More physical and more social 

Imagine a world where your daily actions, from your morning bike ride to your evening gym session to your dinner out with friends, seamlessly contribute to a richer, more interconnected digital identity. This isn't cypherpunk fiction—it's the recipe for a more social internet. 

In this post, I want to evaluate a combination of two seemingly unconnected domains, and why I believe their overlap is foundational and worth more attention. The first is a more interoperable social data layer. We have highly performant social media thanks to ‘Web2’ but lack interoperability due to the standardized business model of ad-driven data monetization. The second domain is DePINs (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks), a unique mechanism to crypto that incentivizes physical build-out of infrastructure (or anything) using token rewards. 

A combination of these two domains is where I believe a large percentage of crypto’s social adoption should occur and how eventually the internet will reconfigure to its users experiencing more control over and value from the data they generate.

Why social?

In democratic societies, social adoption has generally been a precursor to mass adoption. This trend holds true for most technologies, and crypto is no exception. Reflecting on the internet's growth, social media significantly drove new user adoption.

This is because peer-to-peer communication over the internet had novel dimensionality over text messaging and phone calls. This added dimensionality also exists through the properties of crypto but has yet to be realized. 

A significant ‘added dimensionality’ that crypto brings to the internet is the ability to build permissionless identities. The form or method by which these identities come about is still developing but its use case is undeniable. Extrapolating on the base concept of what blockchains enable, internet-native identities are a logical use case. Unlike hardware-based (phone number), or data set-based (Web 2 profiles) identities a crypto identity in the limit exists in its full capabilities anywhere an internet connection exists. This building block would allow any internet-connected device to ‘connect with’ or at minimum query crypto identities thereby giving them social properties! 0xdesigner and others post great examples of this and how on chain identities forming relationship-based ‘social trees’ could enhance online experiences.  

Several frameworks and base layer approaches already exist for this vertical (ENS, SNS, Farcaster, Worldcoin, Lens). Although most are still in the provisional stages, none have yet demonstrated these properties in a clear consumer-facing manner. Social media’s growth in its current form is close to saturated and competing with Facebook, X, or TikTok using marginally enhanced button capabilities will not bring social adoption. Wallet-authenticated social media apps are closer to fighting an entrenched network effect using natively bad UX than introducing something new. Crypto’s unique properties make it an ideal technology for re-expanding the social layer and turning unexpected data sets into action-linked user timelines tied to permissionless digital identities.

Why more physical? 

Why would a near saturation of social media’s current form mean demand for a more physical social data layer exists? Two reasons, one, our lives involve a growing number of internet-dependent tools beyond smartphones: City Bikes, OMNY subway gates, Gym memberships, restaurants, smart fridges, etc. All these have highly parallel data sets structured by users' email + password identities that in isolation have marginal value to users. The second reason is that making the internet more closely connected with the world is easier than continuously making the internet more connected with humans (i.e. what has been the trend for the last 20 years). 

Let me explain.

First, what does the amount of parallelism across user data sets in, say, City Bikes have to do with social data? Well, it’s an easier target than conventional social data sources! The listed examples all rely on data sets of their users' identities for metrics, accounting, etc… but they do not utilize those data sets directly for growth or demand. Maintaining these data sets is secondary to their operation and for users is highly duplicative across tools. Building identity systems starting from these types of tools and working out would unify a peripheral area of the internet (one consumers maintain less than explicitly social ones) along with allowing for a unique dimensionality in people's social lives that many do not realize exists.

Second, why is making the internet more connected to the world an easier target than continuously making the internet more connected to humans? The Internet has become an integral part of younger generations' daily lives for work, education, communication, and more and will most likely continue to do so. 66% of the world's population has access to the Internet in some form and the average screen time for a Gen Z individual is around 7 hours per day. Current forms of “crypto social” are competing for users 7 hours per day bandwidth at the interface end when in fact crypto’s strength is turning existing unconventional data sets into more open user timelines of hard social data. Growing online social data requires work and usually screen time but through crypto identities giving way to social trees a richer, less device-dependent data cultivation environment can exist and if done right will flourish.

Why will physical social data have value?

In the same way, telecommunication has gone from phone numbers/texts to richer internet communication so will siloed highly parallel corporation-owned digital identities go to richer more user-connected internet native identities.  We are physical beings, and building social trust has been the key to our success as a species. Building on this social trust and maintaining its integrity over time is a large part of how we have continued to grow and become so dominant. This zero-to-one began with spoken language and then went on to writing. More recently it went from writing to using the internet and now we are slowly discovering the advantages of using a blockchain. Just as when writing was invented and someone from the past could tell someone in the future a story with no intermediaries beyond paper and pen, so does a blockchain remove the need for a trusted intermediary when taking high-trust actions across any internet-connected distance. 

The issue now is that trust relayed via the internet and more specifically blockchains is not inherently correlated to the current social execution environment that is the physical world we live in. Decentralized Finance(DeFi) already has a term for this which is ‘oracles’. As defined by Chainlink - “Blockchain oracles are entities that connect blockchains to external systems, thereby enabling smart contracts to execute based upon inputs and outputs from the real world.” Oracles in the described sense are a fraction of what they could be if ‘external systems’ include the literal real world we live in. Projects like Hivemapper, Helium, and Teleport could also be considered ‘oracles’ - Hivemapper an oracle of street image data, Helium - of wireless network demand, and Teleport - of ride-hailing interest. They all have marketplaces tied very closely to that ‘oracle’ of data, but their advantage over traditional competitors is the ability to respond to demand more accurately. Growth is organic and more efficient than in non-DePIN competitors because their products revolve around a ‘real world oracle’. These existing projects may lack ‘social expression’ to the degree of social media but that does not make them less social - the products they offer are closely tied to a specific oracle of social intent making them inherently social.

If we broaden the degrees of expression but remain focused on hardware devices or potential devices that could serve as “oracles” of the physical world a large layer of value exists! Your eight gym visits last month become hard reviewable insights both your gym buddy and doctor can reference when you mention your insane early morning PR. As a fan of Bryan Johnson, his smart fridge grocery rotation can map directly into your fridge's shopping list. Your smart washing machine you paid $4k for that you only use once a week can become a semi-public form of passive income where at certain hours other folks in your building can pay for clean laundry priced by the load on a localized free market. This is what physical social data would incentivize! This is what crypto social could be.  

Some of the most valuable social data we produce/consume are our habits and preferences. Habits can be unique to a lifestyle or preferences based purely on what attracts you. With current social tools habit tracking/sharing is very siloed and hard to build social connections through unless you are highly social verbally/by text or are willing to sync your contacts/some other existing zero context social tree. Examples of siloed products in this area that exist today would be Strava, Apple Health, Peleton, Thermomix, and others. Despite being great products with thriving social ecosystems individually they are all effectively isolated ‘oracles’ of physical social data serving only the digital identities they recognize (email/password account holders). A unifying reference point across products starting from the user's identities would allow each ‘oracle’ of physical social data to more easily generate value. 

A real example of this being built today is Receipts. Unifying sensor data from a variety of fitness tracking devices the upcoming V2 will allow any user to attest their workouts against their on chain identity. Expanding this concept, if Receipts were to see enough adoption fringe device manufacturers could and eventually would have the incentive to directly integrate on chain identities into their systems allowing broader use of their devices' abilities. 

 Now as a more detailed hypothetical example take a combination of a tech bro's favorite tools - a Whoop strap, an 8 sleep mattress pod, a smart fridge, and his gym membership. Each tool and its associated siloed data set has value to this individual but lacks a user connection that is seemingly simple and uncaptured. In their current state, each tool and its respective user's data are siloed away and unconnected. If our individual wants to share his findings on what eight hours of sleep in a room of 65°F, two strength sessions with a buddy, and a 5k a day, on an Atkins diet results in after two weeks he needs to execute the process and then extract all his data across all four tools/data sets and synthesize it into a text/image-based social post which he will then share with his constrained and most likely context unaware network he’s procured in our inefficient attention economy. 

On the hypothetical flip side, our tech bro and his fleet of personal discovery tools can continuously be locked in mining valuable social data which by nature of at minimum being pinned to a unifying crypto identity can surface itself according to its value. More concretely - rather than requiring a developer to build an interface that utilizes each product's API to allow for search by user profile and data synthesis that way, each user could natively discover data produced in parallel (i.e. by the same human) and where there is organic overlap by nature of how each data silo structure is recording around its user's open identities. At some point in time, each of the four tools would benefit more from allowing their users to associate their in-data set profiles/identities with a crypto social tree than keeping them isolated in their own data silos. 

Social media is hard because in reality there is only one social layer! Capturing the entirety of the world's tweet-style text output is possible and arguably has already been done. The same goes for every other length, use case, and even language type of text information produced. This is because the connection of ideas is valuable, indiscriminate of the format -  whatever is easiest for people to convey their ideas with can have value as a product. Web2 or maybe better described as the 2-dimensional internet is already close to exhausting this concept of “social media”. The entirety of the world’s text/audio/image social media may have somewhere to land and be consumed but as physical beings, we produce and consume many other types of social data beyond simply text/audio/image. 

Building social media replicas with crypto is hard to sell and most importantly misses a chance to leverage the core potential of what crypto identities allow. If a place existed whose properties allowed for the organic connection of identities and their established data sets indiscriminate of origin, why would generating new data sets on top have more value than connecting existing ones? Beyond concepts like user ownership and censorship resistance, the value of data sets generated on top has little reason to attract more adoption than connecting rich existing ones.

Where are ‘social data DePINs’ ripe for development? 

Social data DePINs could develop anywhere underutilized data sets or physical points of social interest exist. Underutilized data sets of social interest exist anywhere internet-connected sensors are facilitating a social function, the more unique the device the better. Think of consumer or public-facing products and services that now require internet connectivity but are not internet-native. 

These can all arguably be viewed as uncapitalized social data DePINs. A user creates or connects an email+password account which then references any recorded data, whether it is shared with the user or not is discretionary of the service provider. The user's ability to utilize that data personally is never equal to that of the maintainer and often the more physical the product the less developed the online experience. A poor online experience in no way means degraded quality of social data. A routine/path recorded across multiple public and personal devices has little current value by nature of being too spread out not because it lacks the consumer-focused sensor quality of an iPhone camera. 

Similarly, physical points of social interest exist anywhere capturing social data production is too complex or requires too much coordination to have been done so far. If workout routines and dining out experiences are so memorable why don’t business owners turn each workout spot or restaurant table into a passively recorded digital memory for each party that comes through? It might sound insane and like a small business-funded surveillance platform but with existing and near-developed technologies a privacy-preserving version of this could very well exist. Hardware devices deployed through a DePIN-like approach could self-establish anywhere points of social interest exist. An experience-focused restaurant could be incentivized to install attested sensor DePIN cameras above each table allowing for trusted recording and transmission of users' visits while remaining fully unresponsible for the system's integrity. Other example areas could be any physical locations that have a high churn of social data (often already have some sort of grassroots email+password memory layer). 

These listed benefits do exist to a degree with current companies but are significantly limited because of the standardized structuring of limited email + password user identities.

Approaches

General thoughts on best approaches. Production of recorded social data should be passive and have DePIN properties. For starters, if it is not an already required step or easier than opening an app and hitting record on your phone most people will not do it. Actions that require more work or effort can be tied to token incentives using DePIN mechanics. 

The two target areas that are most feasible for adoption as detailed earlier are: 

• Existing unique hardware/devices that already generate ‘social’ data sets

• Physical social data hotspots lacking sensor products due to complexity or coordination

What kind of interfaces or user experiences would early iterations of tools in this area look like? For existing unique hardware/devices my thinking is nearly a direct competitor to mobile ‘Contacts’ apps or users' mutual followings on X, Instagram, or wherever. An interface where any connection appears automatically and context updates following actions. At the business-facing end, it could look something like Privy but oriented toward email+password user-authenticated data sets. In the most bare-bone form, Web2 companies would allow users to attest or link their data set specific email+password profile to a crypto identity. From there linking actions to on chain attested data points would form this internet-native ‘Contacts’ app. 

For social data sensor networks, I imagine locations with an overlap of fitness/health and unrecorded social data would be the perfect place to start. DePIN camera network across bouldering gyms expanding to broader fitness and restaurant venues. Similarly, competing with the Matter standard and servicing smart home products could also have a lot of appeal. Starting with a DePIN smart home product and turning the network into a platform like Helium has for wireless networks. This could enable quicker response to demand as a service and localized market insight and trend tracking.

Conclusion

An interoperable social data layer as a concept is alluded to and commonly dreamed of in both crypto and broader communities, yet it often remains poorly understood. This is because social media has massively expanded the granularity at which ideas can connect. At first, limited by purely physical conversation distance to now barely being discriminant of language, ideas can connect globally. In the same way, our digital identities deserve the freedom to connect across data sets in line with our ideal physical world. Our everyday actions are ideas manifested into physical form using our bodies. Through the use of trusted physical sensor products, I believe connecting these ideas will have as much value as connecting unmanifested ones. 

Inherently centralized account structures less easily allow for continued growth or user freedom through cross-referencing of data sets or passive production of social data in ways that are natural in organic human-centric networks. Mark Zuckerberg who has arguably had the most success in building social media consistently iterates that his focus is “building technologies that help people connect”. In line with his directing focus, permissionless identities giving way to a more interoperable social data layer will better connect people and allow for heavier reliance on the idea aggregators that are social media. 

Social data exchange will be the driving force of the internet becoming more blockchain dependent with I believe an outset advantage around token-incentivized physical device networks (DePINs) that passively produce social data making a more connected physical and digital world. 

Sources

graph - https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

others - linked ^