Original Author: Mable Jiang (X: @Mable_Jiang)
I am excited to announce the establishment of Trends: Trends is a social protocol anchored by value, dedicated to advancing the boundaries of information finance. At the same time, this marks the end of a journey: my full-time work at FSL has concluded, but I will continue to support the company as an advisor. I will write a detailed review of this meaningful journey in a separate article.
Trends has received early support from numerous outstanding founders and angel investors, whose trust in our vision has provided both motivation and responsibility: Anatoly Yakovenko, Lily Liu (Solana Foundation), Meow & Siong (Jupiter), Yu Hu (Kaito), Bryan Pellegrino (LayerZero), TN Lee (Pendle), Cindy Leow & David Lu (Drift), Alice & James Zhang (Jambo Technology), Zhuoxun Yin & Tiffany (Magic Eden), Tushar Jain (Multicoin), Jerry Huang, Yawn Rong & Shiti Maghani (FSL), Su Zhu, Nicolas (Bonk.fun), GM (Dragonfly), and Jason Kam (Folius Ventures).
Through years of exploring crypto application popularization, I have distilled three first principles:
Every true Web3 innovation breakthrough stems from significantly reducing the friction of value flow - the ICO of 2017, DeFi Summer of 2020, and even Pump.fun of 2023 have proven this. The next wave of innovation will similarly be accompanied by a 100x improvement in value flow efficiency.
Tokens are essentially information containers, and social media has long been the most active market for information; if every post could be mapped to a token, information flow and value flow will ultimately merge.
On-chain issuance and value transfer costs will continue to decrease, and social scenarios are ready for this convergence.
Based on these thoughts, we launched Trends: it will first serve as an on-chain curation layer for X (formerly Twitter), then expand to any open content like TikTok, and ultimately grow into a social protocol operated by on-chain capital (internet capital). Each piece of content will have its own curve, volatility, and breaking point; accounts that consistently produce or discover high-consensus content will accumulate an on-chain reputation that cannot be faked.
AI is driving content production costs close to zero. When views, likes, and even entire posts can be generated in batches for just a few cents, on-chain capital becomes the only scarce and transparent true consensus signal. Trends creates a direct channel from belief to profit: inflating numbers requires real money, while open protocols give everyone equal participation opportunities.
In my view, this is what "mass adoption" truly looks like: people's daily actions inherently carry economic weight. Imagine 1 like = 1 dollar: each click automatically buys along the curve, with a preset automatic exit multiple. Viewpoint becomes position, in one step.
We stand at the dawn of a new era.
We are defining an entirely new asset class.
Shaping new behaviors has never been easy, but the trend is good.
