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Fabric Ventures co-leads Primitive’s $5m round with Union Square Ventures (USV) with participation from Stellation Capital, Slow, and Foresight Ventures
The Web3 Social thesis is simple.
Since we published our first Fabric Ventures Investment Thesis in 2017, we’ve eagerly anticipated the rise of a new social architecture. By this, we mean a world where open-source social networks can properly monetise their entire value creation. Users can receive financial upside for contributing engaging content, while developers are rewarded for building delightful social experiences for the network.
The woes of the status quo of social media as we know it today are apparent:
- Meta made $131bn from ads in 2023, and 99.9% of their users made $0
- Developers cannot confidently build apps on existing social networks because the infrastructure is closed, and permission can be revoked at any time (Vine, Farmville)
- Social media startups are increasingly ephemeral because the deck is stacked in favour of the incumbents (BeReal, Clubhouse)
An open-source approach allows users to find and communicate more openly and applications to innovate faster. Removing rent-seeking behaviour fosters increased product and feature competition, creating sustained value for users. We are already seeing the early innings of this thesis play out through decentralised social graphs such as Lens and Farcaster and the growing integration of social features into Web3 applications.
Web3 is becoming more social
The power of social features has become ever more apparent in building Web3 products. Applications are becoming more and more social:
- Projects that initially emerged as NFT applications, such as Foundation and Gallery, have transitioned to social apps with Rodeo and Moshicam.
- Trading is becoming more social with applications such as Interface and Frens utilising the Farcaster social graph to build slick social trading experiences.
- CEXes continue to integrate social features such as PnL sharing
- TON games leveraging social features such as leaderboards, squads, competitions and referrals
As we as an industry continue to focus on improved UX, social features are a must for building sticky products and onboarding users. A shared social infrastructure protocol connecting these applications allows developers to connect user relationships across experiences to build more engaging applications.
Enter Tapestry
Tapestry’s initial roots come from their Primitives application. Initially an art-collecting game with a friendly onboarding experience, the predominantly mainstream user base quickly minted 350k+ pieces of artwork. Primitives rapidly emerged as one of the smoothest consumer experiences in crypto, which is no surprise given the team’s extensive background in building consumer social products.
As the team launched slick features such as pre-emptive minting, inbound interest in their infrastructure rose. There was an apparent demand for better social infrastructure on Solana. When standards such as Compressed NFTs launched, the opportunity for an interoperable protocol on Solana emerged where users owned their data onchain and builders could easily spin up apps, games and experiences that these users could plug into.
We’re excited to back Primitives as they build the Tapestry Protocol and AI creation platform, together these enable anyone to create and deploy social applications using simple prompts while connecting them all through a permissionless social graph. By democratizing app creation, Tapestry is building an open, permissionless social graph to rival major social media giants while paving the way for user-driven networks that operate beyond centralized control.
Solana: a growing consumer app ecosystem
When it comes to choosing where to build in crypto today, two factors matter the most: technology and the community.
Several core features of Solana make it an attractive place to build and scale a social graph database, some of which include:
- Concurrent updates to the Merkle trees allow multiple stakeholders to write nodes and edges to the same block.
- The compressed NFT standard allows affordable data storage.
- High TPS (relative to Ethereum) allows developers fast writes to the database and offers a more similar UX to traditional alternatives.
At the consumer application layer, Solana is increasingly home to some of the most exciting verticals and home to the memecoin capital pump.fun. Solana has a burgeoning DePIN ecosystem, increasingly the blockchain of choice for payments for industry giants such as Shopify, Stripe and Visa, and startups such as Sling bringing onchain payments infrastructure. Solana’s creator economy is growing through applications such as Drip.haus with more social applications emerging such as Popset, Chomp, and more.
To put it simply:
Conclusion
It’s no secret that building consumer experiences on blockchains today comes with friction. However, at Fabric, we’re excited for the emergence of delightful social experiences that are uniquely possible onchain and the Primitives team’s role in powering the integration of these across the Solana ecosystem.
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For more information on Fabric’s portfolio, opportunities and our investment thesis please visit our website and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Farcaster & Orb.