Web3 Social Usage and Engagement

Key Insights

• Lens has 20,000 active users so far in October which is an all-time-high for the protocol and is nearly 8x more than Farcaster.
• While Lens has more overall engagement, Farcaster has seen more new engagements in each of the last two months and is growing user engagement at a much faster rate than Lens.
• Farcaster users are nearly twice as active as Lens users with roughly 30 engagements per user each month.
• 20% of Farcaster users are highly engaged with over 50 total engagements while only 5% of Lens users have the same engagement.

Every crypto bear market in the past has gone off to spawn a new sector or token model within crypto. This bear market is no different, with numerous sectors like decentralized social or gaming vying to lead the next consumer adoption wave. Historically, the sectors leading the wave have dominated the preceding hackathon submissions. Now, the most dominant sector amongst hackathon projects is social.

Web3 social is architecturally different from Web2 in that the underlying social graph is a separate protocol from the front ends. Most of the hackathon activity has been centered around attracting projects to build on top of one of the leading social graph protocols, Lens. While Lens may receive substantial hackathon attention, the crypto community has also praised a second social graph protocol, Farcaster. Both social graph protocols are mainly engaged through a Twitter-like front end which allows users to post, comment, and re-share. Each of the protocols has differing architectures and levels of maturity, but at the core, the most important thing for any social application is user traction.