Debank: A New Opportunity for Web3 Creators' Earnings

Written by: Biteye core contributor Fishery Isla

Edited by: Biteye core contributor Crush

Recently, within just a month, the creator revenue models of two tweet-based social platforms, X (formerly Twitter) and FriendTech, have garnered significant attention.

Although both revenue models have certain flaws, the immense attention they received, in some ways, proves the feasibility of the SocialFi track, which combines finance and social interaction.

In addition to the two platforms mentioned above, another noteworthy event in the SocialFi space is DeBank's launch of the Debank Chain based on the OP stack.

DeBank is known for its steady approach, having first developed the social features Hi and Stream before embarking on building the chain. Debank Chain serves as the crypto asset layer built upon the previously established social functionalities.

It is clear that the team's goals are very focused: to break down SocialFi by functionality, first perfecting the social features before considering how to address financial needs using blockchain technology.

Due to DeBank's meticulous layout in the social domain, which involves many clever designs, it is essential to discuss the drawbacks already evident in X and FriendTech before examining whether Debank can resolve these issues.

Musk's X has three obvious problems with its creator revenue model:

• Lack of transparency: There is no detailed explanation of how revenue is calculated, making it difficult for content creators to understand their actual earnings.
• Numerous payment system restrictions: To receive sharing revenue from X, one must register for a Stripe account, which has very strict limitations based on the applicant's country/region, leaving many creators unable to access their earnings.
• Fake accounts/bots: After X launched its creator revenue model, bot accounts and spam have become rampant, encroaching on the browsing space of regular users. Distinguishing real users from bots will be a significant challenge Musk will face in the future.

FriendTech's creator revenue model also has some fatal flaws:

• Incomplete social features: The web interface often has bugs.
• High transaction friction, unsustainable business model: Due to the presence of front-running bots, transaction friction is very high, with related bots having already profited over $2 million. This level of friction makes it impossible for even the most profitable business model to sustain itself.
• Crude economic model, speculation-driven: The price curve of Keys is only related to the number of holders, and creators cannot earn revenue when there are no transactions.

Next, we will explore Debank's social landscape from the perspectives of asset and social layers, to see if Debank can address the issues faced by similar products.

01 Debank Asset Layer: Debank Chain

The development of Debank Chain is based on the OP Stack, primarily aimed at solving the key issues mentioned above while maintaining strong security: minimizing gas costs, providing an experience close to Web2 through account abstraction, and ensuring the safety of L1 assets.

The Debank team modified the consensus mechanism to reduce the gas cost of individual transactions by 100 to 400 times, adapting to the high-frequency nature of social interactions.

Additionally, the team has integrated a system similar to account abstraction at the chain level, allowing users to enjoy an experience close to Web2 while maintaining 100% compatibility with the current EVM standards.

This new account system supports transactions signed with dedicated L2 private keys, reducing the reliance on L1 private keys in social scenarios and enhancing the security of users' L1 assets.

Debank Chain launched its testnet on August 11 and plans to launch its mainnet in 2024. Currently, only the Rabby wallet has integrated the DeBank testnet, and the official RPC has not been publicly released. This greatly limits bot and witch attacks.

It is important to note that Debank Chain is not the same as Debank Layer2 (also written as Debank L2), which has already been launched; the former is still in the testnet phase.

The latter has been live for over a year and is currently used as the payment account for Debank's social products, but detailed documentation or introductions have not been found in public channels. This Debank L2 has also been a target for many airdrop bloggers.

Looking at it today, the now open-sourced Debank Chain is also positioned as a social asset chain, making it likely to become a replacement for Debank L2.

02 Debank Social Layer

Debank Hi

Debank Hi is positioned as a Web3 instant messaging service, essentially a chat tool. For Web3 messaging applications, it has the following characteristics:

• Account system based on 0x addresses
• Open and permissionless
• Transparent

Its interface layout resembles the built-in chat feature of Twitter, but unlike common chat tools, Debank Hi effectively avoids spam issues by introducing the concept of an "attention market."

What is the attention market?

It defines users' attention to messages as a scarce asset, designing a market for trading attention assets, where sending a message requires purchasing the recipient's attention, and receiving a message means selling one's own attention. An effective automated pricing model is used to reduce transaction friction.

Attention, as an asset, defines the act of a user opening information as a form of attention asset. However, it is worth noting that this definition does not include the attention spent after reading a piece of information.

Different pieces of information provide varying values to attract the recipient's attention, so the attention spent here cannot be simply priced and traded.

By introducing the attention market, spam can be effectively prevented, ensuring decentralization, meaning no account can be blocked by algorithms.

While zombie behavior is often blamed for disrupting the experience of regular users, eliminating zombies without centralized risks is no easy task.

Marking and blocking potential zombie addresses should not be a privilege of any decentralized platform. Establishing an effective attention market means that everyone should pay the price indiscriminately, including bots. Therefore, zombies no longer need to be treated differently.

In Web2, users are constantly bombarded with information and advertisements. Platforms profit from selling users' attention, leading to increased valuations through advertising profits and scale growth. By trading, users can regain control over their attention and receive compensation for the time and effort spent.

Debank Stream

Debank Stream is a posting system very similar to Twitter, characterized by the fact that Stream accounts are linked to Debank's asset statistics, leveraging the moat of asset statistics to enable many advanced and novel gameplay.

One of the key features is the introduction of the concept of Contribution Value, as stated in the official slogan, "a Web3 social feed that calculates each user's contributions to the platform itself!" Stream can calculate each user's contribution to the platform itself! A true Web3 product needs to credit every bit of value it gains to its original creators.

With the concept of Contribution Value, reward pool distribution can be realized. This is a post tipping feature that generates real earnings, rewarding not only the author but also all contributors involved in the posting process.

Whenever a post is published in Stream, Debank creates a corresponding reward pool. For the next three days, any user can deposit assets into that pool.

Each user's contributions to the post during these three days will be recorded to determine the rewards each can receive. Rewards are settled three days later; if the funds in the pool exceed the post's realized value, users will receive rewards matching their contributions, with the excess going to the author.

If the funds in the pool are less than the realized value, rewards will be distributed based on each user's contribution ratio to the realized value. Rewards are typically paid immediately after settlement.

The Debank team believes that users' time and attention are valuable. Compared to Web2 platforms, every minute spent on Twitter becomes the foundation of its value, ultimately converting into Twitter's profits through advertising.

In DeBank Stream, every minute users invest, every article they publish or read, and every comment and repost they make will be counted as a value contribution and recorded in their accounts.

Each natural day, users will receive a record reflecting their contributions to the platform. For each post on DeBank Stream, its realized value will also be calculated, which describes the user attention value gained during the post's dissemination on DeBank Stream.

In the calculation, factors such as the number of users viewing, commenting, and reposting, as well as the net worth of those users, are taken into account. This helps determine each user's contribution.

The impersonation attacks that have become rampant on Twitter can be mitigated in DeBank Stream by considering users' net worth and TVF (Total Value of Followers), helping users discern the reliability of content sources (traditional impersonation accounts can inflate follower counts but cannot increase the total assets of fake followers, which is clever!), ensuring that DeBank Stream captures the attention value of real users.

03 Conclusion

The Debank team has laid out multiple segmented product lines, which benefits their storytelling ability, providing ample narrative; however, the downsides are also evident, with several innovative product features being abandoned midway, such as:

• Debank canceling the well-received Feed feature; Rabby removing the Debank entry;
• Additionally, the launch of Debank Chain, which has an unclear positioning, despite the existence of a functioning Debank Layer 2, highlights a lack of transparency in the team's decision-making.

However, this also reflects the team's decisive execution. Currently, Debank is fully focused on optimizing the social aspect of its products, leveraging its Web3 asset analysis technology to effectively address the long-standing issues of impersonation attacks and spam that have plagued X and FriendTech.

Moreover, the attention market feature introduced in the chat tool Hi can significantly enhance user experience and eliminate spam interference.

On the asset side, Debank can resolve the limitations of traditional Web2 payments through blockchain technology, and with highly customized, abstract account-enabled OP Stack, it is far more suited to social scenarios than the third-party Layer 2 Base relied upon by FriendTech, effectively avoiding the generation of spam accounts.

Whether FriendTech can improve its economic model remains to be seen, while Debank, with its accumulated strengths, is sure to surprise us in the future of the SocialFi domain.