The Decentralized Social Blockchain (DeSo)
Primer: Join Nader Al-Naji, creator of DeSo Blockchain, as he explains what is so unique and different about this state of the art blockchain. He shares the mission of DeSo, how to achieve it, as well as the exciting upgrades to the blockchain that is coming soon.
DeSo and its Mission
What is Deso
The only blockchain built to power storage heavy applications, like social applications
Storing a tweet (about 200 characters) will cost you anywhere between 25 cents to a dollar, depending on congestion
But it is virtually free on DeSo because DeSo is custom-built for these storage-heavy use cases
Mission of DeSo
Currently, a handful of companies control most of the information on the internet e.g. Facebook, TikTok and Twitter
DeSo can move us away from the centralized world to one where there are thousands of apps to choose from, each with its own feeds and UIs etc
The goal of DeSo is to bring competition and innovation back to social media by opening up the content
DeSo can also extend the blockchain disruption beyond social applications to any other storage-heavy applications, like marketplaces, order-book exchanges with fully on-chain content
The same tech that is used to decentralise Facebook can be used to decentralize Amazon listing, Coinbase, OpenSea
Infinite state & Finite state apps
Two kinds of apps that DeSo can power
Infinite state applications
Finite state applications
For finite state apps, the storage that you need per user stays constant even with more transactions
When sending money between A to B in a DeFi app, all DeSo needs to store is 2 account balances, even if a million transactions are done between A and B. Storage needed on the blockchain does not increase
For infinite state app, the storage you need grows with every single transaction
For social apps, every single follow and like results in new data that must be stored on the blockchain
Likewise for marketplaces, order-book exchanges
Since it’s a blockchain, all the code is open source and open data. Anyone who wants to check the code can visit Github for it. This is very different from the platform monopolies that we have currently
Strategy to achieve Mission
Layer 1 strategy
Once DeSo has this blockchain that has storage capabilities that other blockchains do not have, how to get it to compete with Facebook and make people build apps on it?
For a decentralized blockchain, a single killer app is enough to bootstrap a powerful platform effect
E.g. if a social app on DeSo becomes very popular, so it brings all these users, wallets and content on-chain that other developers can build off. This cannot happen for a centralized platform
Ethereum has already done it for DeFi but DeSo is the only one that can build around content and storage-heavy applications, not just storage light apps like DeFi
The network effect of social content is potentially significantly stronger than the network effect around finite state applications e.g. switching from finance applications like banks is easier than switching social networks
This will be especially true when a killer app is built on DeSo and other developers build on top of this
Question: how to get that killer app?
Make it super easy to build on DeSo - no smart contract needed to build on DeSo
Go after 3rd party developers, either by encouraging them or funding them, to build special projects in-house on DeSo
Status of DeSo thus far
How has DeSo done so far?
Launched in Mar 2021 but did not announce DeSo as a blockchain that developers can build on till September 2021
The number of wallets on DeSo just passed the 1.5 million mark
Each wallet can also create a social profile on DeSo, and that reached 500k
Almost a billion dollars in volume flowed through DeSo
Hundreds of apps built on DeSo - posting content on one app shows up in all other apps
Devs building on DeSo
Had a partnership with Major League hacking - one of the biggest hackathon organizations in the world
Got a sponsorship from them, which is a very big deal
For all the other blockchains, the participants in the hackathon have to spend the whole time learning smart contracts and programming solidity or rust before they can build anything
For DeSo, you can build apps with solely web2 tech
Any dev should consider building on DeSo, because one can build infinite state apps and also finite state apps, and all these without learning smart contracts first
Backed 39 teams building on DeSo
16 of them are venture-backed, a few are dev grants
Have deso.js library coming
Hundreds of lines of code can become just one line
Will make it super easy to develop apps by lowering the barrier of entry
The whole point of getting devs to build on DeSo is to build that killer app
Tokenomics
$DESO supply is fixed at 10.8 million coins
2 million owned by founders
275k went to mining
The rest is basically an initial distribution via a public sale through a bonding curve (no individual owns more than 5%)
DeSo passes the high standard of decentralisation needed to list on Coinbase. They will check on both the wallet’s amount and the number of nodes that are running
Do not want the future of social platforms to be centralised again
DeSo foundation is currently sitting on a 4000 BTC in treasury and will be used to develop DeSo further
Upgrades
Blockchain feature upgrades
DAO coins (also known as Social ERC20)
Basically ERC20 tokens with a social profile attached to them
Really like a profile on DeSo with the ability to mint/burn a coin and searchable
Best analogy is to mix Ethereum name service (ENS) with ERC20
NFTs v2
Has full parity with existing blockchains
Near zero gas
NFTs have social profiles attached to them, and the NFTs will show up on all the apps on DeSo
Introduces critical features to DeSo NFTs including ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Royalty Split’ functions
Messages v3
Introduces on-chain encrypted and unencrypted group chats
Does not look like a big deal, but this can move all of us away from email and Facebook messages, where a centralized entity stores the data, to a situation where the data is totally decentralized
This will be showcased by DAODAO
Will be a kind of messenger that follows you wherever you go, and it’ll show up in all the apps in DeSo
Can be used to provide token-gated and NFT-gated groups utilizing desomessenger.com
Derived keys and spending limits
Very difficult to build social applications in a trusted way
In MetaMask, you have to confirm every single transaction but this model does not really work for social applications
Imagine doing a confirmation for every ‘like’ or every ‘follow’ - very cumbersome and does not work well on mobile as well
DeSo came up with a framework of a master key that can authorize new keys that are usable in apps (with mobile or desktop apps) with a limited set of permissions
E.g. give an app a key that you can like, post, comment and follow but you can’t do anything else
E.g. you can do anything you want in an app, but with an overall DeSo limit spending
Need to custom built a permission model into the blockchain to do something like this
Social multisig wallets
Specify m of n keys that can control a profile,
Can be m of n profiles that can spend from that wallet
On-chain tracking of signature shards
Entry metadata
Allows one to add other fields to profiles and posts
Allows apps to add custom things to posts
On-chain non-custodial order-book exchange
Allows one to submit a limit order to the DeSo blockchain to buy/sell an amount of DAO coins (social ERC20)
Should be superior to liquidity pool exchanges like UniSwap because they do not suffer impermanent loss and there is no need to tie up capital in the pool
Will be used to power DAOSwap
Scaling the blockchain
Hypersync
For new chains like Solana or Avalanche, the way a new node is synced by downloading the current state from another node, instead of the entire transactions from the beginning of the chain
But another problem arises where we have to ask whether the node that we downloaded the current state from is verified to be a good copy
Verifying is very inefficient until now - had to download the entire Merkel tree (full copy of the entire state) in order to verify that the state you downloaded is good
Hypersync just need one checksum number, so it’s very fast
This checksum is called EllipticSum and is a breakthrough - something that Ethereum and Solana have tried but failed to crack - and can push the entire blockchain space forward
Proof of Stake
Introducing a new proof of stake system that they are going to move towards. DeSo is currently proof of work
All the storage advantages and speed are not affected by the type of consensus mechanism that is being used but proof of stake allows less money to be spent on mining to support DeSo. People are also incentivized to lock up Deso so it helps the economics
The reason to move from proof of work to proof of stake is not to enable scaling but more about costs and tokenomics
Going to finish publishing a paper soon on the new system, called Collaborand, that they are going to be run by a lot of the top academics
Solves an important problem around generating on-chain randomness that other blockchains are not able to crack
Special projects
DAODAO - enables dev to fundraise and build much more effectively
Great showcase of what DeSo can do as a on-chain social
It’s like fundraising combined with subreddit and it increases the chance of finding that killer app in DeSo
DAOSwap - a simplified order-book exchange that is on-chain
Future plans
More listings - already on CoinBase, but going to work to get on Binance
Coin Split - possibly splitting $DESO 1:1000
Will not change the fundamentals much but will make it easier to own 1 coin
DeSo mobile app portal - a portal or aggregator app that gives access to all the apps and also to manage and see notifications
“The story about DeSo is really about continuous and non-stop execution and compounding. You know, I like to say, be so good that they can’t ignore you and the market will catch up.”
- Nader Al-Naji
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