Attention-Centric: Overview of the Ecosystem Layout of TON, Solana, and Base

Author: YBB

Compiled by: Baihua Blockchain

The current development path is shifting from competing for TVL and building DeFi ecosystems to focusing on the attention economy. In Web3, SocialFi and memes represent the attention economy, with TON, Solana, and Base standing out.

TON has immense potential, with mini-games and mini-programs gaining unprecedented attention and attracting the interest of major trading platforms. Solana's Blink has many potential issues that make widespread adoption difficult. Base is steadily growing under the management of Coinbase.

The best economic model may not need an economic model at all; once something can be precisely calculated, its lifecycle and ceiling will be limited.

1. Embracing the Attention Economy

After Ethereum completed its transition from 0 to 1, the entire industry fell into the dilemma of how to move from 1 to N. Most articles this year have focused on how infrastructure can address the shortcomings of modularity, with less discussion on applications and ecosystems. In a previous article, we mentioned that the lack of applications is due to Layer 2 still being insufficient to support the emergence of "super applications." Besides the limitations of virtual machines and TPS ceilings, most Layer 2 solutions still focus on how to extract maximum value from the main chain through incentives and DeFi ecosystems, aiming to quickly dominate TVL. This templated approach will only lead to faster, cheaper but less liquid "Ethereum clones," failing to provide a unique user experience.

In contrast, new ecosystems like TON, Solana, and Base are driving true on-chain prosperity by embracing the attention economy. According to Wikipedia, the attention economy aims to attract as many users or consumers' attention as possible, nurturing a potential consumer base to gain the greatest commercial benefits in the future. In this economic state, the most important resource is neither traditional monetary capital nor information itself, but public attention. Only when the public notices a product can they become consumers and purchase it. A key method of attracting attention is visual appeal, which is why the attention economy is referred to as the "eyeball economy."

In Web2, platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Google, and TikTok are typical examples of the attention economy. A simple question: have you ever paid to use these platforms? Most likely, your answer is no. However, you may have noticed these platforms constantly pushing ads for products you like. This is because someone is buying your attention, and converting traffic into products is one of the main sources of revenue for these platforms, supporting trillion-dollar internet giants.

In Web3, SocialFi and memes represent the attention economy. Here, we will not discuss memes in detail but will focus on SocialFi. Whether it's friend.tech or Solana's Blinks, I categorize them as SocialFi. Even TON can be seen as a social application chain. The form of these entities—whether projects, components, or blockchains—does not matter. Their ultimate goal is to convert public traffic from traditional Web2 social media into private domain traffic. This aligns with what I wrote over a year ago when discussing non-financial applications: the best Web3 non-financial applications should learn from Web2 rather than rebuild applications that have already proven ineffective in Web2.

2. TON

1) Architecture

The original design goal of TON was to achieve seamless payments and mini-program operations on Telegram, rather than traditional DeFi applications. This is also the fundamental reason why its TVL is significantly lower than that of other major blockchains. The choice to build a blockchain instead of embedding mini-programs and payment functions like WeChat stems from the challenges of monetary and regulatory consistency faced by Telegram's globally decentralized user base. In this context, the blockchain can effectively serve as a source of trust. Here is a brief overview of the TON architecture:

Multi-chain structure: TON adopts a multi-chain architecture, consisting of a master chain (Masterchain) and multiple workchains. This structure allows different types of transactions and applications to be processed in parallel across different chains, greatly improving overall throughput.

Master chain: The master chain is the core of the TON network, storing network configurations and the final states of all workchains. It maintains an active list of validators, their stakes, active workchains, and information about related shard chains.

Workchains: Workchains are customizable blockchains optimized for specific types of transactions or use cases. Each workchain can have its own rules, consensus mechanisms, and token economic models.

Shard chains: Each workchain can be further divided into up to 2⁶⁰ shard chains. This extreme sharding capability allows TON to handle a large number of concurrent transactions.

Dynamic sharding: TON employs dynamic sharding technology to automatically split or merge shard chains based on network load, maintaining optimal size and efficiency for each shard chain.

Hypercube routing: TON uses hypercube routing technology for efficient communication between shard chains, ensuring smooth transactions across the entire ecosystem.

Validator network: TON uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, where validators participate in network maintenance and transaction verification by staking Toncoin.

TON DNS: TON includes a domain name system that assigns readable names to accounts and smart contracts, enhancing usability.

TON Storage: Based on BitTorrent-like technology, TON provides a decentralized file storage solution.

TON Proxy: Offers decentralized VPN and TOR-like services, enhancing user privacy and censorship resistance.

TON Payments: Similar to the Lightning Network, it has a payment channel system capable of efficiently handling micropayments.

TON Services: Provides a platform for developers to deploy applications and smart contracts.

This complex architecture theoretically allows TON to scale infinitely, handling millions of transactions per second from billions of users while maintaining high speed, low fees, and decentralization, providing infrastructure for various applications and use cases. However, in addition to the aforementioned issues unfriendly to DeFi, this architecture also faces challenges of centralization and complexity.

2) Mini-Games

The launch of Notcoin on Binance ignited a wave of "Tap-to-Earn" mini-games in the TON ecosystem. From the perspective of traffic distribution, Tap-to-Earn has been extremely successful. Additionally, Binance Labs made its first investment after nearly six months of silence, betting on TON's mini-game ecosystem. While this may primarily be to attract new users to the trading platform, Binance, as the industry's largest barometer, at least indicates their confidence that Notcoin will not be the last hit.

So, back to the core question: is the model of airdrops combined with mini-games sustainable? Most people may have encountered a popular WeChat mini-game called "Sheep Has a Sheep" in 2022. This game guides users through an extremely simple first level but significantly increases the difficulty in the second level. Users' frustration, intense competition with friends, and desire for game props and extra lives led to rampant sharing and ad viewing within WeChat. The social virality, combined with some special factors at the time, made this game one of the most popular phenomena of the year, reportedly generating nearly 5 million RMB in daily ad revenue.

In short, the monetization path of a successful mini-game should maintain user stickiness through addictive gameplay and then monetize through ads or in-game purchases, i.e., "Game --- Ads/Purchases --- Monetization/Exit." Is this easy to achieve in Web3? I think it is very difficult and unsustainable. Currently, many projects are purchasing mini-game source codes, trying to combine airdrop expectations with this traditional path to form a closed loop, or distributing traffic through trading platform referral codes without ads, optimistically hoping to get rich through tokens. However, my direct impression of most current Tap-to-Earn games is "homogenization --- studio airdrop volume --- lack of user stickiness --- token issuance leads to death." Once this model is exposed, only a few high-quality projects will survive, while most projects will be unable to control witch attacks and ultimately fail to recoup costs.

From the perspective of retail investors, I still believe moderate participation is worth a gamble, as the participation cost is almost zero. Additionally, I personally believe Binance intends to leverage its influence to create multiple hit projects similar to "STEP." Most projects in the TON ecosystem align closely with the project preferences of major trading platforms—low market cap, many users. NotCoin is also the only small project that has launched on both OKX and Binance during this cycle, with its price skyrocketing almost crazily after listing, coupled with Binance's current attitude towards TON (recently announcing airdrops of Banana Gun for Binance holders). These signals remind me of the early STEP N era. Of course, Binance's ultimate goal is to consume a large number of projects to support BNB, and sustainability is not important as long as it can "explode."

3) Mini-Programs

Mini-programs have always been one of the most promising directions in my opinion. For Web3, this is an interesting attempt to achieve mass adoption. There is no need to elaborate on the potential of mini-programs—answers can be seen from WeChat. Simply put, mini-programs have advantages over WeChat in terms of coverage and application flexibility. Imagine a simple scenario: a small to medium-sized e-commerce platform wants to expand to multiple countries and needs to provide subsidies for users. Using traditional local social applications would incur huge promotional and time costs. However, using TON, the platform can effectively track task completion while maintaining transparency and at a cost far lower than traditional methods, fully demonstrating the bottom-up advantages of blockchain.

4) One of the Best Abstraction Layers in Web3

This year's Solana's Meme Summer not only elevated itself but also made TG BOT (Telegram bots) popular. Top bots can achieve daily transaction volumes of billions of dollars. Web3 dapps often perform poorly in terms of user accessibility, leading to the emergence of many abstraction layer projects. These projects often tout "chain agnosticism," but in reality, the higher the level of abstraction, the more complex it often becomes, failing to find a balance between security and usability. In my view, only three projects truly provide user-friendly access to on-chain activities: OKX Web3 Wallet, UXUY, and TON.

The first two projects need no further introduction. During the inscription craze, they won a large number of users with the most user-friendly mobile experience, making a key contribution to the prosperity of the inscription ecosystem. However, the TG bot is unique. It is not an officially developed application but created by individual projects, supporting purchases and trading tokens on major blockchains, operating more conveniently and quickly than web versions. It is extremely user-friendly for both developers and users. This concept can be extended to many ideas, such as introducing external chain DeFi ecosystems, bringing chain games and task platforms in the form of mini-programs. Many projects are exploring this, and there are decentralized ways to implement it. Perhaps in the near future, we will achieve true "chain agnosticism" within TG.

3. Solana Blinks & Actions

1) Architecture

From a technical perspective, Blinks and Actions are not overly complex. The motivation for developing these tools stems from Solana's observation of the enormous potential of the attention economy during Meme Summer and the recognition of the importance of lowering the user entry barrier. Similar to TON, Solana aims to use social media as its "second layer." Here is an excerpt from our previous research report discussing the architecture of these two components:

A. Actions (Solana Actions)

Official definition: Solana Actions are standardized APIs that return transactions on the Solana blockchain, which can be previewed, signed, and sent in various contexts, including QR codes, buttons + widgets (user interface elements), and websites.

In simple terms, Actions can be understood as pending transactions. In the Solana network, Actions are an abstract representation of the transaction processing mechanism, covering transaction processing, contract execution, and data manipulation. Users can use Actions to send transactions, including token transfers and purchasing digital assets. Similarly, developers use Actions to call and execute smart contracts, realizing complex on-chain logic.

Solana processes these tasks through "transactions," where each transaction consists of a series of instructions executed between specific accounts. By leveraging parallel processing and the Gulf Stream protocol, Solana pre-forwards transactions to validators, thereby reducing transaction confirmation delays. With a fine-grained locking mechanism, Solana can handle a large number of non-conflicting transactions simultaneously, significantly enhancing system throughput.

Solana uses a runtime to execute transaction and smart contract instructions, ensuring the correctness of inputs, outputs, and states during execution. Transactions wait for block confirmation after preliminary execution, and once confirmed by the majority of validators, they are considered final. Solana can process thousands of transactions per second, with confirmation times under 400 milliseconds. The Pipeline and Gulf Stream mechanisms further enhance the network's throughput and performance.

Actions are not limited to specific tasks or operations; they can include transactions, contract executions, data processing, etc. These operations are similar to transactions or contract calls in other blockchains but have unique advantages in Solana: due to Solana's high-performance architecture, Actions are efficient, low-latency, and can flexibly execute various complex operations, including smart contract calls and data storage/retrieval (more details in the extended link).

B. Blinks (Blockchain Links)

Official definition: Blinks can convert any Solana Action into a shareable, metadata-rich link. Blinks enable Action-supporting clients (browser extension wallets, bots) to present more functionalities to users. On websites, Blinks can immediately trigger transaction previews in wallets without navigating to decentralized applications; in Discord, bots can expand Blinks into a set of interactive buttons. This allows any webpage interface displaying a URL to achieve on-chain interaction.

In simple terms, Solana Blinks can convert Solana Actions into shareable links (similar to http), with supported wallets like Phantom, Backpack, and Solflare enabling websites and social media to transform into on-chain trading venues, allowing any URL to directly initiate Solana transactions.

The main goal of Actions and Blinks is to "http-ify" Solana's on-chain operations, integrating them into Web2 applications like Twitter.

2) Application Examples

The following content is excerpted from @starzqeth's compilation of some examples from 33 use cases:

A. Sending Red Envelopes on Social Media Author: @zen913

B. Promoting Memes via Blink Author: @MeteoraAG

C. Trading in Private Messages Author: ft.@tensor_hq

D. Tipping on Social Media Author: @zen913

3) Security Issues

While Blink looks cool and has recently gained some attention in the community, its actual usability still has significant room for improvement. First, the feature is not user-friendly for mobile users. Additionally, each operation requires redirection to a detailed webpage to link wallets and sign transactions. The close integration with wallets significantly increases risks. Would you dare to sign and complete transactions through links posted by strangers?

Compared to TON, Blink's advantages mainly lie in broader and simpler dissemination, but it lacks the integrated experience of TG + TON. In terms of security, Blink is not just a decentralization issue; it entirely relies on wallet checks to resolve problems. Therefore, Blink currently resembles an experiment, providing insights into other blockchains, but still has many security issues that need to be addressed.

4. Base

1) The Rise Without Token Issuance

The architecture of Base may already be familiar to many, so it will not be elaborated here. Similar to TON, Base also has a strong supporter. Its rise is akin to Solana's current success, relying on memes for launch and achieving success without token incentives, purely based on wealth commitments. Initially, Friend.tech attracted a large number of users, and after separating from Friend.tech, Base has its own Farcaster as a foundation. Coinbase clearly knows how to operate a blockchain network.

2) Farcaster

Farcaster provides another solution for SocialFi. In short, Farcaster is an open social protocol framework that allows developers to build various social applications, just as email protocols support multiple clients. Its standout feature is interoperability, designed to seamlessly interact with other blockchain networks, facilitating smooth exchanges of information and assets between different platforms. This allows for the construction of multiple social media dapps on the Farcaster protocol, such as the popular Twitter-like platform Warpcast.

3) Application Examples

This section references the work of Wilson Lee, a core contributor to the "Biteye" community.

A. Warpcast

Warpcast is the core application under the Farcaster protocol and the first Farcaster client, developed by a top engineering team assembled by Dan over the course of a year. Its overall architecture is similar to traditional Web2 social software, providing a smooth user experience and currently accounting for 90% of Farcaster protocol traffic.

The registration process for Warpcast is very simple; the system automatically generates a wallet for users, and all Warpcast accounts are associated with a Farcaster ID, with generated content stored in the Farcaster center. This design allows non-crypto users to easily enter the on-chain world, significantly lowering the cognitive barrier for new users. Users familiar with on-chain interactions can also link their commonly used crypto wallets. These adjustments make Warpcast more user-friendly while promoting the growth and acceptance of the Farcaster ecosystem.

B. Jam

Jam is a creator economy platform based on Farcaster, allowing users to convert each tweet on Warpcast into NFT assets similar to Friend.tech Keys. Users can buy and sell each tweet, with prices determined by the bonding curve below.

C. Clubcast

Clubcast is an application on Farcaster, similar to the knowledge-sharing platform Zhihu, which has launched a Token-Gated Casts feature. Users must pay to purchase other users' Club Tokens to unlock hidden content on clubcast.xyz or Frame. Currently, using this feature requires developer permissions.

4) The Best Economic Model May Be No Economic Model

Base aims to consolidate itself through various SocialFi applications provided by Farcaster. Unlike TON and Blinks, which primarily attract users from Web2 and convert them, Farcaster is a more traditional Web3 social protocol. The protocol includes lightweight applications that enhance Web2 functionalities, as well as more complex applications aimed at rebuilding social interactions. These two types of applications are more closely linked to "Fi," meaning they first need to address content pricing and economic model design issues. Complex applications also face challenges of content scarcity and user scarcity.

We have already discussed the issues of complex applications at the beginning of this article, so how should we view the issue of economic model design? From Friend.tech to Pump.fun, the best economic model may simply be no economic model, allowing content to develop freely without preset pricing curves. During the peak of Friend.tech, discussions about the Key pricing model were widespread. Once something can be precisely calculated, its lifecycle and ceiling become limited, which is precisely the case with Friend.tech.