The Rationale

Despite crypto’s growing prominence, mass adoption remains hindered by technical complexity and onboarding friction.

But with Vi, mass adoption is no longer a meme.

Adoption

What is the best way to introduce someone to crypto who has never heard of crypto before? The answer has always been to send them some crypto. “Free money” will make anyone pay attention.

Now you can do that -- for anybody on the internet. Every social media user automatically has crypto wallets waiting for them. There's no need for complex wallet creation or seed phrase management—users can start receiving crypto assets before they even know about cryptocurrency.

It doesn’t stop there. Vi's power lies in its ability to leverage existing social graphs. Social bound addresses are a new primitive that allow crypto apps to layer on top of established social media identities that billions of users already have, rather than building a new network from scratch. This makes crypto interactions as simple as knowing someone's social media handle, enabling immediate access to massive existing user networks.

Applications

Although the principle seems simple, this framework is a 1000x unlock for consumer crypto, enabling use cases that are otherwise impossible. For crypto apps, this means that their TAM is no longer a small network of dedicated users currently on chain. The TAM for crypto apps is now any of the five billion users with a social media account.

Imagine decentralized Patreon, with automatic onboarding for every creator in the entire world. Imagine permissionless, self-owned social tokens for every influencer worldwide. Imagine retroactive airdrops for engaging with companies on social media, without them needing to collect every user's wallet addresses individually.

Interactable social wallet

Vi pioneers the concept of the interactable social wallet. This is a wallet address that is solely owned by the owner of an X account, but that anyone can look up and interact with, even before the user themselves claim the wallet.

The interactable social wallet represents a novel, tremendously powerful primitive upon which apps can be built. Imagine everyone having a secure crypto PO box, where anyone can "mail" them on chain, but only they have the key in the form of their social account login.

To understand the implications, consider the problem of decentralized Patreon. This is a concept that has been tried dozens of times without success. Usually, this faces a chicken and egg problem: it is challenging to onboard creators individually while requiring their time and reputational risk, while users don't want to use a Patreon-like app with no creators.

Under Vi, users could potentially "pre-order" in the form of fully refundable NFTs, with revenue being deposited to the creator's Vi wallet if they onboard. With demand already validated, it becomes much more palatable for the creator to onboard.

The framework

This is not another copy paste L2. This is a new piece of social tech -- a framework that binds social identity to the chain.

A framework that allows builders to create massive apps that scale beyond the limits the current number of on-chain users.

SBF is the canonical social layer of web3. The missing key that unlocks a new meta: mass adoption of consumer crypto.