Investing in Yup

Nascent and IDEO CoLab Ventures are excited to announce our investment into Yup, with participation from Dan Romero (Farcaster). We share a vision of the exciting and powerful role open social platforms will play in the future of how we connect, create, learn, and earn. With an increasing number of social platforms competing for attention and relevance, it is more important than ever to enable creators and users to connect wherever and however they want. Yup plays a critical role to empower creators–and by extension, their community–by aggregating and building the tools that allow them to more powerfully grow their content, audience, and monetization.

‍

Open Social Meta Thesis

Crypto / web3 are unbundling the web and rebuilding it with open protocols. We saw this happen with the unbundling of traditional finance and its rebuilding with decentralized protocols, from currency and payments to exchange and credit. This resulted in financial infrastructure that is open, composable, and resilient. An explosion of innovation and economic activity followed and now we see the growth of DeFi, stablecoins, and RWAs as part of an inevitable transition to the newly upgraded financial stack. We are at the earliest stages of this same thing happening with the social platforms that mediate not only how we create and consume content, but ultimately how we connect with each other and make sense of the world.

‍

Social infrastructure (graphs, profiles, rankings, etc) defined the rise of Web2 and the creation of trillions of dollars of economic activity. These core social building blocks are now being rebuilt to be open and decentralized. Within the crypto community, Farcaster and Lens are the leading examples of open social protocols, through their creation of social graphs and enabling content distribution across them. They are just one layer of the entire social stack that is being unbundled and rebuilt with open protocols, others include ENS (usernames), XMTP (messaging), OpenRank (reputation), Zora (monetization), and more.

‍

As with open financial infrastructure, open and composable social infrastructure offers a resilient foundation on which to build social experiences. Users and creators will have more choice in the apps through which they experience content and community while still benefiting from the utility of being part of one (or few) global scale social network.

‍

At least, that’s the dream.

‍

We love to get nerdsniped alongside builders who geek out about protocol design, incentives, and techno philosophical musings. But in our own experience, the main thing holding us back from transitioning our default social apps to tools like Warpcast, Orb, or FriendTech is not the underlying technology or any missing UI elements or features. It’s that the majority of people we want to follow and content we want to consume still lives on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

‍

The reality is that, today, none of the open social protocols have reached critical mass. Even within web2 social, we are seeing increased fragmentation, as new challengers vie for attention. Brands and creators especially feel pain from fragmentation as they look to build an audience for the same primary content and voice across many platforms. It’s never been more difficult to cut through the noise. To win, both creators and platforms need to build critical mass such that network effects take hold and the unique value proposition of open social shines. 

‍

Yup: The Social Aggregator

Just as 0x and 1inch blazed the path for tearing down liquidity silos in DeFi, Yup demonstrates that fragmented networks and identities are equally nonsensical for social liquidity (aka: attention) as they are for financial liquidity. Yup makes practical some of the promises of open social infrastructure, allowing a simple way for creators to build a cohesive identity and audience, connecting their accounts across various services and simultaneously publishing across all of them. This increases the availability of quality content on emerging platforms and allows creators to experiment with new networks with minimal effort before deciding which ones are worth investing in developing more platform-specific content.

‍

The benefit of crossposting with Yup isn’t limited just to open social platforms - it allows creators to spread their content across any social platform and makes their reputation more portable as well. There have been a myriad of attempts over the years to help creators and brands link their identity and content across platforms (Keybase being the most loved by crypto nerds like us, Linktree likely the most used today). As both the place where identities can be linked and the homebase for creator distribution, Yup is the most promising attempt we’ve seen yet to create a true hub for digital identity and content aggregation.

‍

Yup is also best positioned to deliver on a key promise of open social: the expanded opportunity for monetization.  Instead of relying on sponsored posts, endorsements, and splits of ad revenue, creators on open social platforms have additional options for more direct forms of revenue. Early experiments in this area include tips via community currencies (DEGEN, BONSAI), referral fees on mints (Zora), a myriad of opportunities via interactive elements (Frames, Open Frames, and Blinks) and even content creation rewards via Yup’s own token (YUP). Yup not only aggregates audiences across social platforms, but enables parallel direct monetization across each of those platforms. As adoption of both Yup and the platforms it supports continue to grow, being the home base of creators across the open social web will put Yup in position to align its own success more closely with interests of the creators it serves.

‍

We look forward to continuing to support Nir, Vernon, and the Yup team as they build out the bridge from a world of siloed content and connections to one that is more vibrant, free-flowing, and open to adaptation in the service of all creators and users. If you’re wondering whether you should join us, the answer is: YUP!