Rethinking Revenue Models: Wallet as a Service on Decentralized Social Graphs. - At0x.eth

Introduction

A lot of innovation in crypto comes from discovering novel revenue models and funding mechanisms. One only needs to look at the ICO craze and the NFT summer as novel revenue models that brought many new use cases to the ecosystem. Each of these mechanisms leveraged a property of decentralized networks to create never before seen capital transfers. However, in time they also highlighted their weaknesses as market participants realized again that there are no silver bullets.

Revenue

Currently, the entire crypto space is grappling with the problem of long-term revenue streams. ICOs and NFT drops struggle after the immediate raise to keep revenue as volumes aren’t guaranteed in perpetuity, and the market attention moves elsewhere. Similarly, projects work to find mechanisms to gracefully capture value for their token or treasury without creating friction (and fork potential) for the entire protocol.

Lens-Power: Decentralized graphs as content distribution platforms.

Lens Protocol is NOT a social media app. It is a decentralized social graph. A Social Graph is a model representing relationships in a social network. In other words, Lens is the backend for all the web3 apps that want to use a social component.

Web 2.0 companies use social graphs to personalize content, exploit network effects, and analyze user behavior for insights. These companies, like Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok, monetize the social graph by using your data and relationships to serve targeted advertisements and curated content, influencing what you see and interact with and often generating significant revenue.

Decentralizing the social graph means users own and control their data, enhancing privacy and enabling cross-platform interactions. This also means that users can monetize their content however they see fit. Furthermore, it means that individual developers can create experiences distributed on the Lens graph, thus opening the doors for a whole new class of software.

The Current State of the Lens Garden: A Web2 Remake.

As far as I can tell, every product developed on Lens has taken a web2 approach to implementing the social graph. This means that the available products right now are more or less recreating their Web2 counterparts, such as:

Although this is a perfectly valid approach, and these interfaces are very much needed, in my opinion, they currently fail to fully capitalize on the best qualities of the lens protocol (Although they will be the most used interfaces for a long time).

How to Wield the Lens Powr

The Lens Protocol provides unique tools that can change the dynamics of social networks: 'Collect' and 'ReferalFee.”

Collect: Take The Power to Take.

With the collect module, the lens protocol gives the power to monetize the content to the creator. It allows posts to be purchased with predetermined conditions, much like an NFT mint. Authors can limit their scope by time or edition size and split revenue among participants, enabling trustless collaboration.

'Collect' gives content creators the autonomy to monetize their content. Imagine you've created an insightful infographic. With the 'Collect' module, you can set conditions for purchasing this post, similar to selling a limited edition art print. You can set a time limit for the availability or restrict the number of copies. Additionally, you can split the revenue among different collaborators, fostering trustless collaborations.

ReferalFee: Take The Power to Give

ReferalFee' is another groundbreaking feature of the Lens Protocol. The referral fee is probably the most underappreciated feature in the entire protocol, perhaps because it is not immediately apparent how it works. Let's consider a scenario where Bob posts a fascinating article with a referral fee. Alice finds this article intriguing and shares it on her feed. Suppose Steve, a follower of Alice, purchases or 'collects' the article. In that case, Alice receives a percentage of the revenue that Bob had set as 'referable” This promotes a rewarding content-sharing ecosystem.

These tools are not just theoretical; they've been implemented in the practical world. For example, SavePointGPT leverages these tools to monetize dialogues from ChatGPT. Users can 'collect' these dialogues, with revenue shared among the original poster and the SavePointGPT service. At the same time, those who help in further distribution can earn from the 'referalFee” It's a win-win situation for all - the content creator, the sharer, and the end user.

The Smart Bot User.

One of the things that can be done using the lens protocol is to rethink the user as more than just a regular individual if we abstract the Social Graph as a content distribution network. ( I post something, my followers see it, they share, and their followers see it = content distributed ). A user can be seen as a node in this network, and their followers are the list of nodes that "subscribe" to the user node.

In this regard. I believe there is a new class of users: Smart Bot Users that can leverage this new kind of network to provide services to other nodes and turn them into anchor points for the network.

What is a Smart Bot User? A Smart Bot User is a lens profile owned by a server or smart contract instead of an end user. This smart bot executes a predetermined logic that other users can call on however the developers see fit.

Users can rely on the smart bots to enhance their reach in the network, for example, by paying to get their posts shared or owning a group feed that can post to a more significant number of nodes or post content to a curated feed that will reach their intended audience and enable the end user to monetize their content. By adding collect modules that split revenue between users and smart bots and adding a referral fee, we can create a new business model enabled by decentralized social graphs. This is the basis for the curator economy. In it, value can be extracted from content by distributing it widely on specialized networks, which spread the value generated back to all participants.

Putting it in Practice: SavePointGPT.

To illustrate these ideas, I created a project called SavePointGPT. SPGPT is an application that will take a chatGPT unique share link, encrypt it and post it on Lens alongside a comment (hopefully) describing its contents. This enables users to monetize their chatGPT conversations in a new medium: Dialogues.

The value of dialogue.

Arguably, the most potent form of communication we have is dialogue. Not because it transmits information but because it generates knowledge. For the first time in history, we have this Aristotle-like figure in LLMs that we can ask questions to and capture knowledge that we can share, just like Jimmy Neutron's chewable books dialogue chews knowledge into easily digestible bites that we can ingest.

Much like video cameras produce "moving pictures," ChatGPT conversations are "moving conversations" Users can reformulate questions and keep the thread going with the existing context to experience the author's thought process as he converses with the AI.

How it’s Done:

The client and server validate input to ensure you share the correct link format. Then it sends an encrypted post to the savePointGPT profile. Using the LensSDK

Once the post is created, a comment is automatically added to inform everyone about the hidden link. The posts appear on ANY interface used by a user who follows this account. This makes SavePointGPT the best way to share and monetize your chatGPT dialogues.

Collect

99% goes to the original poster
1% goes to save-point-gpt

ReferalFee

10% of the total sale is set as referalFee

Try it out!

Testnet link: https://savepoint-gpt.vercel.app/

NERD RULE # 5123 HYPERSTURCTURES ONLY

At the headquarters, we are committed to open-source development. With that in mind, we have to design for open systems. Instead of having a proprietary secret sauce, I'm making the entire code available on my GitHub. The protocol output serves as a building block: a unique identifier for a specific conversation with an AI. This could be used to create many things, such as online courses, a dictionary, doctor prescriptions, escape room experiences, DnD adventures, interactive novels, school curriculums, etc. Additionally, I think there’s a need for many individual intelligent bots, each curating a thread of posts.

Let me know if you want to use this for your ideas! I want to help.

-Atox