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There has been growing interest in the so-called “Web3” movement. This loosely refers to a mix of decentralized technologies, often underpinned by blockchain technologies. Among these, Web3 social media platforms have begun to emerge. These store all social interaction data (e. g. , posts) on a public ledger, removing the need for centralized data ownership and management. But this comes at a cost, which some argue is prohibitively expensive. As an exemplar within this growing ecosytem, we explore memo. cash, a microblogging service built on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain. We gather data for 24K users, 317K posts, 2. 57M user actions, which have facilitated 6. 75M worth of transactions. A particularly unique feature is that users must pay BCH tokens for each interaction (e. g. , posting, following). We study how this may impact the social makeup of the platform. We therefore study memo. cash as both a social network and a transaction platform.
Zuo et al. (Wed,) studied this question.