TLDR - this makes a lot of sense. Social apps are stickier, and have longer session times than wallets. We'll see more of this over time. Context: when I was building a wallet @avara pre-Family acq, we spent a lot of time researching user behaviors. 1) Wallets are not standalone experiences, and that affects retention Many users we interviewed used their wallets for utility, not fun. A lot of people curious about crypto still come in thinking that crypto can be non-financial. And that's a good thing! But the issue is discovery: crypto newbies don't know what they can or should do onchain, compared to what power users know. So they'd come in, check a price, buy or sell, and end their session. Advanced users had longer wallet session times. We thought that was the case because they knew what they were doing, and had an external prompt motivating the longer wallet session (e.g. NFT drop, airdrop claiming or farming, checking prices across a big portfolio, etc). When you combine that with the commoditization of base wallet features, we saw that it'd get difficult to differentiate your wallet offering from others, without developing potentially expensive features. And when prices aren't good, if you aren't already in social circles full of people you like, talking about crypto, you churn and don't come back until ETH rips 20% in a day (s/o to @scrolltax for that). What we realized: if you want people to use your wallet more, you have to give them a reason to keep coming back. 2) Onboarding people into crypto is inherently social Most of the users we interviewed were socially onboarded into crypto. If you didn't lose your money before converting into an expert, you've likely socially onboarded people yourself! I don't have the numbers handy, but the gap between avg. wallet sessions vs social sessions were pretty wide when we researched it. Anecdotally, think about how you got into the space. If it's because you knew someone, joined a forum, watched content, or joined a community, you too were probably socially onboarded. And social onboarding is great, but it dampens virality. It means this only grows as quickly as people are able to convince others why they should individually join (see MMM). "Join because it's fun" is a good reason, but that has different costs depending on the type of fun (see pt 4). 3) If your users stay engaged between price movements, they retain It sounds obvious, but it bears repeating: people want fun things to do. Price movements are engaging, but that can only happen so much before the majority of users churn. So what do you do in the meantime? - Give them community - Give them events - Give them contests to win access, NFTs, tokens, or potential airdrops - Give them memes Give them something to come back for on a day where the price is flat. Something to do when devs are working on tech debt, markets are trading sideways, and you're working on building the things that got your community excited in the first place. 4) Users like fun. NGU is financial fun, but less scalable than fun and engaging content People go to social media for fun, not to make money. So when you pull to refresh your FYP or timeline, and you get good content, that's peak. Good content is cheaper to make than making a token go up 500% in a day. The same content can be shown to 100k users in a 2 minute span, require no marginal buy-in from those 100k users, and give them a "fun" feeling multiple times. OTOH, fun for tokens is when someone makes money through NGU or airdrops. You can only do so many airdrops and NGUs, and when that kind of fun runs out, the people who were there for that churn. When they leave, we see a churn spiral where people get bored/lose too much money, sell off remaining funds, leave, and that price movement causes another sell-off and churn. That's why attention has been so deeply coupled with liquidity in these markets. If we want crypto to stay alive when markets aren't volatile, we have to make crypto fun even on low-vol days. 5) Other wallets already have social features Some have @xmtp_ integrated, or dapp browsers. And when you look at web2 experiences, you already see @MikeIppolito_ 's convergence of media and markets thesis play out: - eToro's copy trading - twitter looking to integrate payments - venmo's social feed I won't share what other stuff we cooked on the wallet before it got rolled into Family, but I wouldn't be surprised if @family , @rainbowdotme and other wallets incorporated more social features. Conclusion: This all makes a lot of sense. Users want delightful, non-financial things to do online. Crypto is online. Empathize with the users, and give them what they want.