All human interactions and value exchanges are accompanied by social activities. The advent of the internet has dramatically expanded the world’s social capabilities, freeing people from the constraints of time and space. Since then, social networks have made their way to the center of the internet, becoming a gathering place for user traffic and a hub for information and asset exchanges. More and more applications are relying on social networking to develop and grow, further emphasizing how important social networks truly are.

Since society’s social behaviors have shifted more and more onto online spaces, social interaction has become more efficient and prolific as well. For example, applications involving e-commerce, group purchases, news distribution, etc. have become easier to use with less transaction issues, launching them into large-scale ubiquity.

This massive explosion of socialization via the internet has generated an abundance of invaluable social data, called social assets.

The most common types of social assets found on the Internet include:

Various characteristics of one’s personal profile, such as one’s gender, age, region, hobbies, tags, status, etc. One’s social relationships, such as one’s friends, colleagues, interest groups, fans, etc. One’s social behaviors and generated data, such as one’s chats, published content (photos, texts, video), live broadcasts, sharing, likes, comments, etc.

It is evident that the data within social assets have great value and significance to individuals. Like other private assets, social assets should be deemed personal and sacred. However, because of the way today’s social networks are structured, individuals cannot control and protect their own social assets, and thus their social assets cannot be effectively evaluated (people cannot claim the worth of their own social assets).

Currently, social networking looks like this:

Each user submits his or her social assets to an online platform (i.e. providing one’s personal data or access to one’s friendship list); As users post and interact on the social media platform, all of the social interactions and content are stored onto the platform itself; The more users there are, the larger the social networking platform becomes, but the users/contributors do not receive the benefits of this growth; Users are not connected across different social networking platforms, and are thus separated into their own islands; Other new applications need these social networking platforms to gain traffic and improve their users’ experiences…

This results in two consequences:

Monopoly of the users’ social assets — the benefits and value generated by the users’ social assets become the platform’s profits. Platform’s monopolization of traffic — All new applications, not just social applications, find difficulty in growing organically.

In short, present-day social networking platforms possess users’ social assets, which grants the platforms monopolies in both user traffic and social asset profits. However, such platforms then use these capabilities to maintain their own status and interests rather than serve developers and users. Clearly, the power gap between users/developers and platforms is becoming wider, and the application- and user- ecosystems are deteriorating.

Despite the aforementioned monopolies over today’s social networks, however, each user is still the root of every social asset. After all, the user is the connection between every relationship, the input source of digital content, and the real source of digital traffic.

SNP, or the Social Network Protocol, is an open and extensible application layer protocol. It will allow all apps to have social functions so that users can exchange the official token currency, Social Coin (SoCo), and discover the full value of their social assets. Each user will be able to have his or her own blockchain-based wallet of social assets, accessible by the user’s private key only.

With SoCo and SNP, users will be able to identify their social assets. New applications will be able to use SoCo rewards to incentivize users into using their social assets to earn SoCo, which will simultaneously help users make money when conducting social activities and help new applications grow faster. In this way, users help apps gain their needed user base while apps compensate users for their efforts, creating an interdependent relationship between users and applications. Ultimately, as users invite others to join these new applications, user traffic will be deconstructed and redirected from centralized platforms to new applications, forming multi-application centers and interconnected social networks.

Apps are already incentivizing users to engage in social activities without the support of blockchain technology. For example, there are features that encourage users to invite friends to applications, help users view and share news, and give out cash rewards. With current social networking apps, the high-traffic centralized social network is introduced to the user, and the user is benefited with the aforementioned features. However, in the absence of blockchain technology, the user’s assets and interests are difficult to protect and it is easy to form a new monopoly. This means that the mutual trust between applications and users is difficult to establish.

SNP and smart contracts make the rewards process transparent, which will improve the trust between users and applications, as well as the trust between users themselves. Users will know exactly how much SoCo they will be receiving for their social assets, and applications will not be able to abuse their information; applications and users alike can trust the payment is secure and will be carried out; all transactions will be recorded and fixed so that scamming and corruption are absolutely minimized.

Ultimately, SoCo and SNP will transform the current centralized social networking ecosystem into a healthier and interconnected network of users and applications, where no individual/individuals can hoard all user traffic and social asset profits. People will finally be able to own their social property and new applications will finally have the opportunity to bring their new ideas to the market.

Here’s an example of how one might use SoCo in real life:

“Mike had an unused bicycle, and wanted to trade it for a secondhand iPod he liked.

Mike opened an SNP-based APP dedicated to selling secondhand items, and used his fingerprint login authentication to post he was selling his bicycle at 300 SoCo.

Next, Mike found an iPod that he liked, which costed 400 SoCo.

Mike sold his bike for 300 SoCo, but still needed 100 SoCo to buy his desired iPod.

Mike discovered a referral reward feature in the APP. Thus, he found a nice secondhand guitar and shared it on his Facebook page. His friend Jerry saw it via Mike’s Facebook post, and decided to buy the guitar through the APP. Mike earned 100 SoCo through his referral, bringing his SoCo total to 400 SoCo.

Mike can finally afford his secondhand iPod, and buys it with the SoCo he’s accumulated.”

As previously mentioned, the number of applications that involve some sort of social function are practically countless. A secondhand retail app is just one of many examples. Practically every industry, from news/media, to advertising, to online shopping, to finance (the list goes on and on) has an application with social capabilities and sharing features. Once you’ve visited a restaurant you’ve enjoyed, you can write a review on Yelp and then share the review on Facebook. Spotify lets you share the music you’re listening to with your friends. When you pay someone on Venmo, you have the option of posting why you just paid $150 to your best friend at 3AM (late-night feast?). These are popular apps that garner millions of users, and they just barely scratch the surface of the variety of apps now offered. Moreover, these apps exist as different apps in different countries (China’s version of Uber is called DiDi), further widening the scope of influence that SoCo and SNP could have on the world of apps.

Social networking is now inherent in practically everything we do. That’s why we need SoCo and SNP.