SocialFi evaluated across if this company shuts down tomorrow, is my handle and my follower list still mine?, can i actually walk out with my audience — and is there anywhere to walk to?, who takes a cut of what i earn here, and is the number actually written down?, and whose key can override mine — and what exactly can they do with it?.
Nostr
#1 of 8 · published ranking
Nostr
82ChainChoice Score
4199
Why it leads
Best in the pool on handle and graph custody and who outranks my keys
Cost
Not priced· No comparable price is published
No provider can pay for a position in this table. The code that computes this order cannot read which links earn us a commission, and every build proves it. Every score below rebuilds from the published criteria.Ranking 2026.08 · 4 criteria · 8 products · same inputs, same order
Personal comparison
SocialFi ranked comparison
No comparable price is published; ranking still uses verified product evidence.
RankProviderBest fitScore
1
NostrNostrA public-domain protocol with no compan...Top ranked
Handle and graph custody — 10/10Trade-off: NOBODY OWES YOU DURABILITY, AND NOBODY PAYS YOU. The two failures are the same failur...
Ranked on 4 published criteria weighted 32/27/25/16, which set goal alignment — 30 of the 86 points. The rest: regional access 20, evidence depth 18, ease of use 10, institutional trust 8. Profile match is shown in breakdowns but carries no weight.
Audit
Infrastructure
Methodology
2026.09.15
published 2026-09-16
Providers tracked
980+
across 119 categories
Last verified
2026-08-17
newest dated pricing or sentiment read
Named on the roster
2 people
managing directors · 6 automated processes
Decision guide
What matters most before choosing in this category
Weighted on handle and graph custody (32), whether you can actually leave and have somewhere to go (27), the earnings waterfall (25), and whose key outranks yours (16). Custody leads because a follower list you cannot take with you is a rented audience. The last axis is small but decisive: it is what separates a protocol whose data is onchain from one where nobody can override you, and a protocol scoring 9 on custody scores 2 there. Two of the eight score 1 on custody outright. User counts, posting volume and token price are shown as context and are explicitly barred from breaking ties.
What matters most before choosing in this category
Weighted on handle and graph custody (32), whether you can actually leave and have somewhere to go (27), the earnings waterfall (25), and whose key outranks yours (16). Custody leads because a follower list you cannot take with you is a rented audience. The last axis is small but decisive: it is what separates a protocol whose data is onchain from one where nobody can override you, and a protocol scoring 9 on custody scores 2 there. Two of the eight score 1 on custody outright. User counts, posting volume and token price are shown as context and are explicitly barred from breaking ties.
If the company shuts down tomorrow, do you still have your handle and your followers?
Has anyone else actually built a client on this data, or is portability only on paper?
Whose key can override yours, and exactly what can they do with it?
Current editor lead
Expert review and scoring weights
Nostr
NostrData checked Aug 2026
A public-domain protocol with no company in it: your identity is a secp256k1 keypair, your follow list is a kind-3 event you signed yourself, and any relay that will carry you is enough — but nothing in the spec obliges a relay to keep your data and nothing in it pays you.
A public-domain protocol with no company in it: your identity is a secp256k1 keypair, your follow list is a kind-3 event you signed yourself, and any relay that will carry you is enough — but nothing in the spec obliges a relay to keep your data and nothing in it pays you. Strongest on if this company shuts down tomorrow, is my handle and my follower list still mine? (10/10): READ ON https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr (HTTP 200, browser UA, 2026-08-17), README body verbatim: "It doesn't rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilient; it is based on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof; it does not rely on P2P techniques, and therefore it works." and… Weakest on who takes a cut of what i earn here, and is the number actually written down? (6/10): THE SILENT PAGE, CITED: I read the COMPLETE text of https://nostr.com/info (HTTP 200, 2026-08-17) — the protocol's own explainer, which itemises thirty-one NIPs including "NIP-57" "Lightning zaps, used to request invoices, render QR codes, and listen for zap receipts when the recipient supports them." It contains no… Published price: NO FIRST-PARTY PRICE EXISTS, AND I AM CITING THE PAGE THAT SHOULD CARRY ONE.
Best forHandle and graph custody — 10/10
Main tradeoffNOBODY OWES YOU DURABILITY, AND NOBODY PAYS YOU. The two failures are the same failure — there is no counterparty. On storage, the protocol's own export route is stated conditionally: "If one believes a relay will store their events for sufficient time, they can use this kind-3 event to backup their following list and recover on a different device." (https://nips.nostr.com/2). A relay may drop your history tomorrow with no notice, no SLA and no appeal, and "These relays can be hosted by anyone and have any rule or internal policy they want." (github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr) is the whole of the guarantee. You keep the key that proves the notes were yours; you may not keep the notes. On money, a buyer who came to monetise an audience finds no earnings rail with a published rate at all — NIP-57 zaps are peer-to-peer Lightning into whatever lnurl server the creator chose, so the take is set by a third party the protocol never names. And the practical cost lands the wrong way round: paid relays charge YOU to be carried (nostr.wine, 18,888 sats admission, read 2026-08-17), so the only priced flow in the system is outbound.
Verify before signupNO FIRST-PARTY PRICE EXISTS, AND I AM CITING THE PAGE THAT SHOULD CARRY ONE. I read the complete text of https://nostr.com/info on 2026-08-17 (HTTP 200); it enumerates thirty-one NIPs and states "Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a free and open network that nobody owns or controls." — and carries no fee, price, subscription or take rate anywhere. github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr's licence section reads in full: "License" / "Public domain." The only prices that exist in the system are set by individual relay operators, and the protocol standardises how they must be disclosed: on https://nips.nostr.com/11 (read 2026-08-17), section "Pay-to-Relay", "Relays that require payments may want to expose their fee schedules.", with the fields "payments_url", and "fees" -> "admission" / "subscription" (with "period") / "publication" (scoped by "kinds"), all in "msats". A live worked example, read on https://nostr.wine with header Accept: application/nostr+json on 2026-08-17 (HTTP 200): "fees":{"admission":[{"amount":18888000,"unit":"msats"}]}, with "payment_required":true and "payments_url":"https://nostr.wine/invoices" — 18,888 sats one-off admission to that one relay. No number was invented; every figure above is a character-exact read.
Methodology
How this category is reviewed
Reviewed on if this company shuts down tomorrow, is my handle and my follower list still mine?, can i actually walk out with my audience — and is there anywhere to walk to?, who takes a cut of what i earn here, and is the number actually written down?, and whose key can override mine — and what exactly can they do with it?.
The order on this page is the published ranking for this category. Every criterion, weight and source behind it is on the methodology page.
Frequently asked
Questions people ask before choosing socialfi
Is this not the same as the web3 apps category?
No. web3_apps ranks applications on what they let you do; this ranks social protocols on what you keep when you stop using them. The questions here are whether the handle and follower graph exist independently of any company, whether anyone else has actually built a client on the same data, who takes a cut of what you earn, and whose key can override yours. A client is excluded from this pool for that reason — Warpcast is an app on Farcaster, not a separate protocol, and ranking both would score one thing twice.
Everything here says it is decentralised. How do you separate them?
By reading what a privileged key can do, which is why that axis exists despite carrying only 16% of the weight. One protocol in this pool scores 9 out of 10 on handle and graph custody — genuinely portable, genuinely onchain — and 2 out of 10 on whose key outranks yours. Both facts are true at once, and only one of them appears in the marketing. Two other products score 1 for custody outright. 'Onchain' describes where the data sits; it says nothing about who can revoke your access to it.
Why do user numbers count for nothing?
Because they answer a different question than the one you are asking. Audience size tells you where people are today; this page is about what happens to your audience when you leave, when the app changes its terms, or when the company stops paying its bills. Those are not correlated — the largest network in a category is often the one with the least portable identity. User counts, posting volume and token price are shown as context, and the tie-break rules explicitly bar them from separating two products.
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
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