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Liang's avatar

Great article! Pump is full stack tho.

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mythrust's avatar

Is Polymarket another example of successful verticalization like Friend.tech? Oh and I noticed that your definition of SocialFi is pretty wide, it seems that any applications that has elements of any part of the stack can be considered partly SocialFi? I do not disagree though, just another perspective which I had never thought off, its pretty cool!

What about Fantasy.top? That's an example of an "Exchange-First" approach right, with Twitter and partly their own marketplace serving as the discovery channel.

Thanks for the great read! Really enjoyed all of the writings done on SocialFi by you and Variant Fund, you guys have a great understanding of this niche within crypto, really helped me a ton in my research.

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Mason Nystrom's avatar

Appreciate the comment and kind words! I think SocialFi is broad because of the general trend where all social apps are adding additional monetization elements, whether they're direct (e.g. paying creators and users) or indirect (e.g. social capital) depends on the platform

Also agree that Fantasy top and Polymarket are definitely examples of the exchange-first approach. Fantasy is interesting since it's explicitly a marketplace (liquidity + asset issuance + execution layer) for Twitter's social graph. Polymarket has started to add more social features as well which is interesting, but a lot of discovery still happens on Twitter/social channels.

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