A Reporter’s View: The Social Space In Arweave In 2023

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Author: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Henry @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Anyone who is new to the Arweave ecosystem may think that the only use case of the protocol is data storage. But developers have used Arweave as a key component of their social applications and protocols. What social applications and protocols built on Arweave shows, is that there is no limit to what can be built. What is needed for new use cases is inspiration for what to build and how to build it. The impact of everVision and its product including Permaswap, everPay, Arseeding and PermaDAO must also be acknowledged in the growth of the infrastructure of some of the projects in the social category. According to Community Labs’ snapshot of the ecosystem, there are 18 projects in the social category; while some are fully functional, others are not. Generally, the social space in the Arweave ecosystem had a good run in 2023. While most of the projects formed partnerships and integrated with others, here is a rundown of the projects and their remarkable feat in the year 2023.

Arweave Name Service (ANS)

In 2023, ANS optimised its system which resulted in an integration by some projects in the Arweave ecosystem including View Block, ArConnect, everVision and Permacast. The users of these apps could use human-readable names instead of a long string of Alphanumeric characters. ANS said it intended to decentralise the project and a move in that direction was introducing ANS DAO and developing a token. The token also got listed on everPay and paired on Permaswap. everVision played a major role in providing a platform for $ANS to be traded. ANS, according to the CTO of Decentland Labs, is one of the few projects in the ecosystem that generates revenue. Protocol Revenue was put at 5,400 $AR. ANS also launched ArMoji which is an emoji shortlink for your Arweave data on the ANS protocol.

Lens Protocol

The year 2023 is the second year for Lens Protocol and for a 2-year-old project, it achieved quite a lot. An achievement that reverberated across the Arweave ecosystem was the launch of Momoka. Lens needed Momoka to help it scale to the level of Web2 social media. A collaboration between Lens, Irys and Arweave, Momoka processes most transactions off-chain and it relies on Irys and Arweave as a data availability layer. Momoka is also cheap; a look at the explorer as of the time of writing, revealed that 1.13M transactions cost $558.97. Nader Dabit, a developer popular on X, said in August 2023 when Momoka transactions hit 500,000 at a cost of $173 that “with these updates, our infrastructure is now 250x less expensive while 165x more scalable than in the past”.

Hey (formerly Lenster)

Hey, a decentralised and permissionless social media app built with Lens Protocol. It played a key role in the Beta testing of Lens Protocol’s Momoka. In the middle of the year, Hey introduced Lens Garden which it says users can use to invite friends to interact on the platform. It also launched Streaks Calendar which shows a user’s daily activity on the platform. Hey gave users freedom by allowing them to choose their algorithm in order to personalise their experience.

Orbis

In January of 2023, Orbis, an open social protocol, engaged its users in product building. Every week, it conducted polls asking users what feature they wanted to see built . It announced weekly polls for people to vote on what features they wanted to see it add to its SDK. It launched Orbis.connect-v2 which allows developers to use a MetaMask account, Wallet Connect or Phantom to display user profiles in applications. It was followed with the addition of Orbis.createGroup to help devs create groups and channels in their apps. Then it introduced Orbis create and Orbis.createConversation. It strengthened its software by launching Orbis V2 to make building a social module faster. It also allowed the integration of Discord for developers and encrypted emails in profiles for user notifications. Other features it created are upvotes, which is similar to Reddit’s. Orbis also had a year where a number of projects built social applications with its technology.

ReadOn

ReadOn, a content distribution platform entered 2023 after launching Sphinx, a feature that is ChatGPT-based and designed to analyze article content and generate corresponding quizzes in December 2022. ReadOn was one of the four winners of the everVision Web3infra hackathon were Arseeding was used as a development tool. Other winners in the everVision hackathon were Echo, MuseTime and PureHub.

Throughout 2023, Its software went through numerous upgrades: from version 1.4.6 which came with a referral module to version 1.4.9 which added a new video feed and video detail page and version 1.4.10 which added anti-cheating agreement; versions 1.4.12 added search platforms while version 1.4.14 added decentralised bullet chat. It updated its software up to version 1.5.8 by the end of the year.

ReadOn partnered with everVision through which it stored 19.78GB worth of data on Arweave and processed 262,000 transactions through everPay. ReadOn also launched what it says is the world’s first zkEVM equipped with a customized Gas Token, $READ. In the last quarter of the year, ReadOn secured an undisclosed funding amount from Skyland Ventures.

Stamp Protocol

The year 2023 for Stamp Protocol began with the release of version 0.2. Its creator, Rakis said at the time that the vision of Stamp at the time was to allow creators to earn on the web of value without keeping their contents private or gated. In May, it released version one to make Stamp more useful, scaleable and complete. Stamp Protocol has been integrated by some projects in the ecosystem such as BazAR and Fair Protocol.

Relation Labs

In February, Relation Labs, a decentralised social graph protocol, expanded its Web3 social offerings by adding a Decentralised Access Control SDK provided by Lit Protocol to develop a privacy module in the Semantic SBT Protocol or programmable NFTs. Encrypted data in SBT are uploaded to Arweave for permanent storage. It unveiled a Web3 social identity service in April with the ‘.Soul’ profile NFT. In May, Relations introduced the tokenomics for its native token, $REL with a total supply of 1billion. The tokenomics was followed by the establishment of the Relation governance forum. Relation proposed and passed a restructure in its design architecture with the Semantic Data Layer. A place to permanently store data would have been difficult for Relation Labs if not for the technology of everVision’s Arseeding that made storing on Arweave easy and cost effective. The Alpha version of the Relation Account, which is an upgrade to Relation ID, was released in November. The full version is expected to be released before 2023 ends.

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