An in-depth analysis on Eden, Gitcoin’s highest donated social project in 2023

Eden, the product that received the highest donation in the Gitcoin 2023 Web3 Global Social Contest, was founded by several Ivy League undergraduates, MIT PhD, and serial entrepreneurs. Transcending the product framework of traditional SocialFi, Eden has created a composable social graph platform using NFT protocol and GPT technology.

Efficiency – The Most Important Thing

Efficiency of information exchange is the fundamental driving force for the evolution of social media. Media is an information distribution channel connecting the creators and the consumers. For social media, social connections become the channels, and users become both creators and consumers to each other. From the information flow of blogs to microblogs, to Snapchat and Instagram’s ephemeral content, to the intelligent algorithm recommendations of TikTok, each new form of social media has brought users a 10x increase in efficiency.

Centralisation to Decentralisation – An Underwhelming Promise

However, with the evolution of the industry, the user experience of social media has gradually reached a bottleneck and numerous drawbacks are becoming increasingly prominent.

While it seems that the traditional social media company’s product is their online platform, in truth they are commoditizing users and profiting from selling packaged user information to advertisers. In this process, platforms aim to maximize the utilization of user data at the product design level, allowing users to only establish a single social graph. As a result, as user social relationships become increasingly complex over time, users can only post the “greatest common denominator” content on the platform, making interactions increasingly superficial and vulgar.

Emerging web3 social products, on the other hand, have been telling a seemingly compelling story based on the concept of decentralization in recent years. But their fundamentalist philosophy has not solved the limitation of information interaction efficiency brought about by the single social graph. On the contrary, pure on-chain interaction behavior is not only slow but also requires the payment of a Gas Fee at every step. These social products generally lack innovative features, and the product experience has significantly declined due to being on-chain. They also require users to abandon existing social relationships. Unimaginative fundamentalist web3 social products will ultimately be hard to sustain.

From One to Infinity – Eden’s Composable Social Graphs

Eden is committed to changing the numerous drawbacks of existing social media with a new product form, and becoming the center of all online traffic in the next era of internet. Its product uses Generative AI technology to analyze users’ existing social network information (such as Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and generate a unique social asset – iToken.

On Eden, iToken has a trinity characteristic of being the user’s on-chain social asset, pillar of digital identity, as well as vessel carrying nodes of user’s social graph. iToken not only confirms the users’ ownership in their social assets but also brings liquidity to users’ digital personas and social graphs through its visual and tradable properties. Eden uses its proprietary SageMint algorithm to generate iToken for each user, allowing users not to worry about losing past social data and to establish a new, unique, and visual social graph through iToken, ultimately helping all users achieve precise socialization.

Eden enhances social efficiency through Generative AI technology and market mechanisms. The product analyzes users’ social media information through the SageMint algorithm, generates 6-12 highly accurate iTokens for users, enabling users to establish highly accurate connections with mutual iTokens holders, thereby improving social efficiency. On the other hand, iTokens, which meet mainstream NFT standards (like ERC-721), can be traded cross-platform in centralized and decentralized exchanges (Eden will also build its own trading platform to ensure maximum compatibility and best trading experience), making the social graph liquid and greatly improving the efficiency of establishing new useful contacts and removing old useless ones.

Ownership – Bestowing Value to Connections

The composable social graph is the biggest opportunity for the next information age. Based on iToken, the on-chain social asset reinterprets the most important concept in web3: ownership. The core value of ownership in web3 is, in fact, “giving value to connections.” In offline social, people invest various resources (time cost, money cost, energy cost, etc.) to give value to their relationships. Social media’s simple ways of establishing connection such as adding friends or following others require no cost, so they lack profound meaning. On the Eden platform, iToken further expands the concept and application of ownership. Through iToken’s “on-chain social asset” attribute, investments in relationship building are realized. Eden uses tradable iTokens to “price” the social value contained in each iToken, allowing the market mechanism to give value and meaning to online relationships.

During the transitions of social media 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, we have witnessed the evolution from a text platform for a thousand people to a pictorial platform for a thousand people, and then to a personalized information platform for each individual. What will be the form of the next generation of social products? User data during the Eden beta testing period actually answered this question. During the Eden internal testing from March to April 2023, iToken, initially placed in the product as a side feature, received more than 80% user interaction. We believe that fungible tokens have already brought the first wave of mass adoption of cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens will bring the second wave. With Eden, the efficiency of information exchange can be greatly enhanced through means of equity ownership and trading mechanisms, and eventually solving the pain points of online social.

Eden Product Demo

Instal Eden’s browser plugin on Chrome web store