Ex Sushi CTO Joseph Delong’s New Venture is a SocialFi Dapp Called Untitled

Joseph Delong, the former CTO of Sushi and a former Ethereum core developer, has launched a novel decentralized social platform offering an innovative take on blockchain-based social media, aka, SocialFi.

Untitled quietly went live on July 26 as an ecosystem combining blockchain technology with social interaction fueled by economic incentives.

“Untitled is focused on creating a disintermediated social platform where users can see what they want and say what they want,” Delong told The Defiant. “Our long-term goal is to turn off our server with all control on-chain.”

How it works

Activity on the platform centers around a daily “title” message, which users can claim ownership over by bidding in a 48-hour declining Dutch auction leading up to the post going live. The winning “title owner” can then compose a message featured in the daily title in a bid to kickstart discussion among users. The next title auction will begin at twice the price of the previous title.

Users can post comments replying to titles through another Dutch auction mechanism, with the price of replying starting at half the price paid by the title owner before declining over 48 hours. The auctions for subsequent replies start at half the price of the previous comment, with the original commenter receiving a share of the auction price. The platform also features a tipping feature allowing users to like or “snap” titles and comments alongside a financial reward.

The title owner receives 90% of revenue generated from comments and likes posted, incentivizing users to participate in title auctions and post engaging content on the platform.

Delong said a user-configurable AI model is responsible for content filtering on the platform.

“All content will eventually live on a decentralized storage (IPFS) and each user will act as a content server and client,” he added.

Early days

Untitled is slowly garnering users and activity after launching three weeks ago.

The post announcing Untitled’s launch attracted the highest volume of comments with four. A post proclaiming “hell is empty, all the memecoins are here” garnered the most snaps with 44. Delong said Untitled’s 178 users have posted 101 titles, 156 replies, and 857 snaps.

The subjects discussed include memecoins, Delong’s philosophic ponderings, and the Untitled platform itself.

Untitled was launched on top of Lens, the decentralized social graph protocol from Avara — the parent company behind Aave. Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of Avara, described Untitled as “one of the most exciting social apps launching on Lens.”

However, Delong said that Untitled is currently powered by Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 network, while Lens develops Lens Network, a forthcoming Layer 2 that will be powered by ZKsync.

Delong tweeted that he was motivated to launch Untitled by dissatisfaction with the trajectory of web3 development.

“When I started in web3 we believed in a decentralized future,” Delong said. “We wanted to build unstoppable decentralized finance to rival the financial system, not join it… Our use cases have devolved into government coins — but on-chain, pump and dumps, and degenerate leverage… The web3 we wanted it to be is definitely dying… The time is now for a reset.”

Other socialfi experiments

While recent socialfi projects have enjoyed explosive short-term growth combining speculative game theory mechanics with points-powered incentive programs, the sector has struggled to achieve long-lasting user retention.

FriendTech enjoyed meteoric growth after quickly emerging as one of the most popular dApps on Base after the Layer 2 network launched on mainnet in August 2023. The platform allows users to buy and trade “keys” allowing access to chatrooms associated with Twitter accounts.

At its September 2023 peak, FriendTech hosted more than $20 million worth of daily key trading, but the figure crashed by more than 99% by April. While the platform enjoyed a short-lived resurgence following the launch of its v2 iteration and the FRIEND token in May, daily volume trended between $10,000 and $26,000 over the past two weeks, according to Dune Analytics.

Daily FriendTech key volume. Source: Dune Analytics.

Farcaster, an OP Mainnet-based socialfi platform, enjoyed a surge in activity in February with the launch of its Frames feature — which allows users to embed interactive content including applications into their posts. Active Farcaster users surged 15 times to a peak of more than 40,000 during February, but dropped by 60% during the following month. Analysis conducted by The Defiant found that only 4,360 users were active on the platform daily in June.

However, Lens has managed to buck the socialfi downtrend, with its user base enjoying surging growth in 2024, buoyed by its permissionless launch in February. Lens provides infrastructure for third-party developers to build decentralized social apps on top of it.

Lens has consistently posted new all-time highs for activity since May. While nearly 28,600 users were active on Lens-based platforms in January, 262,364 wallets interacted with Lens native applications last month, according to Lenscan. However, the data likely counts wallets that interacted with multiple applications within Lens’ ecosystem.

No points program for Untitled

Delong told The Defiant that Untitled won’t launch a points program to incentivize early adoption.

Despite describing points programs as an effective short-term “growth hack,” Delong said points-based incentives often degrade the user experience and culminate in a steep activity decline later on.

“An airdrop is likely in the plan but we haven’t mapped out how to best reward early/frequent users,” Delong said.

Related: Avara Announces Lens Network L2 Leveraging ZK Stack