Crypto Sapiens - Decentralizing social platforms | Mike McGuiness, Co-founder, gm.xyz
Primer: Data monopolies are stifling discourse on social media. Discord underserves the Web3 community. Mike McGuiness aims to resolve both issues by co-founding gm.xyz, a Web3-native social application. Find out what is it all about in this episode of Crypto Sapiens.
Background
Worked at a hedge fund and got exposed to Bitcoin
Went on to work as a software engineer
Thinking of finding ways to build in the space. Got excited about decentralized social media
There are other decentralized social media solutions in the space, but they are not decentralized enough
Left his job in September last year. Started gm.xyz with his brother
Bitcoin Maximalism
Was not a very harsh maximalist. Was open to people building cool things
Bitcoin’s store of value use case made sense to him in light of the money printing by central banks
A friend introduced him to Ethereum
Listened to Justin Drake’s Ultra Sound Money podcast episode on Bankless
Sold half of his Bitcoin and put it into Ethereum. Wrote an essay on why Ethereum would win store of value
Moving Towards Decentralized Social Media
Worked on a consumer social app before this
Heard Balaji talking about a permissionless data layer that allows permissionless innovation to be built on top of it
Data monopolies are stifling public discourse
Should have teams experimenting with different ideas, everything from censorship to moderation
They are trying to build a crypto-native version of Discord
Web3 communities are underserved by Discord
“If you think about Discord, it's really kind of a gaming chat platform that was never intended to be used by 1000+ person NFT communities or DAOs right?”
- Mike McGuiness
There are millions of people in Web3 communities. These people could be used to bootstrap the network
The goal is to build a scalable communication platform that comes with token gating, reputation systems, governance, voting, etc.
Decentralizing The Data Layer
Twitter and Discord have some API endpoints
However, you can’t access their database and build an app on top of them
What they are doing with gm.xyz is to make it permissionless to build on top of them and to read and write to the underlying data layer
“What decentralizing does is it allows us to make that hard commitment that hey, you can build on top of us and we're not going to pull the rug out from under you.”
- Mike McGuiness
Differences Between gm.xyz And Other Tools
With gm.xyz, everyone signs in with their wallet automatically
There is no need to connect with a third-party bot, which is a security risk
Thoughts On The Composability Of Identity
Composability is one of the most under-discussed aspects of Web3
Lots of projects are trying to put reputation on-chain
Can imagine people baking identities into lending platforms
People can bring their followers, post history, NFTs with them. This improves safety as people can make informed decisions regarding who they are
Connecting People With The Same NFTs
Does gm.xyz Provide Recommendations For People To Get To Know Others Based On The Metrics Of Their Identity?
Their focus is on getting communities on onboard
Once they have reached a critical mass of communities, their focus will turn towards funnelling people into communities
Thinking of opening DMs to enable people holding the same NFTs to connect with one another
Hoping for NFT projects to give their NFTs to people who contribute to the project rather than buying it
Thoughts On Web3-Native Social Applications
Lots of things need to be abstracted away
DeFi appeals to a small subset of the global population
NFTs appeal to more people than DeFi
Social apps touch everybody in the world
Roadmap
Focused on building a great product
Have a waitlist of communities looking to launch on gm.xyz. They are talking with them to learn about their problems
Innovating on some features that Discord does not have:
Leaving certain channels
Opt-in to certain channels
Once they have a great product, they will open up the platform more. They will productize their APIs and decentralize the data layer
Most Influential Person
Balaji — has interesting ideas and a wild imagination
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