SocialFi is a new branch of cryptocurrency that merges the core aspects of social networking and DeFi into one protocol. Since its inception, the SocialFi industry has grown into a force to be reckoned with, holding a current market cap of $958,801,318, and a 24-hour trading volume of $107,843,386, with the numbers set to only increase. Due to its recent popularity, it’s only fair to check out the most popular SocialFi projects making waves in 2025.

What is SocialFi?

Source: https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-socialfi-a-fusion-of-social-media-web3-and-decentralized-finance

SocialFi (short for Social Finance) is a new concept in the crypto industry that merges social networking with DeFi. It involves creating platforms where people can socialize with their friends and communities while conducting blockchain transactions like trading tokens and staking. Essentially, SocialFi converts regular online interactions into new opportunities to earn income, thus offering them more financial freedom.

With SocialFi, users own all their content and personal data, as opposed to normal social media where each platform controls user data. This allows users to earn digital assets like tokens and NFTs directly from their activity. As a result, SocialFi can ensure full transparency and fairness.

Additionally, SocialFi platforms use a similar method of governance, giving users a say in how each SocialFi project grows. This means that all decisions, from content guidelines to reward distributions are made through decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Using this procedure appeals to privacy-conscious users, thus offering an inclusive model for future social media, blockchain technology and finance projects.

Best SocialFi Projects

Some of the highest-rated SocialFi projects include:

CyberConnect

Source: https://cyber.co

CyberConnect was created to combine Web3’s flexibility with social networking. It is a decentralized social graph protocol, a blockchain-based system that records and manages users’ social activity, including friends, followers, and engagement. This allows CyberConnect to give users full control of their digital identity and content on the blockchain.

The platform was founded in 2021 by Wilson Wei, Ryan Li, Shiyu Zhang, and Zhimao Liu. Its parent company, Cybertino Inc, received substantial backing to the tune of $25 million across four rounds. Its investors include Animoca Brands, Multicoin Capital, Sky9 Capital, Draper Dragon, Lattice Capital, amongst others.

CyberConnect’s architecture is user-friendly and includes several features, including CyberID and CyberGraph. CyberID is the CyberConnect blockchain’s native naming system, while CyberGraph is a set of smart contracts that provide censorship-resistant social data (meaning this information cannot be easily blocked or deleted). These features combine to create a self-sustaining digital identity (DID) system that gives users access to their complete social profile without needing different platform logins.

CyberConnect also uses account abstraction to enable full interoperability across blockchains like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon. This improves its user-friendliness by reducing technical barriers associated with using blockchain tech.

The CYBER token powers the CyberConnect ecosystem. CYBER’s functions include governance, paying for gas fees, and purchasing premium digital identities like unique CyberProfiles (the names on CyberID). With its V3 upgrade announced in 2023, CyberConnect expanded its processing capacity, and today, it supports over 2 million users and has processed up to 20 million transactions.

Friend.Tech

Source: https://www.friend.tech

Friend.tech is a blockchain–based social platform launched on Base in August 2023. It was built by developers bearing the pseudonyms Racer and Shrimp to redefine how regular users and influencers connect.

Just like other SocialFi projects, Friend.Tech focuses on giving users full ownership over their digital presence. However, what separates this platform from others is that it is on Friend.Tech, creators can monetize their influence by issuing digital assets called “keys” (formerly known as shares). Owning these keys also grants access to exclusive content like digital clubs, private chat rooms, and other reward systems like airdrops.

The platform’s architecture is designed to merge social networking with decentralized finance (DeFi). As such, Friend.tech leverages the secure infrastructure of the Base blockchain to ensure fast, transparent, and censorship-resistant interactions. Friend.tech was also backed during its seed round (though the money raised is not publicly available), led by Paradigm and Notation Capital.

Friend.Tech is powered by its native utility token, FRIEND. The token was distributed entirely through airdrops, focusing on a model where insiders or investors could not dominate the token supply. FRIEND serves various functions, including completing transactions on the platform (such as buying and selling keys), governance, and incentivizing active participation.

Cheelee

Source: https://cheelee.us/?v=v17

Cheelee is a short video platform that turns everyday screen time into financial rewards by combining elements of both SocialFi and GameFi. It was launched in February 2023 on the Binance Smart Chain by Roman Alekseev and co-founders Ruslan Sharov and Yuriy Kardonov.

Cheelee was built on an Attention Economy model, where user attention is valued as a form of currency. This means that as you watch videos, interact with content, and engage with other community members, you earn CHEEL tokens. This model empowers everyone, not just content creators, to monetize their online presence.

What really sets Cheelee apart though is its unique economic design and robust anti-fraud measures. The platform is protected by complex algorithms that combat malicious bots and fraudulent activities, ensuring that rewards are distributed fairly.

Cheelee also provides a Stability Fund, which stores revenue from advertising, in-app purchases, and NFT sales. This fund supports token buybacks and burning, which help improve the value of both the rewards/governance token, CHEEL, and the utility token, LEE. CHEEL is used to upgrade features (such as NFT glasses) and participate in community governance. On the other hand, LEE serves as the primary currency for transactions, such as watching videos and accessing exclusive content.

In addition to its watch-to-earn model, Cheelee incorporates gaming elements to increase engagement on the platform. As a result, users can participate in challenges and unlock achievements, further increasing their earning potential.

Lens Protocol

Source: https://www.lens.xyz

Lens Protocol is another decentralized social graph protocol hosted on the Polygon blockchain. It was developed by the Aave team and launched in 2022. It focuses on making user data portable and censorship-resistant.

Lens Protocol operates on a modular framework, which makes it easy for developers to build and extend functionalities on the platform. It uses an energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) model to provide efficient transactions. As a social graph protocol, Lens also supports a wide range of interconnected apps, including social networks, marketplaces and content creation/monetization tools.

This kind of flexibility improves creativity and also opens up new ways for content creators to earn directly from their work. Additionally, users can earn bonuses in native MATIC tokens through active participation, governance, and conducting transactions with the platform.

Open Campus

Source: https://opencampus.xyz

Open Campus is a community-led platform that improves education by connecting learners, educators, content creators, and service providers in one decentralized ecosystem. It was built on the EDU Chain, a Layer 3 network within the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem. It is also integrated with platforms like TinyTap and GEMS Education to decentralize educational resources further, offering more learning materials while sharing rewards for participation.

The project’s vision is to allow users to choose educational content. In most traditional systems, educational content is controlled by centralized institutions. However, Open Campus takes a different approach, tokenizing educational information through Publisher NFTs. This approach protects intellectual property and allows educators to earn from their courses and content.

Open Campus is run by the Open Campus DAO, which includes all EDU holders, the Open Campus team, and other key stakeholders. The DAO is also run by a Council, a group of 5 individuals whose duty is to ensure that the Open Campus Protocol runs smoothly and can add approved features. Members of the Council include Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, Yogev Shelly, founder and CEO of TinyTap, Jay Varkey, Executive Director of GEMS Education, Jack Chorowasky, ex-president of the KIPP Foundation, and Yida Gao, the founder of Shima Capital.

EDU is the Open Campus ecosystem’s native token. Its functions include facilitating transactions, governance, and rewards. Open Campus also features a unique “Learn-to-Earn” (L2E) model that links every learning experience to earning opportunities, allowing students and educational content creators to gain rewards from participating.

Additionally, Open Campus has attracted significant interest from leading venture capital firms, raising up to $11.65 million across five funding rounds, with investors including Animoca Brands, Sequoia Capital, and Binance Labs. It also supports accelerator programs like OC-X, which provides educators worldwide with resources, assistance, and funding.

Farcaster

Source: https://www.farcaster.xyz/

Farcaster is another decentralized social graph protocol built on the Optimism network. It was founded in 2020 by former Coinbase employees Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. It provides an ecosystem of different applications all aimed at transforming online interactions. The project’s main product is Warpcast, a Twitter-like platform that handles most of the protocol’s activity. It also supports integrations with other apps on blockchains like Solana.

Another popular app on Farcaster is Frames, which was introduced in January 2024. Frames allow users to perform functions within Farcaster apps (like Warpcast) directly, without needing to switch to a third-party application. This integrated approach streamlines the user experience, as evidenced by a 400% increase in daily users, thus making it easier to navigate and interact within the Farcaster ecosystem.

The Farcaster platform uses a decentralized hub system to handle everyday activities like posting messages, following users, and reacting to posts. This structure ensures that most interactions happen off-chain for faster and cheaper transactions, while the more critical actions like account creation and data storage are secured on-chain.

Farcaster is famous for its focus on user autonomy and censorship resistance. It ensures that all users own their social graph, meaning they can keep their followers and content across different dApps built on the protocol. Farcaster achieves this by introducing permanent on-chain profiles and the use of signatures to verify user actions, which work together to provide full security and transparency. Its economic model also allows users to monetize their content and interactions, unlike traditional social media platforms that profit mainly from user data.

Challenges Facing SocialFi

Just like any new tech, SocialFi faces different issues that must be fixed to ensure steady long-term growth. One of these challenges is scalability. As SocialFi platforms grow and more people join their networks, they face common problems like high gas fees and network congestion. Nonetheless, developers are already working on solutions like sharding and better consensus algorithms so they can process more transactions efficiently.

Another challenge is that crypto projects have to deal with complicated regulatory guidelines. In today’s world, SocialFi platforms must obey data protection laws in various areas, which can somewhat slow development and innovation.

Additionally, SocialFi projects must be wary of the sustainability of their economic models. Platforms today use token rewards to gain more users. Still, they can become unsustainable if the token’s value fluctuates because of the volatile market and the influence of high-profile users. As such, building a project that balances attractive incentives with long-term viability is necessary.

Finally, combining social features with crypto transactions raises privacy concerns, as people don’t like sharing their personal data. To counter this, SocialFi projects use advanced privacy-related technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, thus keeping user data safe while providing high-quality, interactive social experiences.

Conclusion

SocialFi allows users to get rewards for using social media as they already do today. It is also an example of how blockchain technology can improve different industries. However, with the growth of blockchain technology, we must ensure that we do enough research about any project before making any investments.