In a 48-hour period at the end of January, the two largest decentralized social protocols underwent major leadership changes. Farcaster shifted stewardship of its protocol, flagship client, and leading Base launchpad, Clanker, to its primary infrastructure provider, Neynar. Concurrently, Lens Protocol announced its transition from Avara (the team behind Aave) to Mask Network.

The suddenness of these transitions was enough to rekindle a familiar debate: Do these restructurings by the sector’s most established projects signal a failure for crypto social? For many critics, the answer was an immediate yes. They argued that crypto social never moved beyond the crypto bubble, failed to compete meaningfully with Web2 giants, and ultimately imploded under its own momentum. For them, the ownership changes confirmed that decentralized social media is a dead end—at best, a niche experiment. However, this view misinterprets a necessary market correction as a complete collapse.

Why the first save struggled

What these transitions actually reveal is a long-overdue acknowledgement of reality: building social networks is not primarily a question of ideology or infrastructure, but of product quality, distribution and incentives. The first wave of crypto social struggled not because decentralization is inherently flawed, but because it attempted to recreate legacy social platforms while layering crypto’s complexity on top of them. Farcaster and Lens were ambitious efforts to reimagine social media around user-owned identity, open graphs and composable data. Both attracted top-tier capital and world-class engineers. And yet neither managed to break meaningfully beyond a crypto-native audience.

A key misstep was assuming social graphs would scale like blockchains, that you could build a shared, open layer first, and value would naturally accrue. In practice, social graphs do not compound simply by existing. And this is not uniquely a crypto lesson. Decentralized social graphs have existed for years, with Mastodon and Nostr as the obvious examples, yet neither has achieved sustained mainstream adoption. The pattern is consistent: users do not migrate for ideological reasons, and portability does not overcome the cold start. Without a flagship experience that feels materially better today, with better content, better loops, better status and better tools, decentralization remains an implementation detail that appeals to a committed minority, not a mass-market hook.

In addition, both ecosystems leaned too early into platform-building and developer ecosystems, overestimating their ability to solve the cold-start problem for builders. With user counts in the low tens of thousands, the economic pie was simply too small for third-party applications to thrive. Builders were asked to take on distribution risk before meaningful distribution existed, while competing, implicitly or explicitly, with flagship clients that controlled the primary surface area.

Social networks live and die by network effects, and crypto introduces additional friction at every layer: wallets, security assumptions, moderation trade-offs and identity management. Convincing users to abandon platforms where their social graphs already exist is difficult under any circumstances. Asking them to do so while navigating unfamiliar tooling raises the bar even higher.

From Social Media to Social Financial Networks

Rather than chasing a decentralized Twitter analogue, the narrative is shifting toward what might be better described as social financial networks. In these systems, the primary function is not broadcasting opinions or accumulating followers, but coordinating information, capital and collective belief. Success is measured less by engagement metrics and more by the quality of signal and the flow of value.

Seen through this lens, crypto may already have found its most compelling native social platform, just not in the form many expected. Prediction markets such as Polymarket function as social coordination engines. They aggregate opinion, surface collective intelligence and transform discourse into probabilistic outcomes. Crucially, this model is not a copy of Web2 social media. It does not rely on advertising, algorithmic outrage or attention extraction. And it has demonstrated relevance beyond a purely crypto-native audience.

But social financial networks are only the first wave of what crypto can unlock. Blockchains make certain end-user experiences possible in a way Web2 rails simply do not, and speculation is just the most legible early expression of that. Polymarket turns conversation into accountable belief. Products like FOMO show how trading itself can become social, with transparency, shared context, and real-time feedback loops baked into the graph.

The bigger opportunity goes well beyond a social + markets equation. It is social systems where ownership, identity and monetization are native rather than bolted on. Digital ownership can turn content and status into durable assets. Programmable incentives can align creators, curators, and communities around long-term behavior rather than short-term extraction. Onchain coordination can unlock new group behaviors, from collective funding to shared membership, shared governance and shared upside. The point is not that crypto makes social cheaper or more open, but rather it expands the design space for what social networks can be.

A reset, not an obituary

Declaring crypto social “dead” misses the point. What has ended is a particular vision of Web3 social, one that assumed legacy social media could be recreated on crypto rails with better incentives and better values.

What remains is a harder, more grounded challenge: identifying where crypto enables forms of social coordination that were previously impossible. Capital formation, information markets, community-owned infrastructure and new mechanisms for aligning incentives all remain open design spaces. Crypto social is not disappearing. It is shedding its earliest assumptions.

One reason the “dead” narrative feels premature is that we may have been looking for the next crypto social breakout in the wrong place. Moltbook is a deliberately weird experiment: a social network designed primarily for AI agents, with humans as observers. In a matter of days, tens of thousands of agents reportedly spun up emergent behaviors that look uncannily social, creating religions, organizing governance, publishing manifestos and even experimenting with privacy and encryption.

The surprising part is that watching it has been engaging for humans, precisely because it feels like observing a new social class forming in real time, negotiating norms, status and even revenue strategies, sometimes explicitly trying to evade human legibility. It is too early to know whether this is a durable phenomenon or a passing narrative, but it is a bold reminder that new forms of social can emerge when the participants, incentives and constraints change. If AI agents increasingly need to transact and coordinate across the digital world, blockchains are a natural substrate for them to do so.

For now, it turns out, the crypto social obituary was written for the wrong thing.

Long live crypto social!

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Ether (ETH) price is up 18% since plunging below the $1,800 mark on Feb. 6, reclaiming the $2,000 support level. Surging price volatility and a low MVRV Z-score value are also signaling a local bottom forming.

Key takeaways:

• Ether realized volatility on Binance has risen to its highest level since March 2025, hinting at a potential recovery.

• Ether’s MVRV Z-Score has dropped into the accumulation zone, suggesting that ETH has bottomed. 

• Ether’s multiyear trend line around $1,800-$1,900 holds as support. 

Ether’s volatility hits 12-month highs

Ether’s volatility has seen a sudden spike, suggesting that the market is entering a period of intense activity and strong repricing, according to data from CryptoQuant.

Volatility is a metric used to determine how much and how quickly Ether’s price fluctuates over a given period. 

Related: ETH options turn bearish as traders prepare for extended Ether price downside

The chart below shows that the realized volatility (30-day) indicator on Binance rose sharply to 0.97 on Thursday from 0.37 in mid-January. 

A spike in realized volatility to such high levels indicates that the “market has emerged from a period of relative calm and entered a highly volatile environment,” CryptoQuant analyst Arab Chain said in a Quicktake analysis, adding:

“Past experience has shown that such readings have often preceded a significant upward move in Ethereum’s price.”

The last time the volatility was this high was late March to early April 2025 as ETH price formed a bottom range of $1,500 to $1,700.

After that, the ETH/USD pair rallied 77% to $2,700 in less than 30 days. A similar spike in Q4/2024 preceded a 74% rally in Ether’s price.

If history repeats itself, this spike in volatility could mark the end of the downtrend, setting up ETH for a multimonth rally once volatility normalizes and conviction builds.

MVRV Z-Score suggests Ether bottomed below $1,800

Ether’s MVRV Z-Score, one of the most popular onchain metrics used to identify market tops and bottoms, has dropped into the historical accumulation zone (the green line in the chart below), strengthening the argument that ETH may have found its bottom.

The last time Ether’s MVRV Z-Score dipped to the current level around -0.31 was in April 2025, after a 66% price drawdown. This coincided with a price bottom at $1,400 and preceded a multi-month rally, with ETH price rising 258% to its $4,950 all-time high. 

This indicates that, from an onchain perspective, Ether is oversold and may continue the ongoing recovery, potentially rising toward liquidity clusters between $2,200 and $2,500 in the short term.

Ether’s 2020 fractal projects an “explosive climb” for ETH price

Ether’s current technical structure closely mirrors the setup that sparked its 2020-2021 price rally. 

The monthly chart below suggests that the price is currently holding a multi-year trend line, much like the one that supported the price from December 2018 to April 2020. 

“Every time price holds above this ascending support trend line, it launches into a parabolic rally,” as seen in 2020, analyst Trader Tardigrade said in an X post on Thursday, adding:

”Now $ETH is testing the trendline again. If it holds here, history says we’re gearing up for another explosive climb.”

This trend line lies within the $1,900 to $1,800 support zone, where investors recently acquired 2.9 million ETH, Glassnode’s cost basis distribution heatmap shows.

As Cointelegraph reported, ETH could continue its recovery to retest the 50-day simple moving average (SMA) at $2,540 if bulls manage to push the price above $2,100.