The blockchain has become a popular strategy to try and fix some of them, with both traditional social media integrating crypto elements, and crypto-native social media trying to reinvent the entire structure. 

One of the most recent developments, however, was a non-blockchain solution allowing to build peer-to-peer apps. More surprising even, it came from one of the biggest crypto finance players – a stablecoin giant Tether.

Legacy social media trying out crypto

The most crypto-conscious social media out there is probably Twitter. Last year it added Bitcoin to its Tip Jar functionality, allowing users to tip their favorite authors with crypto (although Lightning Network wallet integration is still only available for the US-based accounts). Soon after, it enabled blockchain-verified NFT profile picture option.

Reddit is rolling out crypto rewards, allowing subreddits to grant tokens for the most captivating posts. For the moment two subreddits use their own tokens based on Ethereum’s layer-2 Arbitrum.

Facebook and Instagram are trying out NFT integration, which would allow to display NFTs on the profile and distinguish NFT posts from others.

Crypto-native social media

While traditional social media’s dabbling with crypto elements is still too modest to bring a real response to its problems, crypto-native social media takes a comprehensive approach trying to reconsider the whole system. However, despite its best intentions, it still fails to get the necessary exposure. 

One of the most advanced realizations of a decentralized social media is Ecency, a decentralized social network built on Hive (community-led fork off Steem). Hive is a highly scalable blockchain, and a few DApps have already chosen to be built on it, notably a popular play-to-earn game Splinterlands. Ecency user posts are stored on the blockchain, ensuring a certain degree of censorship-resistance, and content creators and users who react to their posts receive dollar-convertible tokens. 

However, Ecency is still far from going mainstream: unappealing user experience and a complex system of tokens used on the platform are some of the reasons it still has only 600k unique visitors, a year after its fork. Steemit, Ecency’s “ancestor” from the Steem platform, does not do a better job either.

Has Tether just advanced the future of social media?

This Monday Tether, the creator of the eponymous stablecoin, its sister company Bitfinex, the crypto exchange, and Hypercore, the developer of P2P data network, announced the launch of Holepunch – a platform aiming at facilitating the creation of P2P applications. 

Holepunch does not need a ledger to record all data that passes through the peers, so it does not use the blockchain technology and thus has no native cryptocurrency. However, to ensure that crypto payments can be easily integrated into the apps built on it, the platform will have a built-in API that will run, operate, and be powered by the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s layer-2 solution for fast and cheap transactions. Unsurprisingly, another coin to be enabled by Holepunch will be Tether. 

It is symbolic that the first app built on Holepunch was a P2P video chat application called Keet.

Unlike the encrypted, but centralized messaging services like Zoom, Whatsapp or Signal, Keet allows two or more people connect and exchange media files directly with each other or through a network of peers, bypassing any central server whatsoever. 

Keet users create and announce their cryptographic public keys to the network, allowing other users to locate and, when authorized, connect to their computers. Any peer who received the data can relay it to others, even when the sender is offline.

It is presented as more private (using partial information from multiple peers) and more resilient (as implied by the absence of a central server) alternative to the existing messaging services.

Holepunch is still completing its alpha testing and will be available in open source by the end of 2022. Will it inspire more companies to create decentralized censorship-resistant social networks? Keet, acting as a pilot fish, will certainly help understand this potential.

Social networks prompted the transformation of web1, where users merely consulted the content, into web2, where users themselves became content creators. Web3 is the next evolutionary step, which will enable users to finally take control of their data and get fairly rewarded for their participation. Decentralization is crucial for web3, and the number of initiatives developing crypto and P2P solutions suggests that social media is about to change.