social

Phantom announced the launch of Phantom Chat, positioning it as a new social feature for 2026.On-chain detective ZachXBT warned that this feature could become a new entry point for asset theft, noting that Phantom has still not resolved the "address poisoning" issue. Users, without filtering out spam transaction records, may mistakenly copy similar addresses, leading to asset theft. He disclosed that last week, a user lost 3.5 WBTC as a result.

According to SoSoValue data, most sectors in the crypto market have retraced, with only the DePIN, AI, and SocialFi sectors remaining relatively strong, rising 0.01%, 0.06%, and 2.14% respectively over the past 24 hours. Within the DePIN sector, Arweave (AR) increased by 2.40%; in the AI sector, Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL) rose by 1.33%, and Worldcoin (WLD) increased by 2.03%; in the SocialFi sector, Toncoin (TON) went up by 2.80%.In addition, Bitcoin (BTC) fell by 3.10%, briefly dropping below $73,000, but has now rebounded to above $76,000; Ethereum (ETH) decreased by 3.72%, touching $2,100 at one point, and is now approaching $2,300.In other sectors, the Layer1 sector dropped by 2.12% over the past 24 hours, with Solana (SOL) falling by 5.00%, while Cosmos Hub (ATOM) rose by 5.49%; the Meme sector declined by 0.38%, with Binance Life significantly increasing by 13.58%; the PayFi sector decreased by 0.96%, but Trust Wallet (TWT) rose by 4.20%; the Layer2 sector fell by 1.56%, with Polygon (POL) down by 3.74%; the CeFi sector dropped by 1.70%, with OKB down by 2.11%; the DeFi sector decreased by 1.93%, while Morpho Token (MORPHO) rose against the trend by 5.01%.The crypto sector indices reflecting historical market performance show that the ssiSocialFi, ssiDePIN, and ssiAI indices increased by 2.56%, 0.68%, and 0.42% respectively.

According to SoSoValue data, the cryptocurrency market continues its downward trend, with the decline narrowing. Among them, Ethereum (ETH) has dropped 6.15% in the last 24 hours, falling below $2300. Bitcoin (BTC) decreased by 1.21%, dropping below $78,000. Only the SocialFi sector remains relatively strong, rising by 0.58%. Within this sector, Toncoin (TON) increased by 0.52%, and Chiliz (CHZ) rose by 4.02%.In other sectors, the Layer2 sector fell by 1.36% in the last 24 hours, but zkSync (ZK) surged by 13.62%, and Zora (ZORA) rose by 4.73%; the Meme sector decreased by 0.12%, with MemeCore (M) remaining relatively strong, increasing by 4.79%; the Layer1 sector dropped by 1.77%, while Canton Network (CC) surged by 4.73% during the session; the DeFi sector fell by 1.93%, but MYX Finance (MYX) rose against the trend by 14.41%; the CeFi sector decreased by 2.24%, with Binance Coin (BNB) dropping by 2.49%; the PayFi sector fell by 2.92%, while Ultima (ULTIMA) surged by 19.93%.The cryptocurrency sector indices reflecting historical market performance show that the ssiSocialFi, ssiMeme, and ssiRWA indices increased by 1.20%, 1.14%, and 0.17%, respectively.

According to The Block, OpenAI is planning to launch a new social media platform that may utilize the eye-scanning Orb technology from World (formerly known as Worldcoin) to verify that users are real humans, in order to create a bot-free social environment.It is worth noting that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a co-founder of Tools for Humanity, the company that developed the World technology.

According to Cointelegraph, the social NFT platform Rodeo has announced that it will gradually shut down, becoming the second NFT platform to announce its closure this week. The platform was launched in March last year through the Apple iOS store, focusing on a social-centric NFT collecting experience.The platform's co-founder and CEO stated that although the product was well-loved by the core community, it failed to achieve the scale of growth necessary for sustainable operation, and therefore could not continue. From January 27 to February 10, the platform will continue to operate normally, after which it will switch to read-only mode and will completely shut down on March 10.Rodeo has developed a user asset and data migration plan, including support for transferring media and metadata to the storage platform Arweave, and providing an asset migration assistant to guide users in transferring assets from the platform's smart contracts.

According to statistics from Our Crypto Talk, by early 2026, most SocialFi platforms will either be abandoned, acquired, or lose functionality, with tokens dropping by 90-99%, and communities evaporating instantly after incentives dry up. Among them, Friend.tech is the most typical example, generating a lot of fees and attention at its peak, but seeing activity plummet by over 95% within a few months, leading to a token crash.The core flaw lies in SocialFi's conflation of social interaction and speculation. The platform monetizes people rather than platform currency, causing users to focus not on content quality, but on whether it will skyrocket. Money has altered the incentive mechanisms, incentives have changed behaviors, and behaviors have destroyed culture. As Vitalik Buterin criticized, SocialFi is built by those obsessed with the market, yet attempts to solve problems that only social thinkers can understand.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke at Space, stating:"Personally, I have been using Farcaster quite a bit in 2023 and 2024, and I recently started paying attention to decentralized social media for two reasons. One is that I think the quality of conversations on Twitter is particularly poor, and it is not suitable as the world's chat center, so we need more options. The other is the 'network effect'; perhaps your new product has a better algorithm and better privacy protection, but if you don't have users, all of that is meaningless.Firefly has two features that can break through this dilemma. It is a decentralized social media platform, but it is also a multi-platform entry point. It can be a Twitter client or a Farcaster client, allowing users to use Firefly without leaving Twitter, which solves the 'network effect' problem."

Vitalik Buterin posted on Farcaster, "In 2026, I will use OpenStreetMap and the encrypted email service Protonmail, prioritizing decentralized social media to enhance the efficiency of privacy data protection. At the same time, I will continue to explore deployment solutions for local large language models (LLMs).The ideal solution is to leverage local LLMs as much as possible, compensating for the lack of parameters with dedicated fine-tuning models; for high-load scenarios, we will overlay pay-per-query zero-knowledge payments, trusted execution environments, and local query filtering, essentially integrating all imperfect solutions to provide the best possible protection. Of course, the ultimate goal remains to conquer highly efficient fully homomorphic encryption technology. Sending all data to third-party centralized services is indeed redundant. We have tools to significantly reduce such operations and should continue to build and apply them more actively."

According to Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, one of the Farcaster clients, Neynar, will acquire the decentralized social protocol Farcaster. In the coming weeks, the Farcaster protocol contracts, codebase, applications, and ownership of Clanker will be transferred to Neynar, which will be responsible for subsequent operations and maintenance.Some members of the Merkle team, Varun, and Dan Romero will step away from the day-to-day operations of Farcaster to focus on new projects. The Neynar team has been developing on Farcaster from the beginning and is one of the earliest Farcaster clients, with its infrastructure now supporting most of the developer ecosystem.Dan Romero stated that after five years of development, Farcaster needs new approaches and leadership to realize its full potential.

Vitalik Buterin stated that he plans to fully return to decentralized social networks in 2026, believing that if we want to build a better society, we must have better large-scale communication tools. These tools should help people filter high-quality information and opinions, find consensus, and serve the long-term interests of users rather than maximizing short-term interactions and emotional conflicts.Vitalik pointed out that there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution to the above problems, but enhancing competition is an important starting point, and decentralization is the key path to achieving competition: by sharing a data layer that allows anyone to build different clients on top of it. He revealed that since the beginning of this year, he has started using decentralized social tools for reading and posting, with all content synchronized across platforms like X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky through Firefly.He also criticized some crypto social projects for deviating from their original intentions, overly viewing "token issuance" as innovation, and attempting to create price bubbles around individuals to incentivize creators. However, practice shows that such models often reward existing social capital rather than content quality, and the lifecycle of tokens is short. Vitalik emphasized that money and social interaction are not inherently in conflict; the key is whether they truly serve the content itself, such as through subscription-based support models rather than speculative asset designs.In his view, decentralized social should be driven by teams that genuinely care about the "essence of social interaction." Vitalik acknowledged the Aave team's previous long-term maintenance of Lens and expressed anticipation for the direction of the new team, believing they are more focused on solving real social problems. He stated that in the coming year, he will speak more on decentralized social platforms and encourage more users to participate in ecosystems like Lens and Farcaster, breaking free from the information adversarial environment of a single platform and exploring new forms of interaction.

Aave and Lens Protocol founder Stani Kulechov posted on X that he will transfer the governance of the social protocol Lens Protocol to the Msak Network team, which has been focused on advancing the development of Lens Protocol at the application layer.The Lens social foundational module will always remain open source and will continue to serve as the infrastructure for anyone building social applications on a decentralized track. The original team will continue to serve as technical advisors while focusing on innovation in DeFi, which has always been their core area of expertise.

Decentralized social protocol [Mask Network](https://www.rootdata.com/zh/Projects/detail/Mask Network?k=Mjk0 "Web3 portal") and [Lens Protocol](https://www.rootdata.com/zh/Projects/detail/Lens Protocol?k=MjA3Nw== "Social layer of Web3") jointly announced that Mask Network has become the new steward of Lens Protocol. In the future, the focus of Lens Protocol will shift from protocol experimentation to consumer-facing user experience, product design, and global distribution."Mask's mission is to make decentralized social features easy to use, intuitive, and able to meet the needs of everyday users, which aligns perfectly with Lens's next phase of development," said Suji Yan, founder of Mask."As Mask leads this important phase, our role will shift from daily product development to consulting. In this role, we remain committed to making open, scalable, user-owned social networks a core pillar of the future internet. We are dedicated to the long-term success of Lens, its developers, its community, and Suji and the Mask team," Lens stated in an official blog.According to RootData, Lens Protocol has raised over $46 million, with investors including Tencent, Robot Ventures, Variant Fund, and others. Last June, media reported plans for a new funding round at a valuation of $500 million. Mask Network has previously raised over $57 million, and its token MASK currently has a FDV of $60 million.

According to SoSoValue data, the overall trend of the cryptocurrency market is showing a rebound, with the RWA sector performing outstandingly, rising 2.38% in 24 hours. Among them, Sky (SKY) increased by 1.90%, Ondo Finance (ONDO) rose by 2.74%, and Pendle (PENDLE) surged by 5.52%. Meanwhile, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are experiencing narrow fluctuations, reported at $92,000 and $3,200, respectively.In other sectors, the AI sector rose 2.06% in 24 hours, with Kite (KITE) increasing by 7.79%; the Meme sector rose by 1.80%, with MemeCore (M) up by 3.61%; the PayFi sector increased by 1.30%, with Safe (SAFE) rising by 4.27%; the Layer1 sector rose by 0.97%, with Cosmos Hub (ATOM) up by 4.10%; the CeFi sector increased by 0.83%, with Binance Coin (BNB) rising by 1.69%; the DeFi sector rose by 0.75%, with River (RIVER) continuing to rise by 15.72%; and the Layer2 sector increased by 0.47%, with SOON (SOON) up by 10.83%.Additionally, the NFT sector fell by 0.22%, and the SocialFi sector dropped by 1.61%. The cryptocurrency sector indices reflecting historical market trends show that the ssiMeme, ssiRWA, and ssiAI indices rose by 1.36%, 1.36%, and 1.05%, respectively.

According to monitoring by ZachXBT, a victim lost over $282 million in LTC and BTC due to a hardware wallet social engineering scam.The attackers subsequently converted the stolen LTC and BTC into Monero through multiple instant exchange platforms, causing a temporary surge in XMR prices. Some BTC was also cross-chained to Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin networks via Thorchain. A total of approximately 2.05 million LTC and 1,459 BTC have been disclosed as stolen addresses.

The social decentralized prediction market platform Slips announced the completion of a $3.5 million seed round financing, led by Las Olas Capital and Sunset Bay Capital, with participation from Andrew Schwartzberg, co-owner of the NBA's Charlotte Hornets and Leeds United Football Club.Slips offers AI-generated P2P prediction markets and location-based group activities, allowing users to interact in real-time both online and offline. The new funding will be used to expand its financial services infrastructure, including support for cryptocurrency payments and stablecoin withdrawals.

The Vice President of the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and Executive Director of the China Finance Society, Fan Wenzhong, wrote an article in the Hong Kong Wen Wei Po titled "Steadily Promoting the Coordinated Innovation of Digital Renminbi and Hong Kong Stablecoins," in which he pointed out: Currently, the cross-border use of digital renminbi mainly relies on the internal regulations and pilot policies of the People's Bank of China, lacking clear legal authorization. It is suggested to add provisions in the revision of the "People's Bank of China Law" to clarify the cross-border payment functions of digital renminbi and the legality of its interconnection with compliant overseas digital currency systems, while striving to clarify the "special regulatory requirements and preferential policies for stablecoin issuing institutions that exchange with the mainland central bank's digital currency" in the implementation rules of Hong Kong's "Stablecoin Ordinance," forming a synergistic institutional force.

According to Cointelegraph, the customer service hotline of the Social Fund of Russia handled approximately 37 million calls in 2025, most of which were routine inquiries (such as pensions, social benefits, etc.). However, among the non-standard questions, inquiries related to cryptocurrency surged, becoming one of the most common queries. The hottest crypto-related questions included whether pensions could be received in cryptocurrency and whether mining income would affect the calculation of social benefits.The Social Fund of Russia clearly responded that all pensions and social payments are currently issued only in rubles, and digital assets are not under the jurisdiction of the social fund. Cryptocurrency income and tax issues are handled by the Federal Tax Service of Russia.According to a report by Chainalysis, Russia has become the largest cryptocurrency market in Europe, surpassing the UK and Germany. From July 2024 to June 2025, Russia received $376.3 billion in cryptocurrency inflows, a year-on-year increase of 48%, far exceeding the UK's $273.2 billion. Large transfers increased by 86% year-on-year, and DeFi activity grew eightfold in 2025.