event in Moscow. Even though only 19 followers among his audience of 85k collected his post, each $50 USDT collect was enough to fund his travels. Ukko shared he is planning to give the collectors extra benefits within his community.

• Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph, incubated and supercharged by AAVE Companies. It launched in May 2022, days after the UST death spiral and just weeks before the 3AC fallout. Despite 12 months of organic growth and solidifying itself as an early category leader amid broader market uncertainty, new profiles minted fell for a 4th straight quarter, from 2,748/month in Q1 to <700/month in Q2 – a 75% regression. This comes as Lens announced a $15M fundraise in June 2023.

• Lens has enabled creators to earn $358k to-date, with 92% of that revenue driven by collected posts and 2% by subscriptions. Total profile NFT trading volume stands at $6.2M to-date.

• Digging into the application layer, Lenster (60%) and Phaver (33%) together have a 93% dominance on Lens Protocol posts with a long tail of 20+ applications sharing the remaining 7% of Post volume.

• 🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The most expensive Lens profile sale of the year occurred on May 30, 2023 with the purchase of 12345.lens for 0.99 ETH ($1860). This sale shows continued excitement about a key feature unique to web3 social—profiles as tradable creator assets. The buyer also owns one other Lens profile, 555555.lens purchased for .555 ETH ($1,032), which was the 2nd highest sale over the same period.

• Lenster is a decentralized and permissionless social media app built on top of Lens Protocol. Lenster has incorporated various features to optimize creator economics, such as collecting. As one of the earliest dApps developed on the Lens Protocol, Lenster has established a strong reputation. More than 98k profiles are active on Lenster, and Lenster boasts a penetration rate of 95.84%. Lenster accounts for 22.8% of unique Lens profiles across all Lens dApps.

• There are three primary creator behaviors on Lenster: posting, commenting, and mirroring. To date, creators have generated over 2 million pieces of content on Lenster. 54.6% of creator behaviors are posting, while commenting and mirroring account for 14.6% and 30.8% respectively. Creators have an average of 8k creations on a daily basis.

• The average half-year retention rate stands at 53%. Since September 2022, the one-month retention rate has consistently exceeded 50%. This notable achievement is indicative of an increasing number of individuals choosing Lenster as their go-to social media platform for their daily needs.