Welcome

Introduction

Welcome to the documentation for Beam (beam.fun) and the Social Protocol - the first social protocol where users get paid to participate, advertisers target real economic behavior, and brands build living reputations, all running autonomously onchain. This platform represents a deliberate shift in social networking, transforming passive engagement into active economic participation while maintaining complete user sovereignty over identity and data.

Built on Solana's high-performance blockchain, The Social Protocol serves as the social infrastructure for network states - global communities that coordinate digitally beyond traditional geographic boundaries. By creating portable reputation, verifiable identity, and economic alignment mechanisms, we enable new forms of human organization where membership is earned through contribution, governance flows from reputation, and value accrues to participants rather than platforms.

The Vision Behind Our Platform

Traditional social media platforms have shown us the limitations of centralized control: algorithmic manipulation, data harvesting, censorship, and the constant battle against spam and bots. The Social Protocol addresses these fundamental issues by creating an autonomous economic system where incentives replace moderators, mathematics governs behavior, and users capture the value they create.

At the heart of our design is a crucial concept: users vote on people, not posts. This creates persistent reputation scores that reflect genuine community standing over time. Unlike traditional platforms where engagement metrics can be gamed, our onchain reputation system ensures that influence is earned through consistent positive contributions to the community. These reputation scores become portable social capital - real onchain assets that function as citizenship credentials in digital communities, enabling network states to establish meritocratic membership based on proven contribution history.

Beyond reputation, we've reimagined advertising itself. Users don't just view ads - they get paid in SOL for their attention. Advertisers bid on economically-aligned groups (DeFi users, NFT collectors, traders) based on actual onchain behavior, not demographics. This creates the first advertising system where users are the primary economic beneficiary, not the platform. For network states, this means sustainable funding models where community attention generates direct value for members.

Understanding the Architecture

The Beam.fun platform operates on a sophisticated dual-mode architecture that gives users unprecedented control over their experience. In Performance Mode, users benefit from lightning-fast responses through our high-performance Go backend that indexes and caches blockchain data. For those who prioritize absolute decentralization, Trustless Mode enables direct blockchain queries, ensuring complete independence from any centralized infrastructure.

This flexibility extends throughout the entire system. The mobile frontend, built with React Native and optimized for Solana Mobile devices, seamlessly switches between data sources based on user preference. Real-time updates flow through WebSocket connections in Performance Mode or blockchain subscriptions in Trustless Mode, ensuring that users never miss important community interactions regardless of their chosen configuration.

The underlying Solana program, written in Rust using the Anchor framework, implements advanced features including atomic operations for epoch distributions, dynamic fee calculations for anti-spam protection, and comprehensive verification systems for NFT and SNS domain ownership. Every interaction is secured by Solana's high-performance blockchain, creating an immutable record of community engagement.

Economic Innovation

The Social Protocol implements mathematical moderation through economic incentives, creating a self-regulating system that runs autonomously forever. Posting and voting require small SOL fees that increase exponentially with frequency (up to 100x), ensuring that genuine users can participate freely while making spam economically irrational. This autonomous governance model replaces traditional moderators with market dynamics.

Our direct tipping economy enables zero-fee creator monetization. Users can send SOL tips directly to any user with optional messages, building supporter-creator relationships without platform intermediation. Combined with tip tracking statistics, this creates a transparent economy where value flows directly between participants.

The treasury system features programmable buy/burn mechanics integrated with Raydium CLMM pools. A configurable percentage of all fees automatically buys and burns the project token, creating sustainable token economics without manual intervention.

The User Experience

From the moment users open the application, they experience the seamless integration of blockchain technology with familiar social interfaces. Native wallet integration through the Solana Mobile Wallet Adapter means transactions happen in-app without interrupting the flow of conversation. Profile creation automatically verifies NFT and SNS domain ownership, creating rich, authenticated identities that persist across the entire Solana ecosystem.

The discovery feed experience itself feels instantaneous despite the underlying blockchain complexity. Posts appear in real-time, votes register immediately, and reputation updates flow seamlessly. Behind the scenes, our sophisticated caching layer and optimized indexing ensure that blockchain interactions never compromise user experience. The platform scales elegantly from intimate community discussions to large-scale social movements.

For community moderators and platform administrators, we provide comprehensive tools for maintaining healthy discussions. Real-time monitoring dashboards, automated alert systems, and granular control over the frontend app platform parameters ensure that communities can self-govern effectively while maintaining the decentralized ethos of the platform. Anyone can create a frontend application that interacts with the social protocol and application owners can choose how to moderate the content visible on their platform.

Additional Features

The Social Protocol introduces several world-first innovations in social networking. Our onchain brand directory creates a living registry where brands must maintain activity or lose verification after 365 days, preventing name squatting while enabling transferable brand assets. Brands can link their official tokens onchain, creating verifiable brand-token relationships that other programs can authenticate.

The advertising system revolutionizes how users interact with ads. Through auction-based group targeting, advertisers bid on economically-aligned audiences defined by actual onchain behavior. Winners of auctions can deliver ads as NFTs to group members, who must actively claim their SOL payments - ensuring genuine engagement while making users the primary economic beneficiary. Every advertiser builds an onchain reputation tracked through spend history, win rates, and community reports.

For developers, The Social Protocol offers complete public state access without API keys or rate limits. All user profiles, posts, votes, and reputation scores live onchain as composable PDAs that any program can integrate. This creates a permissionless social layer for Solana where identity, reputation, and social graphs become portable infrastructure for the entire ecosystem.

Building for the Future

The Social Protocol is designed as permanent infrastructure for Solana's social layer. Once parameters are frozen, the system runs autonomously forever without admin intervention. This creates unprecedented guarantees for users and developers - your social capital, reputation, and economic relationships persist independently of any company or organization.

We envision a network state future where The Social Protocol serves as the coordination layer for global digital communities. These network states leverage our infrastructure to establish legitimate governance through reputation-weighted voting, create economic alignment through shared treasury mechanics, and build collective identity through persistent social graphs. Members earn citizenship through contribution rather than birthplace, creating truly meritocratic societies that exist beyond traditional borders.

Network states built on The Social Protocol can implement sophisticated coordination mechanisms: reputation thresholds for membership tiers, economic participation requirements for governance rights, and social capital accumulation for leadership roles. The protocol's composable PDAs enable communities to create custom rules while inheriting battle-tested identity and reputation systems. As more communities adopt these standards, we create an interoperable ecosystem where reputation earned in one network state carries weight in others, fostering a new era of global digital coordination.

Getting Started

Whether you're a developer looking to integrate social features, an advertiser seeking economically-aligned audiences, a brand building onchain presence, or a user ready to earn from your participation, this documentation provides comprehensive guidance.

Join us in building the social layer of Solana where users get paid to participate, advertisers reach real economic actors, and brands build living reputations. Together, we're creating autonomous infrastructure that aligns incentives, rewards value creation, and operates forever without centralized control. Welcome to the future of social protocols - where code is law, incentives are governance, and users capture the value they create.