#255: SocialFi Strikes Again ft. Portalcoin

🤔 SocialFi as a product vs. SocialFi as a strategy

Some of us breathed a sigh of relief over the past month as the frenzy around friend.tech has gradually turned into an afterthought (until they conduct the airdrop in a few months).

But when one chapter finishes, another one begins. And we’re seeing another flavor of SocialFi emerge with Portalcoin.

Oh boy, I just recovered from the friend.tech trauma. Who and what do I have to mute on my timeline now?

If you’ve been active on X over the past few days, you’ve likely seen posts on the timeline that have tagged the @Portalcoin account like this one featuring my buddy doodlifts:

Thanks, muting ‘Portalcoin’ now.

Before you do that, I’m going to make the argument about why this aspect of SocialFi is here to stay, why it will proliferate, and what may happen next as the space continues to evolve in weird, annoying, and interesting ways.

Basically, don’t be the person on the left. Be the person on the right 🙂

What the hell is Portalcoin?

The real question is, what is Portal?

Portal is a web3 gaming platform, similar to Steam. What does Portal’s vision look like?

• Single sign-on to access and play different web3 games

• Payment platform for games within their network that accept crypto, fiat, and of course, Portalcoin

• Game assets under a single inventory

• Social features that allow for connecting and conversing with friends and other players

• Discovery platform that allows players to find new games and developers to have another avenue for distribution

Portal already has 200+ games that have agreed to be on the platform, which is notable when we think about network effects.

With a better understanding of what Portal is and what they’re trying to achieve, $PORTAL or Portalcoin makes more sense.

Gaming distribution and discovery platforms aren’t new, and many are popping up as web3 gaming is taking off. Some other examples of these are Owned, FreeNFT, Simplio, and many others I’m not aware of.

This doesn’t explain why our timelines have been flooded with Portalcoin posts though…

Portal announces Crystal Dash

On Monday, Portal launched Crystal Dash and was straightforward with their intentions.

TLDR:

• Create Twitter content that tags @Portalcoin and earn points

• Level up to earn shards

• Shards are fused into crystals

• Crystals = $PORTAL

• Points earned vary based on the type of engagement on your Portalcoin posts

  • 2 points per view

  • 10 points per like

  • 20 points per reply

  • 25 points per repost

  • 30 points per quote post

  • A multiplier is applied based on the account’s follower count, age, etc.

Season 1 lasts a week, so if you’re getting angry reading this, you can relax knowing this will be back to normal by next week (at least temporarily) 😮‍💨

One of the reasons the Portalcoin madness consumed the timeline so quickly was because the team was straightforward about the airdrop and how to earn it. This method stands in contrast to most strategies when it comes to announcing airdrops, which involve teasers, speculation, and suggestive but vague wording. An example of this is with Base, the Layer 2 blockchain built by Coinbase:

Of course, Coinbase and Base have a completely different set of considerations, so this is understandable.

By keeping the mechanics simple, vampire attacking X’s algorithm, and providing the carrot of a token airdrop, what were the results ~2 days in?

• 1.3 million tweets with the @Portalcoin or $Portal tag

• Reached #7 on Twitter trending

• Engagement from larger figures in the space

Players (users? farmers?) can also earn points by engaging with Portal posts as well, which explains why their posts have sky-high engagement and why their follower count doubled over the past few days.

Source

Caveats

As impressive as these top-line numbers might be, we shouldn’t be easily fooled. Whenever financial incentives are involved, there is always motivation to maximize ROI.

There are likely a lot of bots and alt accounts juicing up these numbers, in the hopes of getting a larger portion of the eventual airdrop, and there are countless group chats working together to boost post engagement for fellow members.

Despite those valid criticisms, you can’t deny the fact that Portal has won the awareness game this week. In traditional marketing circles, there is the concept of the Rule of 7. Prospects need to ‘hear’ or ‘see’ an ad 7 times before taking action, whether it be a purchase or something else.

As annoying and cringe as the Portalcoin posts might be, those active in the space have easily reached the threshold of 7 impressions. In fact, it’s probably closer 70 or even 170 impressions. Even if you muted @Portalcoin and $PORTAL, you probably saw it 7 times before taking action.

What Portal is doing reminds me of the term ‘business in front, party in the back’.

Except it’s in reverse: ‘party airdrop farming in the front, product and platform in the back’.

And I think this strategy works, at least for Portal and as an early mover with this strategy. The platform is embracing it all: the hype, aggressive engagement farming, cringe, and critics, trading it off for mass awareness with the native crypto, NFT, and web3 audiences.

If you didn’t know what Portal was last week, you do now thanks to all the posts on the feed.

If you didn’t know what Portal was yesterday, you do now because you’re reading this (which is a secondary effect of all the posts on the feed).

If you hate Portal, they might win you back later as they shift the focus from the token to the platform in the future. Or maybe you weren’t their target audience in the first place, which is ok too.

Creative farming

One of the reasons I was more intrigued than annoyed at Portalcoin posts was because of the ways that participants creatively incorporated the requirements, making it more bearable.

Dingaling playing on the fact that Portalcoin posts are annoying:

See what he did there with the liking and RT’ing? 😉

Ashchild uses Pudgy Penguin content to attract engagement while inserting a Portalcoin mention to earn points:

Kopi changes their display name to a BAYC Sales bot and announces an eyebrow-raising (but fake) BAYC sale notification. Notice the Portalcoin tag nestled in between the two hashtags?

McGavin uses an old strategy leveraging keywords that attracts scammers and bots to reply:

And Reptjar conducts an entertaining and ridiculous poll to get some Portalcoin engagement:

Alright, seeing all these Portalcoin posts in a row makes me want to mute as well 😂 That said, participants understand they have to be creative in order to see success. Their personal brand is at stake.

What does this mean for SocialFi?

The hell if I know. Jk, I have some thoughts.

First of all, this isn’t a novel concept. A few months ago, tipcoin came out with SocialFi mechanics that have some similarities to what Portalcoin’s Crystal Dash is doing now.

Tipcoin

Portalcoin/Crystal Dash

What is different is that tipcoin’s product is a social platform (tipchat), while Portalcoin is a token used on the Portal web3 gaming platform. Similar strategy/tactics, different product.

With the success of Portalcoin, I believe we will see more variations of this type of campaign in the coming months, especially if there is willingness to be upfront about a token airdrop.

However, the bar for seeing Portalcoin-like results will increase exponentially:

• Participants will grow tired of doing the same thing and some will realize that their personal brand is worth more than chasing a token. This will result in only smaller or alt accounts participating, resulting in less impact

• There will be a saturation of projects using this strategy, and the broader community will regard most of these the same way we look at the 1398591381 new NFT projects that launched during the last cycle (and possibly this upcoming one)

So…will this be a:

1. Passing fad that will fade into the background

2. Tactic that will be utilized by everyone, but with a capped ceiling for impact

3. A growth strategy that evolves via growth hacks layered on top

I think it’ll be somewhere in between 2 and 3. Many teams will utilize this to some degree, just as allowlists have become the norm for mints. I described 3 the way I did because IMO the Portalcoin strategy will be a viable one until it gets saturated and less effective, and then someone else will come along and put a twist on it, making it hypereffective again.

Taking a step back, this makes me question the concept of SocialFi.

What IS SocialFi?

I’m not smart enough to answer that question. Let’s see what Blockworks says:

Makes sense when we think about SocialFi as a product or platform. But after observing what has happened with Portalcoin, I don’t think SocialFi is just a product or platform, it’s more than that.

When we compare the friend.tech and tipcoins of the world vs. Portal, the definition and concept of SocialFi expands beyond the conceptual box we put it in.

It’s sorta like when Uber was thought of only as a taxi app. A decade later, Uber is now a transportation app: for people, pets, packages, food, and more.

Just as Friend.tech has introduced a new primitive for creator platforms, I believe Portalcoin has introduced a new primitive for how SocialFi can be integrated beyond just social platforms.

So next time you see a new Portalcoin-type of posts popping up, take some time to see how SocialFi is being incorporated. Then mute the keywords 🤐

See you next week!