Roll Labs Launches ‘Form’ SocialFi Platform

The demise of FriendTech isn’t deterring a group of SocialFi enthusiasts from attempting to take this crypto sector to the next level. In fact, it’s given Bradley Miles and his crew at Roll Labs the lessons needed to connect the dots between DeFi and online communities.

Today, Roll Labs has unveiled Form, an Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem. It’s also the kick-off to an initial native yield campaign and the opening of a pre-deposit campaign. However, the novelty here is to create bonding curve-driven “thesis chains.”

“We are the city that enables a decentralized SocialFi,” Miles told The Defiant.

How? “Through bonding curves for every bit of content a creator makes, connecting their online community with DeFi. Imagine having a bonding curve button installed on YouTube that, with a click of the button, creates a token you can then monetize.”

For Miles, this will allow for an underlying principle in crypto to flourish – speculation. “Chris Dixon says Web1 was read, Web2 write, and Web3 own; Form isn’t just owning, it’s building the financial internet.” He added that this will allow creators to own social communities, turning them into rocket fuel for their ecosystems.

Meditations

Along with the launch of Form, the team is also introducing a points program dubbed Meditations.

The first phase of the program (there will be two), also known as Season Zero, is a pre-deposit campaign that kicks off today and will conclude with the launch of a governance token. According to the team, at least 9% of the token supply will be distributed to users at the end of both Meditations and 50% of the total supply will be distributed to the community, although some details are yet to be finalized.

The team has allocated 29% of the supply to the Foundation treasury, 38% to ecosystem and development, 15.5% to core contributors and 17.5% to investors. The foundation, ecosystem, and development allotment are earmarked as “community” and reach 67%.

Form has onboarded some of the largest projects in crypto as partners and will be offering rewards to users participating in Season Zero. These include Renzo, a liquid restaking protocol with $995 million in total value locked (TVL), Turtle Club, a syndicate for DeFi liquidity with $1 billion in TVL, Pendle Finance, and others.

Thesis Chains

Form is betting big on what it calls “thesis chains.”

These are chains that “intensely focus” on one particular category or asset class without being distracted by anything else. Miles said that these are chains that have a specific comparative advantage against others and have weathered many cycles.

He gave the examples of Ronin for gaming, Chiliz for fan tokens, or even “thesis cities” like Las Vegas as the bedrock of the project. “We are the city for SocialFi,” he claims.

Vitalik Buterin recently published a piece that hints at thesis chains as the future of Ethereum. “Layer 2s allow subcultures to emerge that are armed with substantial resources, and a feedback loop that forces them to learn and adapt in order to be effective in the real world,” Buterin wrote, adding that a “Layer 2 is simultaneously (i) an ecosystem, and (ii) organized around building something.”

The Demise of Friend.tech

In late Sept. 2023, a new platform dubbed Friend.tech took crypto by storm. And with it came the SocialFi movement, a hybrid concept that combines social networks with DeFi.

However, a year after it came to life, the platform was abandoned. Once the most popular application on Coinbase’s Layer 2 Base, on Sept. 7, the team removed the ability to change the underlying code, effectively killing the project.

This reality drew the Form team to create an alternative, decentralized platform.

“SocialFi's legacy on Ethereum can't be centralization,” said Sid Kalla, a core contributor at Form. “Users have the right to transact, the right to own and the right to bear a market as they see fit with their tokens. SocialFi users should be able to mint and trade tokens on bonding curve apps and use those same tokens across DeFi, DEXes and even CEXes.”

Bonding Curves

At the center of Form’s alleged decentralization lie bonding curves.

A bonding curve is a mathematical concept used to describe the relationship between the price and supply of an asset, in this case, a cryptocurrency. The mechanism is used to launch and trade tokens, designed to facilitate fair access to new coins without the classic pre-sale advantage common in crypto projects.

According to Miles, what Form brings is second-order bonding curves. “We see a multi-curve world, where this mechanism exists not only for individuals but also their content,” he said. In other words, individuals can create a token around themselves, but others can create another that might be linked to another bit of their content.

This, essentially, drives the decentralization and financialization of the project.

A Hyperfinancialized Online Community

Behind Form lives one of the most underlying yet conveniently avoided principles in crypto: speculation.

Miles paraphrased one of the project's investors, Balaji Srinivasan, and said that the first principles in crypto lie on the speculation side of things. When asked about how this might drive a hyperfinancialized community, he had a succinct answer: “There’s always a market and a price for speculation, and you’ll just be late to adoption.”

Ultimately, Form’s larger vision is creating default yield-bearing assets that can be integrated into an on-chain SocialFi experience. One that lets users continually receive yield while minting and trading tokens on the network, in a potentially endless monetization loop between creators and their creators.