DeSo Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Platform Of The Future

May 02, 2022 at 17:56

DeSo, which stands for “Decentralized Social”, is a Level 1 Blockchain built to power and scale a new category of decentralized social applications. The company behind DeSo is raising awareness about the need for its platform in the current saturated and asymmetrical social media landscape where information is controlled and brokered by a select few conglomerates.

Since its inception, DeSo has accumulated over 100,000 node downloads, a total transaction volume of over $1.4 billion, and it has managed to achieve this with an average cost of less than $0.000017 per post. The code is 100% open source and all the data is stored directly on the chain. DeSo already boasts of over 200 apps built using its blockchain platform.

DeSo offers native on-chain features such as on-chain profiles, social NFTs, social tokens, social tipping via “Diamonds”, on-chain posts, and much more. It has been featured in several media outlets such as CoinDesk, Bloomberg, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Decrypt, Forbes, Yahoo Finance, and more. The company aims for DeSo to eventually reach a billion users.

The concept for DeSo was born when the company’s founder, Nader Al-Naji recognized the unsustainability of the ads-driven business model currently used by traditional social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Traditional social media companies completely control access to the data that their users generate, giving them the power to serve ads that drive revenue and growth.

Nader talks about the damaging effects of this monopoly on data by saying, “Large social media companies are controlling our data and then monetizing it without a hint of transparency into how they operate. This has put the world’s population in a precarious situation as large corporations can act with impunity, even going so far as to sell our data to those with nefarious intentions. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal is a good example of how multibillion-dollar companies are callously selling the data that we entrust to them, to the highest bidder. Since they control the data, they also get to impose their own morality on the content leading to a stifling of free speech. It has also stagnated competition and innovation in the social media space as new players face the cold-start problem and can’t compete with the established user bases of the companies that enjoy the first-mover advantage.”

Nader then goes on to say that the only way to solve this problem is the democratization of the underlying data in the form of a decentralized social media platform. However, current decentralized technologies are not properly equipped to handle data at the scale that is usually generated by social media sites. DeSo’s solution to this is a Layer-1 blockchain that uses the principles of database indexing to optimize for storage in contrast to traditional blockchains that are optimized for financial apps.

When asked about how DeSo envisions capturing market share from established social media players, Nader says, “All DeSo needs is one killer app and it could bring millions of users onto the next wave of Web 3.0 applications. This has happened in the crypto space before. ICOs brought in plenty of speculators, builders, and investors to the Ethereum platform. Once a killer app germinates naturally from the healthy DeSo ecosystem, it will lead to more developers building apps for the platform, bringing in new users, who create new content, that brings in more users, driving prices up, bringing in more developers to create apps and the cycle repeats. This is the growth loop that will make DeSo the platform of choice for building the future of social media.”

DeSo’s vision for the decentralized social future makes space for several smaller players instead of a winner-take-all system as it exists today. The company is counting on the success of the first few apps to trigger a gold rush for creating apps for the platform which it attributes to the “Grim Trigger” concept from game theory. The company also warns that giant companies like Twitter and Facebook run the risk of disruption if they don’t adapt to the decentralized social media model.

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For more information about DeSo, contact the company here:

DeSo
Arash Ghaemi
(562) 384-2691
team@deso.org
20 W 34th St, New York, NY 100001