Interview with Metya Co-founder Allen Soc: Building a New World of AI Social, the cornerstone of Web3’s next decade

Guest: Allen Soc, co-founder of Metya

“Doing things in a bubble requires faith and a sense of direction.”

This is the most common saying by Metya co-founder Allen Soc. As the former global growth leader of Web2's leading platform, Allen has been deeply involved in user growth, product operations and community ecology for a long time, and has strong insight into how to build a sustainable user experience and scale growth system.

He witnessed how traditional social platforms drive growth through centralized algorithms, and also experienced the bottlenecks brought about by the controversy over data privacy and the decline of traffic dividends. During the process of repeated global operation experiments and localization, Allen began to think deeply about the proposition of "whether users truly have their own data and identities."

“Web2 has turned social networking into a traffic business, but it has forgotten the original intention of connecting.”
It is precisely based on this reflection on the sovereignty of digital identity and the value of user participation that Allen gradually turned to Web3 and began to build a new social network system that is decentralized, inspiring, and evolving - this is the starting point of Metya.

He firmly believes that what can truly travel through the cycle must be products that serve real users and have long-term evolution capabilities, rather than short-term narratives or speculative hot topics.

Metya was born under this concept - a new Web3 social platform combining AI Agents, DePIN networks and on-chain incentives, committed to redefining the "connection" between people. Since its launch in early 2025, Metya has exceeded 1.9 million registered users, and the global community has expanded rapidly. $MET tokens have been listed on many mainstream platforms, and operation nodes in multiple regions have been implemented one after another.

But all this is far from the end.

Qidian: Why is it "social"?

Allen never hides his persistence in "connecting people".

"Social is the closest to human nature among all applications. It naturally has the attributes of frequency, emotion and value accumulation. Even in the cycle of AI explosion, GameFi innovation, and BTC narratives, the relationship and interaction between people are still the next super entrance to blockchain."

Therefore, from the beginning, Metya's goal has far exceeded labels like "Web3 version of Tinder" or "decentralized WeChat". It is a full-stack social system powered by AI, driven by on-chain incentives, and supported by DePIN networks.

On Metya, users match, chat, create and manage through AI agents, and all social relationships are deposited into on-chain assets. The data belongs to the user itself, and the behavior can be rewarded, and even the chat itself can create economic value.

"We are not building an app, but reconstructing social network protocols."

Allen said that Metya's long-term goal is to become the "Android system for Web3 social" - developers can deploy various agents based on the protocol, users can switch freely between different social scenarios, hardware nodes provide computing power support, and value feedback is achieved through $MET.

Four steps to build a "social finance operating system"

In order to realize this systematic concept, Metya has built a development path from shallow to deep.

In the early days, Metya focused on the establishment of cold start-up and economic models. The launch of $MET main network tokens has introduced a basic value circulation system for the platform; the deployment of on-chain Staking modules gives users the incentive motivation for sustainable participation; the launch of Mini App forms a closed loop of early AI social experience, planting the first interactive seed for users.

Entering the second stage, Metya continues to broaden and evolve the technology stack. The AI ​​system realizes multilingual matching, emotion recognition and other functions, and the wallet module has gradually integrated multi-chain support and cross-scene transactions to open up paths for the assetization and tokenization of social relationships. At the same time, NFT was introduced into the platform as an experimental social asset form, laying the foundation for future Web3 personality and relationship networks.

In the third stage, the platform will introduce content incentive mechanisms and hardware portals. Mini Ear devices designed based on DePIN not only have the ability to interact with voice recognition and AI, but also can achieve efficient response through edge computing; at the same time, the on-chain UGC mechanism will also be launched to encourage users to create profitable social content and truly activate the creator economy.

In the end, Metya will enter the stage of global expansion and governance implementation. Localized nodes such as Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, and Latin America will be connected one after another to build a multi-language and multi-cultural global social network; the community governance system will also be launched simultaneously, and users can participate in platform evolution through proposals and voting; Metya will also create an offline "social center" and event space to complete the ecological closed loop of virtual and reality.

“We may not be fast, but every step is laying the foundation for the future.”

Don 't pursue hot spots, just do the underlying structure

When the entire market is chasing the “AI concept,” “Meme narrative,” and “L2 outbreak,” Metya instead takes a structuralist “slow path”:

• Instead of making "virtual AI chat toys", create "personality agents"

• Instead of making "graphic and text social overlap coins", we realize "on-chain relationship financialization"

• Instead of being a "traffic diversion tool platform", it builds a "closed-loop social economic system"

"Many people who see our community active and stunning data will recommend that we focus on exchanges, pulling the market, and doing 'fast money' things," Allen recalls. "We are always very restrained. The issuance of $MET is not for hype, but for building a truly sustainable social economic system."

In his opinion, Token should not be just a financing tool, but a "value agreement" that connects users, developers and ecological participants: "If it is just for short-term pull, we can choose an easier path. But what we want to build is an operating system that can support billions of users and trillions of interactions ."

**Instead of pretending to understand "E", it is better to be a "I"

sincerely**

Although Metya is quite popular on X and Telegram now, Allen claims to be a typical INTP - quiet, rational, technically oriented, and likes to think systematically. He laughed:

"Most of the people on our team are actually 'I', not very good at socializing, nor very marketing. But this is exactly what we mean by Metya -providing a fairer, smarter and more trustworthy way to connect for introverts, marginalized people, and cross-cultural users."

Therefore, from product structure design to operational activity arrangement, Metya always adheres to "real interaction" and "pragmatism".
They care more about whether users are willing to stay and establish long-term relationships on the platform than trying hard to attract people to join the group.

Three numbers that define the next three years

Talking about the next three years, Allen only mentioned three numbers:

• 100 million registered users

• 10 million daily life

• 50 million AI-Agent assets

He made it clear: “We are not painting airdrop pie and not predicting market value, but hoping that one day, Web3 socialization is no longer a concept, but a part of people’s daily lives.”

He ended the interview by quoting one of his favorite sentences:

“Long-termism is not waiting for a miracle, it is doing the right thing every day.”

Conclusion: The future of social interaction, on the chain

AI is the wave, DePIN is the breaking point, Staking is the engine, and governance is the ownership. But the core of all this has always been -people.

They are people who desire to express themselves, people who desire to respond, and people who desire to establish real relationships in complex worlds.

And Metya is trying to reconstruct a new social universe for them.