Original author: Mable Jiang (X: @Mable_Jiang)
I am very happy to announce the creation of Trends : Trends is a social protocol anchored by value and committed to advancing the boundaries of information finance. At the same time, this is also a farewell to a journey: my full-time work at FSL has come to an end, but I will continue to support the company as an advisor. I will write another long article to review this meaningful journey.
Trends has received early support from a number of outstanding founders and angel investors whose belief in our vision has provided both motivation and responsibility: Anatoly Yakovenko, Lily Liu (Solana Foundation), Meow Siong (Jupiter), Yu Hu (Kaito), Bryan Pellegrino (LayerZero), TN Lee (Pendle), Cindy Leow David Lu (Drift), Alice James Zhang (Jambo Technology), Zhuoxun Yin Tiffany (Magic Eden), Tushar Jain (Multicoin), Jerry Huang, Yawn Rong Shiti Maghani (FSL), Su Zhu, Nicolas (Bonk.fun), GM (Dragonfly), and Jason Kam (Folius Ventures).
In the process of exploring the popularization of encryption applications for many years, I have extracted three first principles:
Every real Web3 innovation breakthrough comes from significantly reducing the friction of value flow - ICO in 2017, DeFi Summer in 2020, and even Pump.fun in 2023 have proven this. The next round of innovation will also be accompanied by a 100x efficiency improvement in value flow.
Tokens are essentially containers for information, and social media has long been the most active market for information; if every post can be mapped to a token, the flow of information and the flow of value will eventually merge into one.
The costs of on-chain issuance and value transfer will continue to decline, and the social scene is ready for this integration.
Based on these thoughts, we launched Trends: it will first serve as the on-chain curation layer of X (formerly Twitter), then expand to any open content such as TikTok, and eventually grow into a social protocol operated by on-chain capital (internet capital). Each content has its own curve, fluctuations and explosion points; accounts that continuously produce or discover high-consensus content will accumulate an on-chain reputation that is difficult to fake.
AI is driving the cost of content production down to near zero. When views, likes, and even entire posts can be generated in batches for a few cents, on-chain capital becomes the only scarce and transparent real consensus signal. Trends opens up a channel from belief to profit and loss: it takes real money to increase traffic, and open protocols give everyone equal opportunities to participate.
This is what “mass adoption” looks like to me: people’s daily actions carry their own economic weight. Imagine 1 like = 1 USD : each click automatically buys in along the curve, with a preset automatic exit multiple. Opinions are positions, all in one go.
We are standing at the dawn of a new era.
We are defining an entirely new asset class.
Shaping new behaviors is never easy, but the trend is good.
