In the last few decades, social media has taken over the world and sparked a profound wave of societal changes. Among other things, social media managed to drastically reduce the marginal cost of accessing financial information, which has democratized market participation. For instance, it is estimated that today, around 80% of young adults get their financial advice through social media. This shift has created a dynamic where everyone can become an investor, at their own scale, and more easily allocate capital to ideas they believe in.
However, another implication of social media is that we have rapidly moved into a short-term, attention-driven economy. This has led to phenomena like meme coins, which have surged in interest alongside the rise of social media in recent years.
Source: Vala
While at first glance the rise of meme coins and attention-driven trading sound like a fun thing with no real applications, it is important to understand that new technologies often begin with simple, fun applications, sparking curiosity and engagement. It is only by embracing these early use cases that we open the door to unforeseen innovations that can drive positive societal growth.
Hence, we believe that the second or third iteration of this phenomenon could lead to interesting new use cases, especially in the social media and on-chain reputation field. This could play a subtle yet key role in contributing to an internet where data ownership is put at the center of everything.
Because Vala is a unique mix of DeFi and SocialFi with data ownership at the center, we believe that is at the right place and at the right time to lead this trend. It is something we haven’t seen before and we are excited about the long term vision of the project. More importantly, we also think that in a second step, this could provide a strong base layer for the decentralized AI movement to build upon.
Overview of Vala
Vala is a cross-chain SocialFi app that integrates social media content with a trading and coin creation platform. In a sense, this platform aims to remove all the friction between the moment users get information about a potential trade idea, either intellectual or attention driven, and when the trade is executed. They call this concept Flick-to-Buy, and are a pioneer in that field.
Source: Vala
Over and above, Vala removes the barrier to entry of creating new tokens, sharing it to social media, and creating and nurturing a community as this process is done seamlessly and in a single app.
Source: Vala
In the future, we believe that all of these features could lead to new kinds of social reputation systems that emerge on the internet. This could potentially be an interesting value proposition for the decentralized AI movement.
Go-to-market strategy
A clear go-to-market strategy is crucial for any project looking to introduce a new innovative product to the market. Without a well-defined plan, even the most innovative offerings can struggle to gain traction, leading to missed opportunities and wasted resources.
In that sense, we believe that Vala’s plan on how to reach target customers, differentiate from competitors, and achieve its objective is clear and compelling.
Its main strategy revolves around targeting a big network of micro influencers, from meme creators, KOLs (Key opinion leaders), and creators to share content on Vala. To incentive this initiative, they are providing community rewards for early members as well as airdropping 25% of the revenue generated by the platform back to communities and KOL.
Initial traction
For any social media project, the first 10,000 users are always the hardest one to acquire. To overcome this initial hurdle, Vala is betting on three different strategies:
- In-house: Leverage its own team and partner network of KOLs to create content and share content.
- Guerilla: Scrape accounts and repost compelling ones to incentivize people to create an account.
- Direct: Comments and DM target users to join the platform with incentives.
The idea here is that once there is an initial set of people using the platform, reflexive network effect strength will start to kick in and the platform will start growing by itself.
While the first batch of users will be crypto natives, Vala is built to scale to the masses, even the non crypto users by leveraging its easy and seamless UX.
VALA utility
VALA will be the utility token powering this innovative dApp.
The initial objective with the VALA tokens is to enable holders to get access to infinite airdrop opportunities of all tokens launched on Vala simply by locking their tokens. Further, swapping tokens using VALA will earn preferential rates, and users will also have the possibility to burn VALA for social recognition on the platform.
In the future, we expect the token to continue to grow and enhance its importance in the Vala ecosystem.
Team
The team and advisor behind Vala is top notch and composed of various serial entrepreneurs and talents from diverse backgrounds. Here is an overview of the key team members:
- Rupert Barksfield - CEO
Rubert has been in crypto since 2016 and has already founded 4 companies, with 3 exits. The definition of a serial entrepreneur. Over and above, Rupert is also a partnerships consultant for the Solana Foundation. This is a key relationship to have for the success of a crypto venture. - Radames Ramirez - CTO
With experience in TradFi at Bank of America, over twelve years in crypto, and previous founders of four projects, Radames seems well suited to lead the tech team of Vala. - Rebekah Keida - CMO
Rebekah is another successful entrepreneur that has already founded two projects and exited one. She will be responsible for the growth strategy of Vala. - Whitney Trujillo - Head of Product
Whitney has been in crypto since 2017 with previous working experience as a program manager at Coinbase as well as Amazon in the past. She will be leading the product development of Vala.
Comparative analysis
As we said earlier, there is no pure comparable to Vala. But if we use different DEXes already on the market as a proxy, we see that if the project is a success, then the market potential is really big, especially when we add to that the potential premium that Vala could get because of its SocialFi features.
Source: Vala
