The sunset of Phaver
The Phaver app is no longer available, the product was discontinued in January, but it still functioned even in late February. A product named SoicalAI DAO will be the new product reborn from Phaver's ashes, but as it stands out, it won't have much to do with the old app, which was a social network pegged mostly on Lens and a bit on Farcaster.
To be fair the social network project can only find success if it survives for a very long time, I think even at this moment Phaver was one of the most important Lens drivers, and in many periods it was the main driver of Lens network, and until its very end I still consider the product was pretty solid, the core of social network was there, but my guess is that it was just bleeding funds and wasn't profitable, so the next thing is something even more simple, that's based 90/100 on speculation.
The team's expectations of profitability were completely unreasonable, but then again many times the whole crypto ecosystem is driven by unreasonable expectations.
For the decentralized social, this is a blow, as even if it wasn't super popular it had at least 30-40k real users that will be forced to use something else, the biggest mistakes of Phaver are what hurt many other similar projects, and that's it the financialization of every aspect of the product, and the rush for quick profit.
Even if Web3 is characterized by hyper-financialization that doesn't mean it’s a good fit for social products, the only things that a social network could inherit as benefits from Web3 are transparency, decentralization, multiple client options, permissionless actions, and data ownership.
But the reality is that many times web3 social projects inherit some detrimental traits that make them sometimes even worse than their web2 counterparts, such as insider trading, insider promoting, obscure algorithms meant to push specific goals, lots of proprietary code, lots of backroom deals, hiper-financialization, promoting crypto hype and silencing what is seen as negative, performative decentralization and openness.
Often all these web3 nascent social platforms have been plagued many times by traits that aren’t so noble, so anyone should be skeptical of any such projects especially if they were 99% funded by VC money.
The decision to discontinue this app was also probably affected by the fact that Lens was moving to its own chain, with Lens V3 which IMO was premature. But it’s the way of the crypto space where there are much more shovels than land.
Anyone who has taken a glance at this ecosystem knows that this space is so fractured because everyone wants to make a profit from selling infrastructure, creating SaaS and PaaS, and extracting rents but this has actively hurt a lot of the ecosystem because the demand does not justify such a level of diversification in infrastructure.
All in all, the App was live for about 2 years, marketing was pretty good IMO and most web3 users have heard of or even used Lens because of Phaver, but also many people will say this was a scam entirely.
Phaver did provide a lot of ways to invest NFTs, points, and private sales, and most of those are now worth close to nothing, so all those people who lost funds and time will be quick to call this a scam.
There are probably a few individuals that did manage to make some money from Phaver but I suppose those are a very tiny group of people.
I think there are some lessons to be reinforced and learned with the Phaver’s sunset, first social projects must be ready to at least survive for 5-6 years, secondly, hyper-financialization was never proven to help a social project to survive, I would say in fact is the other way around. Yet most projects still push for this path. Creating a decentralized network as the backbone of the social project is generally the best bet and most projects that still exist today have taken this route albeit rather late.
Lastly, such social projects need to be very open from all perspectives, have no proprietary code if possible, and be ready to burn a lot of cash at the start, because in reality, it’s truly incredibly difficult to have a clear path of monetization.
It’s a bit sad but the reality is that Bluesky looks more decentralized than the web3 social platforms, but in terms of decentralization all platforms that exist now have huge issues, and probably all these issues stem from how the economy functions, great social platforms can’t function in for-profit mode, that’s what I believe so will still have to wait until the greatest UX and data ownership will arrive.
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