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Ribhav
Ribhav

Posted on • Originally published at Medium

SocialFi: How Farcaster and Lens Are Redesigning Social on Web3

#social #crypto #blockchain #education

From rented timelines to user‑owned social graphs and programmable feeds.

This is Day 41 of my 60‑Day Web3 journey. Over the past few weeks we have gone from core infrastructure topics like Layer 0 and Layer 3, to smart contract upgradeability, to zero‑knowledge proofs, to storage with IPFS, and most recently to Bitcoin Layer 2s. Today we are leaving pure infra for a moment and stepping into something users actually touch every day: social. Not “Web2 but token,” but new social networks like Farcaster and Lens that try to rebuild Twitter and Instagram from the ground up as protocols instead of platforms.

If you want to follow the series as it unfolds, you can find the archive on Medium and on Future. The Telegram community is still the best place to discuss each day’s post and share your own experiments, you will find us at Web3ForHumans on Telegram.

Why Social Needs a “Fi” in the First Place

Before we talk about SocialFi, it is worth asking why we are unhappy with the current social stack at all. In Web2, social platforms own three important things: your identity on that network, your social graph, and your reach. Your handle lives in their database. Your followers list is their asset, not yours. The algorithm they tune decides who sees what, and it can change overnight with no way to “fork your audience” if you disagree.

SocialFi and decentralized social try to flip this. Instead of thinking in terms of a single company’s app, they treat social as a protocol made of identity, a social graph, and content that any front‑end can build on. The economic layer is not only about speculative tokens. It is also about aligning incentives so that users, creators, and developers share more of the value that network effects create, instead of handing almost all of it to a single platform.

In 2026, conversations about SocialFi often focus on casino‑style airdrops and “engage‑to‑earn” mechanics, but there is a deeper story underneath. Projects like Farcaster and Lens are trying to build an open social graph, where your profile and your connections are portable, and where developers can create new clients and experiences without asking anyone for API access. Articles like “The Battle for Web3's Social Graph: Why Farcaster and Lens Are Leading” frame this as a multi‑billion‑dollar race to own the “social layer” of Web3.

Farcaster: Social As a Protocol First, App Second

Farcaster is one of the most cited examples when people talk about “Web3 native social” in 2026. At a high level, it is a protocol for a social graph and short‑form posts (called “casts”), with a growing ecosystem of clients built on top. It started with Warpcast as the main client, but the core idea is that any developer can build their own Farcaster app as long as they respect the protocol rules.

Under the hood, Farcaster separates concerns that Web2 bundles together. Identity is tied to Farcaster IDs and usernames that are independent of any single UI. The social graph (who follows whom, who reacts to what) is stored in an open data layer instead of inside a proprietary database. Developers can build custom clients, bots, and indexing services that watch this public activity and offer new ways to interact with it. Some analyses, such as this Farcaster SocialFi overview, describe it as an “open, programmable social layer” instead of just a Twitter clone.

Over time, Farcaster has moved more and more logic on‑chain or into clearly specified data availability layers. There has been a gradual shift toward using on‑chain data for things like channels, reactions, and other social primitives, which means the protocol itself is becoming less dependent on any one operator. News items like reports that Farcaster is “ditching a centralized social graph and embracing on‑chain state” capture this evolution and show how serious the team is about decentralization. For builders, this means you can count on the social data layer existing beyond any single company.

Lens: User‑Owned Social Graph With Smart Contracts

Lens takes a slightly different approach to the same core problem. Instead of building a brand‑new identity system, it leans heavily into smart contracts and NFTs. At its core, Lens treats your profile as an NFT, your relationships as on‑chain connections, and your posts and collects as interactions recorded in a protocol that any client can read. The original version launched on Polygon, and more recently the team has been working on Lens Chain, a dedicated L2 environment focused on scaling social.

From a developer perspective, Lens is interesting because it is very explicit about modeling social relationships onchain. A profile is an NFT, following someone can involve minting follow NFTs, and collecting content can be tokenized. As “Lens Chain Goes Live: Scaling SocialFi with Avail and zkSync” explains, the infrastructure has evolved from a single chain deployment to a dedicated setup that uses data availability solutions and zk‑based tech to make social interactions scalable and cheap enough for mainstream use.

In the context of SocialFi, Lens tends to attract projects that are comfortable with onchain economics. It is natural to build things like creator passes, subscription models, or token‑gated communities when the underlying protocol already treats the social graph as a set of composable smart contracts. At the same time, this raises security and UX questions that are different from Farcaster’s approach, where not every interaction is directly an onchain transaction on a shared smart contract platform.

What Makes SocialFi Different From Web2 Social Plus Tokens

It is easy to dismiss SocialFi as “just another Ponzi narrative with extra steps,” especially if your first exposure to it was some farm‑and‑dump engagement campaign. To filter the noise out, it helps to focus on a few structural differences that serious deep dives, such as this SocialFi explain‑all from Chainup, highlight repeatedly.

First, identity and the social graph are intended to be portable. If a particular client changes its rules, you can in theory switch to another one without losing your followers or content. This is a huge shift from the Web2 world, where leaving a platform usually means abandoning your audience. Second, data is primarily public and indexable. Developers can build analytics, discovery, and alternative feeds by reading from the same underlying protocol, instead of being rate‑limited or banned by a single company’s API policy. Third, economic incentives are exposed at the protocol level. Creators can receive value directly via tips, mints, or onchain actions that are not entirely controlled by a centralized ad system.

Of course, there are tradeoffs. Public social graphs raise privacy questions. Token mechanics can create perverse incentives where people chase airdrops more than meaningful conversation. Infrastructure choices (which chain, what data availability layer, which wallets) still create friction for mainstream users. SocialFi is not a solved problem. It is a set of experiments at the intersection of protocols, UX, and economics, with Farcaster and Lens as two of the clearest current examples.

Farcaster vs Lens: Same Goal, Different Paths

A lot of 2026 coverage frames Farcaster and Lens as rivals in a “2.4B dollar battle for Web3’s social graph,” as in this comparison from BlockEden. It is a catchy narrative, but as a learner it is more useful to see how they complement each other in terms of design space.

Farcaster leans into a protocol‑first identity and data model, with a growing onchain component for state, but not everything being a classic smart contract interaction. It optimizes for a Twitter‑like experience and developer flexibility around indexing, bots, and custom clients. Lens leans more heavily into NFTs and explicit smart contracts, which makes it natural to build tokenized relationships, collectibles, and financialized social experiences. It optimizes for composability with existing EVM tooling and onchain DeFi and NFT primitives.

Both are exploring how much of the social graph should live directly onchain versus in dedicated data layers, how to handle moderation in an open protocol world, and how to avoid purely speculative behavior dominating the experience. From your point of view as someone interested in developer education and DevRel, they are also early case studies in how to build communities around protocols rather than around single‑company apps.

Why SocialFi Matters for Builders and Writers

You might not plan to build a SocialFi app yourself, but understanding Farcaster and Lens matters if you care about Web3 beyond DeFi. First, they are frontrunners in what Vitalik and others have called “desoc” and decentralized social, and even large exchanges have noted that SocialFi is becoming a top priority for 2026, as seen in items like Binance’s commentary on SocialFi trends. That means more projects, more users, and more questions from people who will look for clear explanations.

Second, they are proving grounds for Web3 onboarding UX. Wallet flows, gas abstraction, identity management, and content moderation are all being tested in real time on these networks. Lessons learned there will eventually feed back into other app categories, from gaming to DAOs. Third, they are fertile ground for content and community work. Explaining how to get started, how the protocols differ, how to build small tools or bots, and how to navigate incentives without burning out are all valuable topics for someone positioning themselves in Web3 education and DevRel.

For your 60‑day journey, SocialFi sits nicely alongside topics like The Graph, IPFS, Bitcoin L2s, and upgradeability. It shows that Web3 is not only about infra and DeFi, but also about the everyday user experiences that can either bring people in or push them away.

Key Takeaways

SocialFi is not just “Twitter with a token.” At its core, it is about rebuilding social networks as open protocols, where identity, social graphs, and content are shared infrastructure instead of a single company’s property. Farcaster and Lens are two leading 2026 examples of this approach, with Farcaster emphasizing a protocol‑centric social graph and Lens modeling social relationships explicitly through smart contracts and NFTs.

Both projects are still iterating on critical questions around decentralization, moderation, UX, and incentives. For builders and writers, they are important to understand because they test how Web3 handles something more human and messy than a DEX: our social interactions. As you continue this 60‑day series, keep SocialFi in mind not just as a narrative, but as a living lab where many of the concepts you have already explored, from L2s to ZK to storage, are being applied in a much more visible and emotional context.

Resources

If you want to go deeper into SocialFi, Farcaster, and Lens:

Follow the Series

This article is part of my “60 Days of Web3” learning‑in‑public experiment.

I am learning and building in public, one day at a time. If you have thoughts on SocialFi, Farcaster, Lens, or want to share your own experiments, I would love to hear them.
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