Inside Web3 Social: News & Breakthroughs in Q4 2023

A lot has happened since our last web3 social round up! While initially the weekly rhythm for this web3 social round up worked well, as there were a lot of things happening, there wasn't too much to report on during most of November. Then suddenly in December, a slew of news announcements made the round. So I'm happy to pick this format up again. I'll keep it more of a monthly-recurring format for now though.Common GroundWeb3 Social: weekly round up #5Aaand we're back with our weekly summary of what's new in web3 social. A lot hasNov 12Without further ado here's the latest and greatest in web3 social.

Farcaster continues to show strong growth

Enjoying the post? There’s a whole world to discover 🥳Join Common GroundThe decentralized twitter alternative Farcaster has seen amazing growth since its switch to permissionless signups, as evidenced by this chart that was posted by founder Dan Romero on X this week.

The arrow indicates the day Farcaster switched to permissionless signup, i.e. without the requirement to be invited by an existing user.

$LYX gets a new major CEX listing

The base layer currency of the LUKSO blockchain called $LYX has been listed for trading on the mainstream centralized exchange crypto.com . LUKSO is a chain that's specialized on social use cases, as it provides powerful identity primitives for projects to build on (such as Common Ground).

Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange company based in Singapore. As of June 2023, the company reportedly had 80 million customers globally.

Worldcoin's "World App" achieves 1M WAU, 5M signups

Worldcoin is a leading biometric proof of personhood project founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman. Tiago Sada, the head of product, engineering and design at Tools for Humanity, the company building the Worldcoin project, shared some interesting stats about World App this week.

The Worldcoin project aims to provide the world’s largest, most inclusive identity and financial public utility owned by everyone regardless of their country, background or economic status.While these numbers are impressive, Worldcoin has been criticized in the past for for their growth strategies.Worldcoin's eventually-permissionless World ID system also introduced the ability for third parties to implement the identity solution into their apps.

Crypto Punks become ERC721 compliant

Crypto Punks are among the oldest and most widely known on-chain media. In fact, when the project was created, the token standard for on-chain collectibles, ERC721, hadn't been finalized yet and thus, Crypto Punks launched with an incompatible smart contract . This is finally being rectified .

That's the name of the new wrapper smart contract that can turn a legacy punk into a proper NFT.

POINTS are becoming a thing

In the ever evolving story of web3 projects bribing airdrop farmers to fake activity on shitty apps, a new paradigm seems to emerge called points. Points are an off-chain activity score that projects give to their users. The idea behind it is that in the future, these points could translate into an actual airdrop.

This is rainbow wallet sending me points. What rainbow doesn't know is that I'm immune to incentives :POf course, it was Friend Tech who first introduced this idea earlier this year. And it worked: points increased user engagement for some time in expectation of an airdrop.

What do you think about points? Let us know in the comments. Joking, there are no comments :D

Social painting app Basepaint doing 220ETH in volume

Of all the apps created in the aftermath of Friend Tech, basepaint is one of the cooler ones. Every day a new canvas is created that pixel artists can draw on collectively and then mint the final picture.

This picture was created by 101 artists and was minted over 5000 timesX user Zach kindly shared a Dune Dashboard to keep track of basepaint's key on-chain metrics. Here's an interesting chart showing the continued activity on the app:

POAP shares geographic distribution of its 2023 mints

In a 2023 review thread , the "Proof of Attendance Protocol" project shared some interesting usage data: "From birthdays to weddings, yoga classes to mountain summits, and from family vacations to just watching the sunset together, people in 98 population centers around the world used POAP to commemorate their precious time on planet earth"

While 98 countries is impressive, we're proud to say that Common Ground is being used from 161 countries 🤯

Privy to launch embedded wallets

Privy is the MPC wallet company driving apps like Friend Tech. With privy, users new to web3 can create app-specific wallets in seconds without having to download software to their computers or phones and without having to be aware of what a seed phrase is.While this is great it comes with a problem. Other dApps cannot access these app-specific wallets and thus the whole interoperability paradigm behind wallets goes out the window.In a smart and somewhat predictable move, Privy now " started a conversation " around allowing apps to embedd a "privy widget" that gives a user an overview of their existing privy wallets, thereby reintroducing some level of interoperability.

An illustration of what this could look like.Similar things were tried before and ultimately failed. It's unclear whether it will be different this time around. Privy certainly has enough time to try, given their recent $18M Series A.

Pretty impressive cap table fam.

Orb dropps Community Wallets

With a certain degree of envy I'm happy to report that web3 social app "Orb" has launched a feature we're also thinking about a lot at Common Ground.Community Wallets are digital bank accounts for communities - a super powerful new primitive that could change what online communities are fundamentally capable of doing. It basically democratizes the central superpower of DAOs, i.e. the ability to manage funds collectively.

What can you do in a web3 everything app?

The idea of an "everything app" is not particularly new. While nothing like it exists in the West, everything apps are very established in various Asian markets. Famously, Elon Musk wants to turn X into an everything app as well, starting with financial products. According to Musk, X is currently waiting for an approval of its application for a money transmitter license in the United States.What would an everything app for web3 look like? 0xDesigner has been exploring this concept on their X feed for the past couple of weeks.

What do you think a web3 everything should do? Feel free to spark a conversation anywhere in our community about it.

Coordinape launches new Social App "CoLinks"

Coordinape is a popular web3 tool to reward community contributions. Now the company has launched a new product called CoLinks , a take on a web3-native LinkedIn.The app lets you✊ reclaim your professional network, ✳️ own your rep, 🔗 connect with people that matter to you, 💝 share in the value of your connections.

A screenshot from the signup process. An early backer of the project, Rolf Hoefer, describes it like that:

#deep :)In case you're curious to explore, take any of my ref links to sign up:

Please don't destroy my future reputation