The Social Network 2.0
We’re used to the blue checkmark signaling status, but it will soon define proof of humanity
We managed to dodge the snowstorms hammering the Northeast and stayed put in LA. The only real cold snap came courtesy of the Rams’ playoff exit.
This month’s issue dives into how AI is reshaping online advertising and agentic commerce, and pushing social media toward its next act. Let’s get into it.
Convergence is brought to you by 321 Converge Inc. (“321”), a new 501c6 created by the founders of The Medici Network.
Integrations We Want To See 🔮
Now that we own our data, here are some things we’ll do with it
Sparks ✨
Quick, curated Web2 and Web3 insights you need to know
#1 AI is Transforming Digital Advertising
Author: Coatue
TLDR:
AI is transforming digital advertising by dramatically expanding creative output
A surge in creative output will feed optimization models that personalize ads in real time and lift conversion performance
The impact of AI on digital advertising will reshape e-commerce, making it one of the major beneficiaries of the AI revolution
Our Takeaway:
Authenticity guarantees become critical as AI floods the market with ads. Cryptographic signatures can prove who generated an ad, when it was created, and whether it was modified
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is an initiative to reframe trust in digital advertising around cryptographic attestations of origin and modification, reducing reliance on platform-controlled signals — Adobe, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI are a few companies that support this
Brands will use cryptographic signatures like the one from C2PA, not just for trust, but to prevent brand dilution from unauthorized AI-generated copycats
Be on the lookout for new ad models. EarnOS shifts advertising from impression-based buying to completion-based attribution, where brands reward users for completing verified actions rather than paying for impressions or clicks
#2 AI has broken the internet’s economic bargain – here’s how we fix it
Author: World Economic Forum, written by Stephanie Cohen (Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare)
TLDR:
AI is breaking the internet’s economic model by consuming content without sending traffic or value back to creators
This undermines incentives to produce high-quality content, weakening the ecosystem AI itself depends on
Fixing it requires new infrastructure that gives creators visibility, control, and fair compensation for how their content is used
Our Takeaway:
Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl and new NET Dollar stablecoin create an infra-level payments lane that forces AI crawlers to pay for content access, making micropayments for crawls and content consumption practical
In an AI-saturated internet, authenticity flows both ways. It’s no longer enough to verify that content is original, but advertisers must also verify that the user is human and not a bot
Economic value concentrates around signals that are hard to fake. Cryptographic verification of users and actions will play an important role in the next evolution of digital advertising
#3 Everything You Wanted to Know about Google’s New Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
Author: Nekuda, a startup building infrastructure for agentic payments
TLDR:
On January 11th 2026, Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at National Retail Federation (NRF), enabling users to discover products and complete checkout directly inside Gemini and Google AI Mode
UCP powers “Buy Now” experiences within AI interfaces and is designed to support a multi-agent commerce ecosystem over time
Google’s advantage is its distribution and infrastructure. Its Merchant Center already houses millions of SKUs and merchant integrations
Our Takeaway:
Imagine decentralized ownership of UCP’s commerce rails, where builders can monetize openly instead of relying on a single gatekeeper. That’s the promise of Web3
UCP introduces a powerful new sales channel for merchants to reduce dependence on centralized marketplaces and their own marketing
Machine-readable inventory catalogs will become the primary asset and traditionally polished website front-ends will no longer be as essential in the agentic web
The 3-2-1 🔍
Featured insight breaking down a major story or trend that matters
Banning Under-16s Won’t Fix Social Media
Author: Financial Times, written by Jay Graber (CEO of Bluesky)
TLDR:
Social media was meant to democratize expression, but instead a handful of platforms have consolidated control by locking users into closed systems. Deliberate choices to suppress competition and retain user data have left people feeling powerless against Big Tech. For users, leaving these platforms often means abandoning their identity, connections, and history.
Real change will come from restoring competition through open networks where users can take their data and relationships with them. By making capture impossible and lowering barriers for new entrants, open systems shift leverage back to users and developers, allowing innovation and accountability to emerge organically rather than through heavy-handed regulation.
Our Takeaway:
Decentralized social has gone through a consolidation phase, with early experiments either recently shutting down or being absorbed into larger ecosystems. That doesn’t mean the thesis was wrong. The benefits of an open network are clear but convincing users to migrate platforms without losing their identity, data, and social graph is challenging. Most platforms still force people to start from scratch, keeping Big Tech’s lock-in intact.
There is an unique opportunity for a new entrant to use blockchain primitives like zero-knowledge transport layer security (zkTLS), which can allow users to securely port their identity, relationships, and activity data from incumbent platforms into new applications. Instead of rebuilding a network and social graph from zero, users could bring their history and existing data with them.
Experimentation across consumer social is emerging from multiple directions. Some are taking advantage of zkTLS like the revival of Digg by Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian, Uno, and Overherd from one of the co-founders of YikYak.
More AI-native experiments are also taking form. Moltbook is a new experiment that has taken over the internet as an AI-agent version of Reddit, where autonomous agents create posts, comment, and interact with each other while humans act as readers, reactors, and observers. OpenAI is also exploring biometric verified social network to reduce bot infiltration on the feed. Maybe a new one takes form from a new decentralized identity protocol like Alien? Great idea for their upcoming hackathon at SF’s Frontier Tower this weekend.
Together, these trends suggest that the stars are aligning for a new kind of social platform.
Power Quote:
A decentralised, open network provides greater opportunities for innovation and experimentation, and for iterating improvements instead of dictating a one-size-fits-all approach to every problem.
What We’re Downloading 🎧
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Excellent breakdown on the paradox of social media democratization. The zkTLS angle for porting identity data is clever, solves the cold start problem that killed most decentralzied alternatives. I tried moving to Mastodon a while back but losing my network felt like digital amnesia. The Moltbook AI-agent Reddit experiment is wild tho, kinda flips the script on who the platform is actually for.