The Social Trading App Surge

Social trading is booming in crypto right now. There are now dozens of teams building at the crossroads of social networking and onchain trading.

• Of course, the big name here currently is Farcaster, the decentralized social network that's doubled down on its in-app wallet with swap comments, no trading fees in November, and etc.
• There's also Zora, which offers Instagram-like UX but with tokenized posts and tokenized profiles, a.k.a. creator coins. Plus, the up-and-coming Base app is natively integrated with Farcaster and Zora.
• This scene isn't new, though. I've had Interface downloaded on my phone for quite some time now. It was one of the first social trading apps to integrate Farcaster's social graph, and it's a great copytrading venue in the Ethereum ecosystem.
• I've also enjoyed using Checkr, which provides some fantastic attention and influence analytics as piped in from Farcaster. And my colleague David Christopher recently wrote a great primer on FOMO, which I haven't tried yet but will certainly get around to.

But like I said at the start, there's a surge of oncomers that are ramping up here, too, so take note. The two main arrivals I've seen this week are Clicker and Share.

• Clicker, which just launched and is now available to download on Android and iOS devices, is a new "social network for traders." Starting with support for Base and Solana, the app links trading activity + commentary via trade comments, which let you post your reasonings behind your swaps and analyze others' trades. Native trading on the app isn't supported for now, though you can earn here if your comments get copytraded.
• Share, which also just launched to iOS users, is a new crosschain social trading app that supports Base, Ethereum, and Solana transactions. You can trade through any wallet here, including new ones spun up via Privy, and every wallet automatically gets a dedicated Share profile so you can easily follow others and get instant trade notifications. 0.5% earnings on every copytrade is a nice touch, too.

And more social trading releases are incoming. Thesis, which is being built on the new Base token launchpad Fey, is gearing up, while in Solana land the Timefun team is working on a new primitive + product combo.

There are peripheral opportunities in this scene, too. For example, consider Memory, which is a data layer that lets you sync your various social accounts (X, Farcaster, ENS, Github, etc.) and get paid when external apps build on this data with the Memory API. I could see this getting much more popular.

The bottom line is that trading is becoming a social medium in itself. And this trend is undoubtedly here to stay, so now’s a good time to explore the early apps shaping this culture shift!