Mable Jiang Unveils Trends: A Social Protocol Built on Web3's Core Principles

Following her departure from FSL, the parent company behind the popular move-to-earn app Stepn, Mable Jiang has launched Trends, an ambitious new social protocol designed to reshape how information, content, and value flow across decentralized networks. The announcement, first reported by BlockBeats on July 17, marks a significant shift in Jiang’s career trajectory and signals a fresh direction for Web3 social platforms.

From FSL Leadership to Building Web3’s Social Future

Mable Jiang’s decision to establish Trends reflects her years of exploration into mainstream adoption of cryptographic applications. Throughout her tenure as Chief Growth Officer at FSL and her previous role as a partner at Multicoin Capital, Jiang developed a nuanced understanding of what truly drives Web3 adoption. Her podcast, HODLong, has further positioned her as a thoughtful voice in the crypto community, discussing long-term trends and protocol economics. This background provides the foundation for Trends, which aims to be more than just another social platform—it’s positioned as a fundamental rethinking of how social networks should operate on-chain.

Attracting Industry Titans: The Investor Lineup Behind Trends

Trends has secured backing from an exceptionally rare coalition of builders and investors across multiple segments of the Web3 ecosystem. The Solana ecosystem lends particularly strong support, with Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder, and Lily Liu, chair of the Solana Foundation, both backing the project. This support extends to leading protocol builders within the Solana orbit, including Meow and Siong from Jupiter, Cindy Leow and David Lu from Drift Protocol, Zhuoxun Yin from Magic Eden, and Kaito founder Yu Hu.

Beyond Solana, cross-chain infrastructure leaders have also committed resources, with Bryan Pellegrino of LayerZero and TN Lee of Pendle Finance joining the round. Multicoin Capital’s Tushar Jain, who previously worked alongside Jiang, brings deep institutional credibility, while marquee venture firms like Dragonfly Capital and Folius Ventures round out the investor base. Notable community figures including Su Zhu and Nicolas from Bonk.fun demonstrate grassroots confidence in Mable Jiang’s vision.

Three First Principles Driving Trends’ Architecture

Rather than building incrementally on existing social platforms, Jiang has distilled her experience into three foundational principles that guide Trends’ development. First, genuine Web3 innovations are characterized by dramatically lower costs for value transfer and information flow—removing intermediaries that extract rent in traditional systems. Second, she identifies a macro trend where tokens function as information containers, converging with social media infrastructure. Third, the ongoing decline in on-chain transaction costs creates unprecedented opportunities for social applications that were previously economically unfeasible.

These principles form the intellectual backbone of Trends, distinguishing it from social experiments that simply layer blockchain features onto existing models without reconsidering fundamental architecture.

From X to Multichain: Trends’ Product Roadmap

The protocol is launching with a focused initial phase: an on-chain curation layer anchored to X (formerly Twitter), leveraging the platform’s massive user base while introducing decentralized signal mechanisms. As the protocol matures, Trends plans to expand to additional content platforms, including TikTok, ultimately evolving into a fully sovereign social protocol where on-chain capital directly coordinates content discovery, reputation, and value distribution.

This multi-phase approach allows Mable Jiang and her team to test core mechanisms in a familiar environment before attempting the more ambitious goal of building a standalone social protocol. The integration of content on-chain with reputation and value flows represents the kind of structural innovation that Jiang believes Web3 can uniquely enable—not through marginal improvements, but through fundamental rethinking of how social incentives operate.