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What is DeSo (DESO)?

Social media is undergoing a major transformation with the advent of DeSo, or the Decentralised Social Network (DESO), which is a custom-built layer-1 blockchain platform designed to power a new category of decentralized social applications for users worldwide. By creating an open utility, rather than a privately held monopoly, DESO is paving the way for a more democratic and accessible social media experience.

Who Are the Founders of DeSo?

Nader Al-Naji, a former software engineer at D.E. Shaw Group and Google, founded DeSo in January 2019. Prior to DeSo, he raised funds of over $133 million for Basis, an algorithmic stablecoin. The DeSo blockchain is backed by the non-profit DeSo Foundation, which aims to promote the decentralization of social media. Al-Naji is currently the chairman of the board of the DeSo Foundation, which has a $200 million treasury to support its mission. The foundation recently launched the Octane Fund, a developer fund worth $50 million.

How does DeSo (DESO) Work?

It has come to light that social media is controlled by a handful of private companies, leading to a centralized environment where user-generated content is monetized for the companies' gain. Unfortunately, the current ads-driven business model hinders external developers from creating new apps and features, and users have no choice but to continue using the apps controlled by these private companies. This limited access leads to these companies being the only ones who can curate competitive feeds, build new apps, and monetize content. Furthermore, existing blockchains are not equipped to store and index the vast amount of data generated by social applications. However, DeSo plans to solve these issues by decentralizing social media and creating a content distribution model. As an open-source platform, the entire content will be stored directly on-chain, allowing anyone in the world to show their curated feed by running a node on the public blockchain.

DeSo has a unique consensus mechanism that allows it to consume less energy than other platforms. It plans to further develop its proof-of-stake proposal to better support social applications.

What makes DeSo (DESO) Unique?

DeSo is not your average blockchain platform. It offers a range of social-oriented features that traditional platforms do not. These features include social tokens (creator coins), tipping, and NFTs, which allow creators to monetize their content and engage with their followers in unique ways. What sets DeSo apart is that it treats social data as a public utility, meaning creators are not limited to a few centralized apps. Instead, all content is stored on a decentralized ledger that is available to a growing network of independent third-party apps. DeSo's scalability is unparalleled thanks to its narrow set of social-oriented features implemented on bare metal using custom indexes. For example, 1 GB of on-chain storage on DeSo costs as little as 1 DeSo, which is significantly cheaper than any other smart contract infrastructures. DeSo also plans to switch to a Proof of Stake consensus by the end of 2022, which is expected to increase throughput to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

Conclusion

In today's world of advancing blockchain technology, Decentralized Social is positioned to transform digital communication and connectivity as we know it.