The emerging on-chain social entertainment protocol NAD.fun is committed to building an entertainment ecosystem that integrates social graphs, content incentives, and open finance on high-activity public chains like Ethereum or Solana. The project aims to seamlessly connect content creation, community interaction, and DeFi yield mechanisms through composable smart contract modules, challenging the centralized business models of traditional social media platforms. In the current context of renewed attention on the SocialFi sector, NAD.fun's exploration may open new pathways for its position in the fierce ecosystem competition.
What is NAD.fun? Reshaping the Ownership and Circulation of Social Value
According to the core concept revealed in its GitBook documentation, the starting point of the NAD.fun project is to address the long-standing issue of unfair value distribution in traditional Web2 social platforms. In the existing model, the immense value generated by user-created content, interaction data, and the resulting network effects is almost entirely captured by the platform, while creators and active users, who are the sources of value, struggle to obtain fair economic returns. NAD.fun aims to “financialize” social influence and interaction behavior through blockchain technology, allowing every participant to directly share in the dividends of ecological growth.
The realization of this vision relies on a carefully designed, composable protocol layer. NAD.fun is not building a closed application, but rather provides a series of foundational smart contract modules akin to LEGO bricks. These modules may cover decentralized identity, on-chain social graph relationships, content NFTization, community governance, and built-in liquidity incentive pools, among others. Developers and the community can freely build various specific entertainment applications based on these modules, such as prediction markets, fan token communities, on-chain games, or content crowdfunding platforms, thereby forming a vibrant open ecosystem.
The economic model design of the protocol is key to its success or failure. It is expected to issue native functional tokens for governance, paying fees, and incentivizing specific behaviors (such as high-quality content creation, community building, or liquidity provision). Balancing the token release rate, reward distribution mechanism, and long-term value capture, while avoiding the short-termism trap of “mining, withdrawing, and selling,” will be the primary challenge faced by the project team. Its white paper needs to clearly outline the specific utility of the tokens in various aspects of the ecosystem, as well as how to ensure that their intrinsic demand can grow alongside the expansion of the ecosystem through mechanism design.
Technical Architecture Hypothesis: How to Support Complex Social Interactions on High-Performance Chains?
Although it is not possible to obtain detailed technical content from the NAD.fun white paper, we can make a reasonable deduction about its possible architecture based on the current technical trends of mainstream SocialFi projects. The success of the project primarily depends on the choice of the underlying public chain. Choosing Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions (such as Arbitrum, Base) can leverage its largest developer community and asset security; while choosing Solana can achieve higher transaction throughput and lower fees, making it more suitable for high-frequency, small-value social interaction scenarios, but it is necessary to weigh its historical network stability.
At the level of account abstraction and user experience, NAD.fun must provide an interaction that is almost as smooth as Web2. This means it is likely to deeply integrate the ERC-4337 standard (if based on Ethereum) or similar solutions, enabling features like social account login, gas-free transactions (covered by the project or sponsors), and batch operations. Only by completely hiding the complexity of blockchain in the background can it attract mainstream internet users, which is a threshold that all SocialFi projects must overcome.
Its core “social graph” and “content” on-chain methods involve various technical paths. One is to store key relationships and content hash values on the chain to ensure their immutability and ownership, while actual data is stored in decentralized storage solutions such as Arweave and IPFS. Another, lighter approach may only issue certificates or proofs representing social actions (such as following, liking, tipping) as NFTs or Soulbound Tokens, thus recording and quantifying influence. Designing a solution that ensures data sovereignty while controlling on-chain costs is a key technical challenge.
Potential architecture and functional modules of NAD.fun based on industry trends
Layer 1 Blockchain Selection: Ethereum Layer 2 (seeking ecological breadth) or Solana (seeking performance and low fees)
Core Components: Decentralized Identity (DID), Social Graph Protocol, Content NFT Standards, Community Governance Framework
Key User Experience: Deep integration of Account Abstraction (AA), enabling social login and gasless payments.
Data Storage Solution: on-chain certification + Arweave/IPFS decentralized storage combination
Core Economic Incentives: Native tokens are used for governance, payments, content tipping, and liquidity mining.
A Re-examination of the SocialFi Track: Opportunities and Challenges for NAD.fun
NAD.fun chooses to release its blueprint at this time, as the concept of SocialFi returns to the industry's spotlight after experiencing several rounds of ups and downs. The “social tokenization” experiment represented by friend.tech, although exposed sustainability issues after the initial hype, has successfully validated the market demand for financial pricing of social relationships. However, the lessons from predecessors are also evident: simply tokenizing social influence and engaging in speculative trading can easily create a Ponzi-like cycle, ultimately collapsing due to a lack of real application scenarios beyond trading.
Therefore, if NAD.fun wants to stand out, it must build “real use cases” that go beyond simple token speculation. This requires incubating specific applications with stickiness within its ecosystem, such as a decentralized “OnlyFans” fully controlled by creators over subscription income and content copyrights; a decentralized “Kickstarter + DAO” for project incubation and investment based on community consensus; or an on-chain “Steam” that capitalizes on gaming achievements and social relationships. These applications need to offer unique value that Web2 platforms cannot provide (such as true asset ownership, earnings without platform cuts, and cross-application social asset reuse) in order to form a core competitive advantage.
The challenges are multidimensional. In addition to intense market competition (facing challenges from mature ecosystems like Lens Protocol and Farcaster), regulatory uncertainty hangs over all SocialFi projects like the sword of Damocles. Actions involving user-issued tokens and content monetization can easily cross the red lines of securities laws and financial regulations in various countries. Furthermore, designing mechanisms to resist Sybil attacks (witch attacks) and preventing users from manipulating incentive systems by creating massive numbers of fake accounts is also a difficult problem that must be solved for the economic security of the project.
Investment and Participation Perspective: How to Evaluate the Value of Early SocialFi Protocols?
For cryptocurrency investors and ecosystem participants, evaluating early SocialFi protocols like NAD.fun requires an analytical framework different from that used for assessing DeFi or infrastructure protocols. The primary focus should not be on its TVL (Total Value Locked) or transaction volume, but rather on the background and execution capability of its core development team. Does the team have experience in successful product development? Do they have a deep understanding of the economics of social networks and user psychology? Is their technical roadmap clear and achievable?
Secondly, a deep analysis of the robustness of its token economic model should be conducted. Is the token designed as an indispensable “fuel” and “stake” within the ecosystem? Is its release mechanism inclined to reward long-term builders or short-term speculators? Does the protocol's revenue source (such as transaction fees and royalty cuts) have a clear mechanism linking it to the token's value (for example, through buybacks and burns or staking dividends)? A well-designed economic model should be able to automatically enhance the token's scarcity and demand as the ecosystem grows.
For early participants, risks and opportunities coexist. The high risk lies in the possibility that the project may fail due to technical, operational, or regulatory issues, leading the token value to drop to zero. However, the opportunity is that if one can identify and participate early in the construction of the next explosive SocialFi ecosystem, not only can they achieve considerable economic returns, but they can also accumulate valuable on-chain reputation and social capital. Participation strategies can be diverse: technical developers can try to build based on their protocol; content creators can become early users and establish their own on-chain community; while investors can make prudent decisions at the time of the token's public issuance through in-depth research.
Conclusion: The experiment of the fusion of social and finance is far from over
NAD.fun represents the industry's relentless pursuit of the ultimate form of the “value internet”—a network where not just currency, but everything of value such as human attention, creativity, social relationships, etc., can be efficiently, fairly recorded, verified, and traded.
This road is destined to be long and fraught with thorns. NAD.fun and similar projects not only need to overcome technical challenges and design sophisticated token economics but also need to cultivate a truly vibrant community culture that attracts creators and users who are not here for speculation but genuinely identify with the decentralized social concept. This is not just a financial experiment; it is also a profound social experiment.
Regardless of whether NAD.fun ultimately succeeds, its attempt itself holds positive significance. It drives the entire industry to contemplate what a new landscape of human social collaboration and entertainment will look like after removing the “intermediary tax” and “control” of centralized platforms. For those of us who are at the forefront, maintaining observation, participating cautiously, and drawing profound insights about humanity and values may be the most rational attitude when facing this wave. After all, in the crypto world, sometimes the process itself is more enlightening than the outcome.
This page may contain third-party content, which is provided for information purposes only (not representations/warranties) and should not be considered as an endorsement of its views by Gate, nor as financial or professional advice. See Disclaimer for details.
A new species of social finance is online? The NAD.fun White Paper reveals the innovative blueprint for the on-chain entertainment protocol.
The emerging on-chain social entertainment protocol NAD.fun is committed to building an entertainment ecosystem that integrates social graphs, content incentives, and open finance on high-activity public chains like Ethereum or Solana. The project aims to seamlessly connect content creation, community interaction, and DeFi yield mechanisms through composable smart contract modules, challenging the centralized business models of traditional social media platforms. In the current context of renewed attention on the SocialFi sector, NAD.fun's exploration may open new pathways for its position in the fierce ecosystem competition.
What is NAD.fun? Reshaping the Ownership and Circulation of Social Value
According to the core concept revealed in its GitBook documentation, the starting point of the NAD.fun project is to address the long-standing issue of unfair value distribution in traditional Web2 social platforms. In the existing model, the immense value generated by user-created content, interaction data, and the resulting network effects is almost entirely captured by the platform, while creators and active users, who are the sources of value, struggle to obtain fair economic returns. NAD.fun aims to “financialize” social influence and interaction behavior through blockchain technology, allowing every participant to directly share in the dividends of ecological growth.
The realization of this vision relies on a carefully designed, composable protocol layer. NAD.fun is not building a closed application, but rather provides a series of foundational smart contract modules akin to LEGO bricks. These modules may cover decentralized identity, on-chain social graph relationships, content NFTization, community governance, and built-in liquidity incentive pools, among others. Developers and the community can freely build various specific entertainment applications based on these modules, such as prediction markets, fan token communities, on-chain games, or content crowdfunding platforms, thereby forming a vibrant open ecosystem.
The economic model design of the protocol is key to its success or failure. It is expected to issue native functional tokens for governance, paying fees, and incentivizing specific behaviors (such as high-quality content creation, community building, or liquidity provision). Balancing the token release rate, reward distribution mechanism, and long-term value capture, while avoiding the short-termism trap of “mining, withdrawing, and selling,” will be the primary challenge faced by the project team. Its white paper needs to clearly outline the specific utility of the tokens in various aspects of the ecosystem, as well as how to ensure that their intrinsic demand can grow alongside the expansion of the ecosystem through mechanism design.
Technical Architecture Hypothesis: How to Support Complex Social Interactions on High-Performance Chains?
Although it is not possible to obtain detailed technical content from the NAD.fun white paper, we can make a reasonable deduction about its possible architecture based on the current technical trends of mainstream SocialFi projects. The success of the project primarily depends on the choice of the underlying public chain. Choosing Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions (such as Arbitrum, Base) can leverage its largest developer community and asset security; while choosing Solana can achieve higher transaction throughput and lower fees, making it more suitable for high-frequency, small-value social interaction scenarios, but it is necessary to weigh its historical network stability.
At the level of account abstraction and user experience, NAD.fun must provide an interaction that is almost as smooth as Web2. This means it is likely to deeply integrate the ERC-4337 standard (if based on Ethereum) or similar solutions, enabling features like social account login, gas-free transactions (covered by the project or sponsors), and batch operations. Only by completely hiding the complexity of blockchain in the background can it attract mainstream internet users, which is a threshold that all SocialFi projects must overcome.
Its core “social graph” and “content” on-chain methods involve various technical paths. One is to store key relationships and content hash values on the chain to ensure their immutability and ownership, while actual data is stored in decentralized storage solutions such as Arweave and IPFS. Another, lighter approach may only issue certificates or proofs representing social actions (such as following, liking, tipping) as NFTs or Soulbound Tokens, thus recording and quantifying influence. Designing a solution that ensures data sovereignty while controlling on-chain costs is a key technical challenge.
Potential architecture and functional modules of NAD.fun based on industry trends
A Re-examination of the SocialFi Track: Opportunities and Challenges for NAD.fun
NAD.fun chooses to release its blueprint at this time, as the concept of SocialFi returns to the industry's spotlight after experiencing several rounds of ups and downs. The “social tokenization” experiment represented by friend.tech, although exposed sustainability issues after the initial hype, has successfully validated the market demand for financial pricing of social relationships. However, the lessons from predecessors are also evident: simply tokenizing social influence and engaging in speculative trading can easily create a Ponzi-like cycle, ultimately collapsing due to a lack of real application scenarios beyond trading.
Therefore, if NAD.fun wants to stand out, it must build “real use cases” that go beyond simple token speculation. This requires incubating specific applications with stickiness within its ecosystem, such as a decentralized “OnlyFans” fully controlled by creators over subscription income and content copyrights; a decentralized “Kickstarter + DAO” for project incubation and investment based on community consensus; or an on-chain “Steam” that capitalizes on gaming achievements and social relationships. These applications need to offer unique value that Web2 platforms cannot provide (such as true asset ownership, earnings without platform cuts, and cross-application social asset reuse) in order to form a core competitive advantage.
The challenges are multidimensional. In addition to intense market competition (facing challenges from mature ecosystems like Lens Protocol and Farcaster), regulatory uncertainty hangs over all SocialFi projects like the sword of Damocles. Actions involving user-issued tokens and content monetization can easily cross the red lines of securities laws and financial regulations in various countries. Furthermore, designing mechanisms to resist Sybil attacks (witch attacks) and preventing users from manipulating incentive systems by creating massive numbers of fake accounts is also a difficult problem that must be solved for the economic security of the project.
Investment and Participation Perspective: How to Evaluate the Value of Early SocialFi Protocols?
For cryptocurrency investors and ecosystem participants, evaluating early SocialFi protocols like NAD.fun requires an analytical framework different from that used for assessing DeFi or infrastructure protocols. The primary focus should not be on its TVL (Total Value Locked) or transaction volume, but rather on the background and execution capability of its core development team. Does the team have experience in successful product development? Do they have a deep understanding of the economics of social networks and user psychology? Is their technical roadmap clear and achievable?
Secondly, a deep analysis of the robustness of its token economic model should be conducted. Is the token designed as an indispensable “fuel” and “stake” within the ecosystem? Is its release mechanism inclined to reward long-term builders or short-term speculators? Does the protocol's revenue source (such as transaction fees and royalty cuts) have a clear mechanism linking it to the token's value (for example, through buybacks and burns or staking dividends)? A well-designed economic model should be able to automatically enhance the token's scarcity and demand as the ecosystem grows.
For early participants, risks and opportunities coexist. The high risk lies in the possibility that the project may fail due to technical, operational, or regulatory issues, leading the token value to drop to zero. However, the opportunity is that if one can identify and participate early in the construction of the next explosive SocialFi ecosystem, not only can they achieve considerable economic returns, but they can also accumulate valuable on-chain reputation and social capital. Participation strategies can be diverse: technical developers can try to build based on their protocol; content creators can become early users and establish their own on-chain community; while investors can make prudent decisions at the time of the token's public issuance through in-depth research.
Conclusion: The experiment of the fusion of social and finance is far from over
NAD.fun represents the industry's relentless pursuit of the ultimate form of the “value internet”—a network where not just currency, but everything of value such as human attention, creativity, social relationships, etc., can be efficiently, fairly recorded, verified, and traded.
This road is destined to be long and fraught with thorns. NAD.fun and similar projects not only need to overcome technical challenges and design sophisticated token economics but also need to cultivate a truly vibrant community culture that attracts creators and users who are not here for speculation but genuinely identify with the decentralized social concept. This is not just a financial experiment; it is also a profound social experiment.
Regardless of whether NAD.fun ultimately succeeds, its attempt itself holds positive significance. It drives the entire industry to contemplate what a new landscape of human social collaboration and entertainment will look like after removing the “intermediary tax” and “control” of centralized platforms. For those of us who are at the forefront, maintaining observation, participating cautiously, and drawing profound insights about humanity and values may be the most rational attitude when facing this wave. After all, in the crypto world, sometimes the process itself is more enlightening than the outcome.