Decentralized Social

The other day, someone I know asked me two multi-billion-dollar questions. The first question asked why the DeSo blockchain is &#34;needed&#34; compared to existing blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, etc... The second more interesting question asked, &#34;why do we need blockchains for social media anyway?&#34; I aim to tackle both succinctly in this post. If you&#39;re a DeSo skeptic, or if you just haven&#39;t deeply considered the implications of storing content on blockchains, then this post is for you.Luckily, the first question of why DeSo is &#34;needed&#34; compared to existing chains is easy to answer. The DeSo blockchain is ~17,000 times cheaper than Solana, and ~5 million times cheaper than Ethereum when it comes to storing content. To put that in terms that are easier to understand, storing a single 200-character &#34;Tweet&#34; costs about $0.50 on Solana, about $100 on Ethereum, but only $0.00017 on DeSo (calculations <a href="https://blog.deso.com/blog/web-3-will-not-be-built-on-smart-contracts?ref&#61;bankless" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">here</a>). This gap is the difference between being able to build a fully-decentralized Twitter, where every user&#39;s post is stored directly on an open censorship-resistant blockchain, vs settling for a centralized future where content is stored off-chain and centralized just like Twitter stores your content today.Why is DeSo so much better at storing content than existing blockchains? This is because existing blockchains are focused on DeFi, which has vastly different storage requirements than social media apps. With DeFi, two people can transact a million times while only needing to store two account balances in the end. In contrast, a million posts on a social app would require storing and indexing a million items, potentially forever. Put simply: Existing blockchains are trying to &#34;win&#34; finite-state applications like DeFi, while under-investing in &#34;infinite-state&#34; applications like social.<img src="https://academy-public.coinmarketcap.com/optimized-uploads/273dc49d9fc54af6a2573521359059d0.webp" />The storage issues faced by other chains are affecting every app built on them today. If you look at social apps built on other chains like Ethereum and Solana, you will notice that all of them store their socail content off-chain. This is worse than it seems because content is the single biggest driver of network effects in web2. If everyone in crypto continues to use apps that store their content on off-chain centralized databases, like they do now, we are likely to end up re-centralizing crypto at the &#34;applicatoin layer.&#34;The only defense against the re-centralization of crypto is to build and promote solutions that store content on a blockchain that is as decentralized and as censorship-resistant as Bitcoin. The only path to achieving this, though, is to build a blockchain that can handle the storage and indexing requirements of modern social networks at scale, like Twitter. Building a Twitter-scale blockchain is extremely hard. It is so hard that other founders likely dismiss the whole category of decentralized infinite-state apps as infeasible. But, contrary to what Elon and others would lead you to believe, it is 100% possible, as I discuss in detail in my blog post entitled <a href="https://diamondapp.com/u/nader/blog/putting-a-trillion-dollar-industry-on-chain" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Putting a Trillion-Dollar Industry On-Chain</a>. This is what we&#39;re building with DeSo: The first blockchain that can power storage-heavy infinite-state apps at Twitter scale. And it&#39;s vastly different from what virtually anyone else in the crypto industry is focused on today.Today, one of the only app that has ever stored its content fully on-chain is BitClout, a prototype app that was the first app we launched on DeSo, mainly to show what the blockchain could do. There are few exceptions: Virtually every other social app in crypto has stored its content off-chain in some way or another. What&#39;s more, they had no choice: An app that uses Ethereum or Solana for its financial layer must use another solution to store its social content, and until recently all of these apps have had no choice but to settle for centralized options.So, what does the future look like? If we&#39;re successful with DeSo, new kinds of social apps will begin to become popular, which give you the same level of control over your content as you have over your crypto wallet. Today, there is no way to build the latter self-sovereign category of apps without using DeSo. This means that developers who opt to use Ethereum or Solana for their wallet functionality will likely look to solutions like DeSo to handle their content storage needs, rather than going to S3. The more apps that do this, the more content DeSo will accumulate, and the more valuable DeSo will become as a content storage solution, especially when compared to using a centralized solution. DeSo wins by initially supporting infinite-state crypto-native apps, but in the long-run its content network effects will make it appealing to all founders, including pure web2 devs.With the above, I have focused solely on DeSo&#39;s content storage properties, mainly because this is the single biggest differentiator between DeSo and other blockchains on the market. But the DeSo blockchain is actually state-of-the-art in virtually all other ways that matter, including for DeFi primitives. In some sense, if you can solve infinite-state scaling, as we&#39;ve been focused on with DeSo, then you get better performance on finite-state applications for free.To learn more about DeSo&#39;s other advantages, like its Revolution Proof of Stake system, see these links:<ul><li><a href="https://revolution.deso.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Revolution Proof of Stake</a></li><li><a href="https://proposals.deso.com/docs/deso-perpetuals" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">DeSo Perpetuals and HeroSwap</a></li><li>Try popular DeSo apps like <a href="https://diamondapp.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Diamond</a> and <a href="https://openfund.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Openfund</a></li><li>More info on <a href="https://deso.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">deso.com</a> and the <a href="https://docs.deso.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">DeSo Docs</a> page</li></ul>Without DeSo, crypto is on-track to re-centralize at the application layer. Together, we can make sure this doesn&#39;t happen, and expand crypto from decentralizing just financial products, to decentralizing the entire trillion-dollar social media category, and beyond.Did I mention this post itself is stored on DeSo via a popular app called <a href="https://diamondapp.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Diamond</a>? Your comments will be on-chain, too, and I&#39;d really appreciate your feedback.

Why DeSo? The Billion-Dollar Opportunity Under Everyone's Nose

Decentralized Social

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