Base Social Dream Shattered: They Say It's a False Proposition, But Those Truly Building SocialFi Are Still Alive
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Base Social Dream Shattered: They Say It's a False Proposition, But Those Truly Building SocialFi Are Still Alive
The human heart is not a mining machine; socializing is not mining. With the wrong fuel, the higher you fly, the harder you shatter.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy: Fu Gui
From July 15 to 16, Jesse Pollak posted a series of long threads on X, saying he was「definitively wrong」on the social and creator token track—translated into Chinese, this means clearly wrong, leaving no room for maneuver. He said Q1 2026 was a「punch in the face」, and that the past few months were basically consuming the boasts he made over the previous two years. Two days ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also relented, admitting content coins「didn't work」, dropping the line「We messed up, time to turn the page」. The phrase「turn the page」officially closed the book on Base's story of betting on Farcaster, Zora, and Frames mini-programs over the past two years.
The Base App was handed back to the Coinbase mothership, taken over by Jordan Fish, known in the circle as Cobie. Pollak himself stepped back to write code, focusing single-mindedly on making Base a「blockchain for global finance」. This turn wasn't unexpected; what was unexpected was that before turning, they pondered the matter of「social」for a full two years, and what they finally came up with was something even they couldn't bear to look at.
Why They Wanted Social in the First Place
Let's be clear first about why they set their sights on the social business. There are two layers of logic here: one is the businessman's calculation, the other is the idealist's obsession. Put bluntly, they arrive at the same destination via different routes.
The businessman's calculation was stated most plainly by Musk. He spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, saying out loud he wanted to make it a「digital town square」, a place where everyone could speak freely; but what he thought in his heart was probably simpler—whoever controls the square controls the agenda-setting power, which is worth more than any ad slot. Social has never been a traffic business; it is a discourse power business, something everyone in Silicon Valley knows in their hearts.
The idealist's obsession goes back over a decade. In 2013, Snowden exposed the mass surveillance collaborated on by the US government and major tech companies, and the global internet suddenly realized that the email, search, and social networks used every day were already a telescope in someone else's hands. In 2014, Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood wrote an article calling the internet set to be rebuilt thereafter the「post-Snowden network」. Vitalik Buterin later repeatedly said that what the crypto industry should really do is not issue tokens, but uproot Web2's structural problems like censorship, surveillance, and data monopolies from the underlying technology. When this ideal falls onto specific terms, it becomes several overused but never achieved words: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, security, and decentralization—no single company can delete your posts unilaterally, no backend can see who you DM, your followers and your articles follow you wherever you go, no longer just a line of records in some company's database.
These two layers of logic stacked together are why Base heavily bet on social back then. On one side was the ambition for traffic with real money, a billion-user engine; on the other was the grand narrative of「this time giving the internet's public square back to ordinary people」. Grand narratives are the cheapest to tell; implementation is where the real money is spent.
The Result Was an Impure Casino
The cards in Base's hand should have been the best in the entire industry. Coinbase's compliance licenses, over 100 million verified users, smooth fiat on-ramps, plus one of the smoothest running L2 networks in the ETH ecosystem—these conditions are top-tier in any track. But with such a good hand, what was played out two years later was a pile of misfit speculative tools.
Zora's core gameplay was minting a post or an image directly into a token, anyone could issue. Its token ZORA market cap fell from a peak of about $550 million to about $30 million, a 95% drop. Farcaster hit a daily active user high of 104,000 in July 2024 thanks to Frames mini-programs, but over a year later fell to the 40,000 to 60,000 range. Truly active Power Badge users remained only around 4,360, monthly revenue dropped 99%, and new registered addresses decreased by 95.7%. These numbers weren't a slow slide; they were a direct cliff.
The behavior pattern behind this isn't complex. People rushed in not to talk, but to mine and trade tokens. The so-called「mini-apps」were mostly meme coin launchers in disguise; posts with slightly informative content in the content flow were scattered by shilling and meme images. Posting changed from「I want to say something」to「how to post to earn more tokens」. Once incentives stopped and token prices fell, these people turned and left. The so-called social graph turned out to be an empty shell.
Ironically, this result wasn't even as straightforward as pump.fun. They never pretend, plainly telling you this is a casino, the bet is attention, yet because of the comment section and real-time transactions, a very thin but real layer of social relationship naturally grew. The set Base supported stuffed speculation into the shell of「social」, pleasing neither side—the financial experience couldn't compare to professional perpetual contract platforms, and social relationship density approached zero. Even community modules like Binance Square, which come with trading scenarios, relying on real position discussions, dwarfed Farcaster in scale and influence by several streets.
The problem lies in incentives being placed in the wrong spot. Using tokens to leverage early growth of social networks sounds like a shortcut, because tokens can create data buzz the fastest. But social matters, at its core, require identity recognition and relationship connection. Such behaviors naturally carry a bit of non-utilitarian meaning—if a comment first asks「can I earn tokens」, it is no longer social. Tokens turned relationships into trading objects, fans into investors. Once money is lost, these「relationships」are liquidated immediately. This is not a social network; it is a leveraged position that could blow up at any time.
The Web2 Old World Isn't Clean Either
It's unfair to lay all this blame at Web3's door. That old centralized social set has its own problems, just different in appearance.
Platforms like X, Meta, and TikTok have a business model based on attention mining: browsing time, like records, location information, even contact lists, are all collected and fed to recommendation algorithms. The logic the algorithm recognizes is simple—the more conflicting, extreme, and emotionally losing control content, the more it holds your time, so such content naturally gets higher weight. Hot searches can be manually controlled, trends can be brushed out by bot matrices, MCN agencies batch incubate accounts and batch manufacture opposing topics. Ordinary users at the bottom of this pyramid can only gain a bit of natural exposure by manufacturing emotions. Acquaintance relationship chains are responsible for fissioning all this out—a rumor passed through family groups and classmate groups often gains higher credibility than news media.
This is the real problem Web3 social originally wanted to solve: not that social itself is flawed, but that the business model of「trading privacy for algorithm recommendations, trading emotions for traffic distribution」is flawed. The set Base supported should have been the antidote to this problem, but instead of curing the disease, it sent the patient into a casino—the original illness remained untouched, plus an added layer of token speculation complications.
Same Track, Others Walked Differently
If all decentralized social looked like this, it would mean the direction itself was problematic. But the fact is, on the same track, other projects took completely different paths, and the results were completely different.
Bluesky was led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, using the AT Protocol, cutting out the token layer directly. Phone number or email registration, posting and liking are all free. Its underlying architecture adopts the PDS (Personal Data Server) personal server federation model, where each user's data is hosted on a server of their choice, and Relays are responsible for aggregation and distribution. This system didn't take the blockchain route; it took the internet protocol route, carving a new path in the direction of decentralization. In 2026, users exceeded 43 million. Although not comparable to X's scale, it at least took root among ordinary netizens. The user base includes tech practitioners, media, brands, and a large number of ordinary discussants migrating from X. Content types focus on short news and public topic discussions, not bound to any token speculation. This provides a counterexample: similarly advocating decentralization, it is completely possible to remove encryption thresholds and token speculation at the product layer to serve people with real social needs.
Hive is another solution, providing a sharper contrast. It hard-forked from Steem in 2020, built as an independent social public chain based on the Graphene underlying layer. All posting, liking, and voting are permanently stored as on-chain transactions, backed up by thousands of nodes across the network; no one can delete posts or clear the database unilaterally. Its token system is divided into three layers—HIVE is the circulating governance token, HP is the staking credential, HBD is the intra-chain stablecoin pegged to $1, and holders can also receive fixed annual yields. 65% of the inflation pool is fixed for creators and curators, 50% paid in HIVE, 50% paid in HBD. This means bull or bear market, a creator who insists on posting can always get a stablecoin income bottom line. The game Splinterlands is another magic weapon for retention—users stay because playing cards is fun; the chain is just the engine running the accounts behind the scenes, not the entire selling point. Users stay on the platform for battle fun, social behavior occurs naturally during the game process. This is a completely different logic from token incentives in terms of retention mechanisms.
Looking at these three paths together, the division is not in technology, but in how tokens are viewed. Farcaster treated tokens as the purpose, social behavior became a medium for mining; Hive treated tokens as rewards, content creation is the purpose itself. For the former, once the token price falls, the entire system loses its reason for existence; for the latter, token price fluctuations only affect the amount of extra income, the motivation to write articles, chat, and participate in communities remains.
There is an angle rarely touched in industry analysis, yet extremely fatal—the value of evidence storage at the search engine and AI crawling level. Hive's content, because it possesses on-chain hashes and timestamps, can be stably indexed by search engines like Google after crawling. Although rendering requires pulling block data via RPC to generate pages, and inclusion speed is not as fast as standard web pages, once included, long-tail knowledge content has long-term stability in search results. At the AI crawling level, large models value verifiability and immutability when evaluating factual sources. Hive's on-chain evidence storage happens to meet this standard, making tools like AI Overview and Perplexity more likely to use it as a citable source.
Farcaster's posts are stored in third-party Hub server clusters, not on-chain, can be deleted or modified by operators, the pages themselves lack permanent URLs, plus a large amount of low-quality meme and meme coin promotional content lowered the site's E-E-A-T score. Its visibility in search engines and general AI models is far lower than Hive. Base heavily bet on Farcaster, which equals voluntarily giving up a project's ability to be discovered long-term at the internet infrastructure layer. Once content does not possess the attributes of being retrievable and citable, its presence on the internet approaches zero—this is not a user volume problem, this is a ceiling determined by the underlying architecture.
Farcaster indeed got far more attention and capital than Hive in 2024, but in the cycle of collective SocialFi collapse over the past two years, almost no news was heard of large-scale user exodus from Hive. In the same ruins, who can live to the next decade, the answer is not hard to guess.
What Should Be Guarded
Speaking of this, it's time to reel back: decentralized social itself is not a pseudo-proposition; Bluesky and Hive have already proven this respectively. What truly needs reflection is that Base initially let all these old bottom lines—censorship resistance, privacy, security, decentralization—give way to KPIs of issuing tokens to boost volume.
A healthy Web3 social should still guard those bottom lines—no single entity can delete your account unilaterally, no backend holds your entire social relationship graph, code is open source so anyone can audit, anyone can move their data to start anew. From an economic perspective, these things are essentially public goods: non-excludable, non-rivalrous. The market is naturally unwilling to invest money to do this because it can't make short-term money, yet it is underlying infrastructure everyone needs. This is precisely the reason it should be supported as a public good—relying on protocol treasuries, community donations, relying on a handful of people willing to pay for ideals, rather than pulling in a batch of retail investors to play hot potato.
Speaking broadly, this is also a war for freedom of commercial public opinion. Algorithm recommendations, privacy collection, MCN industrialized content production—this system has turned public discussion into a business monopolized by capital and platforms. The meaning of decentralized social existence is precisely to leave a position in this war not manipulated by single capital—even if it is temporarily small and poor, it at least proves there is another way to live, not relying on selling your privacy and emotions to get by.
Governance Problems, No One Has Got It Right Yet
It's not hard to make ideals sound beautiful; what's hard is governance. Decentralized social to this day, almost every one is stuck in the same set of unsolvable contradictions.
The first hurdle is the content moderation paradox. For fully on-chain storage projects like Hive and DeSo, once posts are on-chain they cannot be deleted. If violating content appears, it can only be blocked locally by clients; switching to a niche client allows viewing it again. Regulators wanting to find someone to take responsibility don't know who to find. Off-chain storage Farcaster is the opposite—content exists in Hub server clusters, nominally decentralized, but actual moderation power is entirely in the hands of a few top Hub operators, no different from Web2 platform monopolies.
The second hurdle is the oligarchization of token governance. Almost all on-chain social uses token weight voting, resulting in early investors and whales naturally monopolizing discourse power. Hive's HP staking weight determines witness seats, Lens's governance tokens are held in the Aave team and early VC hands, Farcaster protocol itself has no tokens, but community meme coin whales actually control channel thresholds and tipping weights. Ordinary users who only scroll posts and hold no tokens have no say in rules, yet rules directly determine whether they can be seen.
The third hurdle is unclear responsibilities and rights. Protocol, nodes, clients, DAO treasuries—these layers of entities have vague division of labor. When things go wrong, they shift blame—protocols say they only set rules, nodes say they are not bound by protocols, clients say they are just local filtering, DAOs say they can't manage node behavior.
The fourth hurdle is incentive mismatch. Anti-spam, running nodes, writing documentation, making clients—these necessary「dirty jobs」earn far fewer tokens than batch posting, so no one is willing to do them, governance and operations lack people long-term. The speed of on-chain governance also naturally conflicts with the real-time needs of social—Hive a proposal voting cycle takes over seven days; by the time disposal is complete, violating content has already spread across the entire network.
For these hurdles, the answers given by all current projects are compromises: hybrid moderation, quadratic voting, staking juries. In the end, all are finding a makeshift middle point in a dilemma. No one has truly untied this knot, which is also the root cause why decentralized social has not grown big to this day.
To Survive, Must Learn How to Fission
The dead knot of governance cannot be untied temporarily, but the economic model matter can still be thought about. Wanting creators to stay, wanting content to truly spread, the core is still to redesign on attention fission, rather than relying on token airdrops to forcibly pull a batch of people in to create false prosperity.
Step one is to decouple money and social. Hive's approach is worth copying—income is not based on token speculation, but on fixed sharing bottom-lined by stablecoins. Creators have a stable income whether they write or not, rather than being completely exposed to naked long risk. Step two is to give clear returns to「dirty jobs」—moderation, running nodes, making clients. If these jobs continue to be unpaid, governance will always spin idle. Step three is multi-clientization. Refer to the protocol logic of email—one identity, any client can log in. Changing frontends doesn't lose fans or content. Only then can content truly flow naturally between different interfaces and different circles. Fission should be the natural result of content itself being good and the protocol itself being open, not an illusion created by incentives.
Finally, splice these segments into a long chain—from creation, to curation, to distribution, to monetization, every link should have its own legitimate income, rather than layer-by-layer cuts feeding the platform. Email could live as internet infrastructure, not relying on which company owns it, but that no one owns it. Social matters, perhaps should also think in this direction.
Budget Burned Out, Time to Wrap Up
Base admitting mistake this time, in the end, is not the contraction of a certain business, but the entire industry spending two years, burning several hundred million dollars, to finally understand something that should have been understood long ago: using tokens to leverage a network needing relationship density is using the wrong fuel. This plane took off fiercely, but lift all came from hype, not from friendship. Once oil cuts, it must crash down.
Decentralized social is not a pseudo-proposition; Bluesky and Hive have already earned back a bit of face for this industry. The remaining question is just, is there anyone willing not to issue tokens, just to walk the path of「post-Snowden network」these words honestly again. The business of human hearts has never been rushed. Everyone wants to take shortcuts, but this thing called shortcuts, when too many people walk it, becomes the most crowded road at the casino entrance.
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