$SOART: Socialfi & Art on Solana
Welcome to Socially Artful, a socialfi and art focused project based on Kaichi. In this, our first Blub blog post (!) we'll introduce ourselves and our mission.
Why socialfi matters
To us the killer app for blockchains is social media and content in general.
Blockchains are, at their heart, a decentralised and permissionless database. This is perfect to hand control of your content back to you (the user) and to act as a bulwark against the increasingly extreme censorship we see from authoritarian govts worldwide and from the large, centralised, web2 social media networks that dominate the space presently.
Let's be clear: It's not that Meta, LinkedIn, WeChat, etc.. are inherently 'good' or 'bad' (contrary to the breathless clickbait articles...); it's that they're not on your side. They hold all the cards and literally your social media profile!
There's no balance there.
You don't own any of the stuff you create, and you definitely don't have control over the value it generates.
The vast majority of us will never make full time (or even part time) income from our social media profiles. But we all highly value our profiles and the only way you can prove you control your data is by controlling the value it creates.
As X showed recently you can have value you've created stolen from you by the platform if they hold all the cards.
Below are just are a few examples of the risk centralised social platforms carry.
This kind of stuff, sadly, happens all the time.
X taking Twitter usernames: what the owner of @music felt when X took his handle away. (slate.com)
We have to start somewhere
Socialfi (aka Web3) is a huge shift in design to what came before. It relies on still very new primitives. Many of the projects are still pretty centralised (Bulb included!) but that is entirely reasonable given how big a shift this is. The most important aspect is that it is headed in the right direction, towards more user ownership, not less.
These platforms need people, not dollars, ultimately to scale. Unlike the rest of crypto apps to date a few "whales" a product does not make in social network. This is even more reason to support the growth of these platforms.
Let's be honest: You're not going to replace your existing social media with any socialfi platform at this moment. No one can sensibly make that argument.
But you can augment your current social media with socialfi, and you should, because it's insurance against both you losing access to your existing web2 social media and insurance against you losing value to your web2 existing social media.
The emerging crop of socialfi platforms may still be small, but they're already far more profitable for an average user than their web2 counterparts and whilst people overwhelmingly use social media for reasons that are not financial the fact that it's a better deal financially will only accelerate adoption over time.
Often it's the little details, the user by user value proposition, that drive larger market shifts.
Solcialfi platforms have been built with revenue sharing in their core design so to compete their web2 counterparts would need to pivot very large and established business models. It's just not feasible.
https://kaichi.xyz/@Vivi/post/4598-hello-guys
Kaichi: A platform built for creators
Kaichi is the second iteration of Solcial (https://solcial.io/, https://wiki.solcial.io/)
Solcial had some success but failed to get enough traction due to some fundamental flaws in the design around user tokens.
The team learned the lessons and doubled down on fixing the pain points whilst keeping the things that went well.
Solcial vs Kaichi
What's different
The big difference is dramatically revamped tokenomics: both platform ($KAI) and user tokens
Sidenote: yeah I know: moar 'tokenomics', but economy design is important and poor economy design is the reason so many socialfi projects fail.
So: Pay attention to what a project is doing as goes their economy. It matters to the platform's success & your enjoyment long term (regardless of whether you're there to "earn" or not).
It's more complex than Solcial's models were Tokenomics | Solcial's Wiki & User Tokens and Pools | Solcial's Wiki.
There's much more of a collective effort to support the platform as a whole both from $KAI and the user tokens.
It's a cohesion that wasn't as prominent on Solcial and that led to a lot of "dead" tokens as the onus was entirely on the creator to do the running. In turn that also led to $SLCL having little value aside from incentives (which were quickly sold off).
The docs are the best place to find out more.
- Business Model & Revenue Sharing | Kaichi Docs
- Trading Pools | Kaichi Docs
- $KAI Tokenomics | Kaichi Docs
- 3 Token Presets | Kaichi Docs
What hasn't changed
Apart from the design (which was always good) the big thing that hasn't changed from Solcial is the commitment to content decentralisation. This was one of the successes of Solcial and Kaichi have carried that forward https://docs.kaichi.xyz/getting-started/publishing-content
Get involved!
Come join the fun with us on KaiChi it's simple, fun, and fair 😸
Referral code: DRiPdrop
$SOART: A Kaichi memecoin
We've minted a memecoin preset on Kaichi.
Kaichi has implemented what they call a fair launch system for memecoins minted on the platform.
Whilst the exact metrics they use to allocate the airdrop are not public, so they won't be gamed easily, you get tokens for engaging with our account on Kaichi. 
3 Token Presets | Kaichi Docs
Bringing DRiP artists to Kaichi. One airdrop at a time
We're launching an artist outreach program to bring DRiP artists onto Kaichi.
We don't for a moment expect a DRiP artist to move their socials to Kaichi entirely and abandon their existing web2 presence. Kaichi is embryonic in its' user base as compared to other platforms.
But it's not about replacing your existing social media as we explained above: It's about insuring your online community and following should the worst happen. In crypto that's more likely than for many other sectors.
You want to have your community established on a platform that can't be taken away from you and a platform that gives you a fair revenue share. Because you don't have to be de-platformed to have your social media properties dramatically affected.
We'll have a separate post about our artist program so stay tuned for that!
The risk of DRiP
If DRiP (who are very centralised) changes their revenue sharing agreement (and they have already done so a few times) it might start being less economically viable for artists.
DRiP has proved themselves to be a wonderful actor in the space and have been a massive net positive but that's under current leadership. Should DRiP be bought out (they are VC funded) and leadership changes that may not be the case anymore.
Even under the current leadership DRiP may need to pivot in order to survive if they're not able to generate enough revenue to maintain their current model. The people who will be the most affected will likely be the content creators as they're ultimately not paying users of the platform.
We hope very much that DRiP continues to be the positive force for creators on Solana that it has so far. We're also pragmatic and we know that X, Instagram and DRiP are centralised and permissioned platforms
$SOART ==> NFTs
As part of our DRiP artist onboard we're helping spread the love of art by airdropping DRiP NFTs to our $SOART holders.
We'll be running many different promotions as we highlight great artists and art on Solana so there'll be plenty of ways to get involved and pick some art prizes.
We love the way Kaichi let's us get creative about the way we engage our follower base and we hope you pick up a few tips and tricks along the way for your own Kaichi profile!
See you on Kaichi!
