Tako App Release Ushers in a New Paradigm of Decentralized Network Socialization

Source: Tako Protocol

What is the Tako App?

The Tako App is the first official client app launched by the Tako Protocol—an avant-garde lifestyle sharing community platform aimed at serving a group of forward-thinking individuals passionate about scientific exploration and personal sovereignty through decentralized technology. The platform seeks to create a "High-Tech High-Life" new cyberpunk space. It has raised over $13 million in early-stage funding, with the most recent round in August.

Among the first batch of seed beta users are OGs and Founders from various Web3 tracks who believe in personal data sovereignty and anti-censorship ideals, as well as a group of Web3 enthusiasts eager to explore how technology can empower social interactions, including renowned science fiction writer Chen Qiufan. In a foreseeable future, this space will also become a hub for artificial intelligence entities and the agent economy: users will be able to interact deeply with decentralized AI agents directly, and even interactions between AI agents themselves will take place. This vision started to take shape some time ago with the emergence of the Farcaster ecosystem's Clanker automated coin issuance bot, and Tako, which has gained official support from Farcaster and targets the Asia-Pacific market, is closely following this trend.

It is important to note that the Tako Protocol is the protocol, while the Tako App is the flagship client built on the protocol, representing a specific implementation of the protocol. What Tako envisions is not just an app but rather a virgin land for all developers and users, offering a fully modular and freely combinable environment to incubate more wild and imaginative applications that interconnect and form the next generation of open social networking ecosystems.

Further Reading: The Tako protocol layer is a decentralized, scalable social networking protocol that integrates data from various social platforms such as Farcaster, Lens, Twitter, etc., providing developers with a unified and convenient development experience akin to building with LEGO blocks. We refer to it as "social LEGO" modules. With flexible APIs, SDKs, and diverse application development scenarios, developers can build decentralized social networks and empower creator economies in a low-barrier, high-efficiency manner. Tako offers permissionless access to its tech stack, allowing developers to leverage various modular "LEGO blocks" to build and deploy their own social dApps. It aggregates and unifies social graphs while providing basic functionalities such as SAA login, social asset issuance and trading, content distribution, content propagation, and peer-to-peer recommendations.

What Kind of Community Will Develop Based on This App?

The Tako App is an avant-garde lifestyle sharing community platform built on a decentralized social media protocol, forked from Farcester's content and adding its own native content section. Each creator can start their own community, and this content is not closed off; the highlight content will be synchronized to the public square. In the early days of the Tako App, following the concept that "1000 fans can support a creator and even a platform," and in order to establish the early High tech/High Life content sharing tone of the community, the official team covered all registration costs. Through inviting high-quality beta users, they gradually built a diverse, culturally free-growing community collection. Whether it's a scientist conducting cutting-edge brain-machine research, a biohacker experimenting with longevity, a traveler sharing digital nomad guides from around the world, a meditation practitioner healing themselves and others, an open-source enthusiast who believes code is law, or a sci-fi fan envisioning a meeting between a bionic person and an electric sheep, all can find their cozy corners here. After the official app launch and as Tako gradually opens up registrations, it also welcomes countless ordinary people who wish to have their voices heard.

In terms of Tako App's design philosophy, it differs from the farcaster client's attempt to become a crypto Twitter and instead takes a different path focused on community maximization. When you open the Tako App, you will default to the communities page, where you can easily discover what topics the people in this community are passionately discussing—such as, can fasting lead to a longer life? What kind of meditation can help you see your true self? What kind of people are in Zuzalu? and more.

When you find a fun community because you participated in a trending topic discussion on the public square and then enter that community where you link up with friends who share the same interests and engage in daily interactions, the social network's energy starts to take effect.

At Tako, you will find that these close-knit, cozy, and interesting communities are just the beginning. High-quality content is just the foundation; their greater appeal lies in being like blobs of Play-Doh/Lego that users can piece together, decorate, and combine with other communities and mini-apps according to their tastes and preferences. For example, when running a meditation community, you can choose to embed a zk anonymous tool provided by community developers to allow your community friends to share their stories and experiences more openly. Of course, you can also choose a mod tool to set it up so that only friends who hold your favorite NFT can successfully join. Even more interestingly, when your community members are dissatisfied with these tools, they can also collaborate, as there is probably nothing better than creating something better together.

What kind of community will Tako develop? Will it be a group of people discussing longevity every day like in the Anti-Aging Olympics? Will it involve daily running challenges like in the STEPN community? Will it be a group exploring the future cyberspace together like in a "cyber nation"? Perhaps it will involve all of these, as there are people of all kinds here. Imagine this scenario—you and your friend make a bet in a shared community, with the bet being "ETH will reach $10K USD by the end of 2026, and if not, you will give them 150 SOL, but if it does, they will give you 10 ETH." Here's the catch: you don't have any SOL, so you need a third-party credit loan agreement to help you deposit it first. You don't need to have enough SOL at the moment, nor do you need any collateral. You just need to use your on-chain social reputation to sign your name as a guarantee. In the end, if you win, you only need to pay the platform interest from your winnings—such magical scenarios were initially only part of Web3 Desoc's imagination, but next, they will unfold on Tako one by one until they explode.

Tako's goal is to make each of your casual ideas possible to try, combine, and achieve in the community you love, connecting interesting souls to more interesting souls, and growing into a creative and energetic community.

Based on these community's social graphs and peer-to-peer information flow, more fun things will happen, such as:

· InfoFi: Predictive markets integrated into social flows, disrupting the way information is disseminated—you can use a mechanism similar to PolyMarket with friends on the Tako app to predict the outcome of each couple's relationship in the variety show "Goodbye, Lover";

· Novel Community Organization: Design economic models to create diverse interest communities—you can set up a bounty pool to launch the Tako ZK Brutal Co-Learning Program, receive bounties based on completion levels according to community voting, and move the hackathon format onto the chain;

· Creator Economy: Support fan tokens, live streaming tips, referral programs, and other monetization methods for creators—you can crowdfund niche research using the logic of tipping influencers, achieving "research online, funding on-chain";

· Mini-Apps: From social betting to esports mini-games, everything is available—the mini-app experience based on the social graph will be even smoother than Telegram mini-apps;

· AI Agent: Build open data-driven AI service scenarios—let an AI agent mint coins and have another AI agent engage in PVP;

· Defi 2.0: Credit lending service based on social graph and reputation data - Imagine if you are a person who frequently interacts with Vitalik, wouldn't your borrowing credit be higher?

A Lego-like explosion of content and creativity can be brought about by free content creation + free economic settlement layering.

Why now? Why Tako?

During the development over the past decade, Web2 platforms' social media has become increasingly centralized, with absolute management and control over user information dissemination, propagation, and even account survival. Idealists began to explore the path to decentralization of social networks, leading to the emergence of Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, Lens, Farcaster, and Tako. Some of the mentioned applications either changed their strategies midway, had simple designs but low usability, or struggled with minimal user engagement. Currently, only Farcaster and Tako remain on this path.

Currently, Farcaster's V1 solution has encountered significant bottlenecks, with V2 reverting to a blockchain design concept; while Tako has learned from Farcaster's correct points in technical architecture—its openness and programmability provide developers with a good testbed, and its native encryption feature has led to various standout projects. Tako has chosen to follow the DHT solution towards a high-performance and highly scalable route. To some extent, both Farcaster and Tako are each pursuing a solution that better suits themselves.

We have now reached a bottleneck stage in blockchain infrastructure innovation, where asset issuance and chain issuance have become as simple and low-friction as possible, and the foundational module protocols have been developed (various liquidity and trading protocols). When the underlying chain issuance becomes extremely low-friction and these application-layer protocol modules can scale, the next worthwhile endeavor is to build the intermediate protocol layer. This is also the current bottleneck of various applications: there is no intermediate layer that can connect users and network effects together; many applications will never be able to amplify and scale without the endorsement of a social network.

Having had early access to sufficient funding, obtained official support from Farcaster (Farcaster is unable to localize the Asia-Pacific community) and Base's official attention, and having a rich social practice rooted in the Asia-Pacific/domestic Web2 (learning from a large number of experiences of success or failure on platforms like Kuaidi, Douban, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Weibo), Tako undoubtedly serves as the best choice to act as this intermediate coupling layer.

If you are also looking for:

· A platform where you don't have to worry about your account disappearing ✓

· A space where you have full control over your own content ✓

· A community where you can meet like-minded friends ✓

· A creative environment with valuable rewards ✓

Then, welcome to Tako, the oasis of the new cyber age.

Website | Apple Store App

This article is contributed content and does not represent the views of BlockBeats