At the turn of the new century, the internet witnessed an incredible evolution that changed how information is shared by providing people with vast access to information with just a click. Connecting to the internet became easier, transcending physical communication barriers to make it possible for everyone to connect digitally and share information faster. However, in order to connect with their friends and family on the web2 platforms, users in return have to forfeit their privacy almost entirely and get invasively profiled and targeted based on private discussions and browsing sessions.. To provide a more ethical way for people to connect and truly own those connections, Joonatan Lintala and Tomi Fyrqvist co-founded Phaver, a Web3 social app that rewards users for creating and sharing quality content while providing them ownership through an NFT-based social graph.
Phaver is a decentralized platform combining the best features of both Web2 and Web3 social apps. The innovative social platform merges the ease-of-use and polished content feeds of Web2 platforms with the incentives and ownership of Web3 platforms to provide users with an all-encompassing experience. The idea to create a truly user-focused social platform occurred to Joonatan when he saw firsthand how efficient but also invasive the advertising mechanisms of Web2 are where, to connect with your friends, you need to trust platforms who scan your chats and follow your GPS to get you to buy more stuff, or, in the worst cases, vote according to a foreign government's interests in your local election.
The final straw was when he got a distress call from his grandmother, whose Facebook and Instagram accounts were revoked after she accidentally changed her age to under 13 in the settings. This singular incident reminded him that even as online social life now surpasses physical one for many people, currently users do not own any of it, and years of network or entire livelihoods can be wiped out by one wrong click or post.
To give users the autonomy of a social platform that offers genuine ownership and is optimized to reward quality rather than addictiveness, Joonatan Lintala teamed up with Tomi Fyrqvist and two senior developers as the founding team of the decentralized social platform, Phaver. Combining Joonatan's social experience and Tomi's experience from financial technology and blockchain, the team started assembling the building blocks of a more fair Web3 social network.
However, creating an autonomous Web3 social platform was no easy task. The Phaver team soon realized that merely building an NFT-based social profile would be like giving users a key but still controlling the only lock it works on. To fulfill the original goal of genuine ownership, the creators partnered with the DeFi platform Aave, which was in stealth mode building a revolutionary social graph that later became the Lens Protocol.
In addition to ensuring autonomy, the Phaver platform aims to solve the challenge of more ethical monetization and rewarding the community members who provide value for others by creating, curating, and moderating content. "We have crafted a dual-token economy similar to many play-to-earn games but with the key difference that many actions in a social network provide genuine value for others, making it not a zero-sum game but a balanced value exchange," Joonatan shared.
Therefore, unlike many P2E projects, Phaver has a genuine value creation that allows a balanced economy not reliant on ponzinomics or high entry fees in the form of NFTs or other tokens from new users. As a result, this unique feature empowers a much wider audience to access the earning potential around the world and creates a more egalitarian system. Since its launch, Phaver has garnered over 17,000 weekly returning users with zero marketing spending and over 30,000 active members on its discord channel.
Phaver aims to be the future of social and in the coming years, the innovative brand wants to provide the subsequent billion users with access to a social platform that gives them the ownership and rewards they deserve while providing content that is not optimized for addiction or controversy and makes the world better instead of worse.
