Decentralized Social

# What is DeSo?
DeSo is a new layer-1 blockchain built from the ground up to decentralize social media for billions of users.

We believe in empowering an internet that’s creator-led, user-owned, and open to millions of developers around the world to build off one another.

Today, there’s only a handful of big-tech companies that own and control all the information we consume online.

DeSo puts the ownership back in the hands of users, not platforms. Your identity, your profile, your content, and your social graph can now be owned by you in a completely censorship-resistant way.

Creators can now freely monetize in a way they could never do before. 

With new crypto-native monetization tools, like Social Tokens, Social DAOs, Social NFTs, Social Tipping, and more — creators have access to monetize their passion and make a living by doing what they love.

Developers can build in a gasless, permissionless, and transparent environment where everything is open and on-chain for ultimate accessibility and composability. 

DeSo is built to support storage-heavy or infinite-state applications, opening up a new world of non-financial-based web3 apps that weren’t possible before. 

We can now imagine, build and experience the next generation of web3 social.

In the same way, we’ve seen Bitcoin and Ethereum decentralize finance, DeSo is now enabling this for social.

We know our mission is colossal, but we believe the world will be better when users, creators, and developers are put first - not corporations.

It’s time to break free.

To learn more, make sure to check out [the vision](https://docs.deso.org/about-deso-chain/readme) behind [DeSo.](https://www.deso.com/)

Check out some of our top apps:

[Decentralized Twitter](https://diamondapp.com/)
[Decentralized Fundraising](https://daodao.io/)
[Decentralized Social Networks](https://desocialworld.com/)
[Decentralized LinkedIn](https://joinentre.com/)
[Decentralized Medium](https://zirkels.com/)
[Decentralized Instagram](https://pearl.app/)
[Decentralized TikTok](https://www.storiapp.co/)
[Decentralized OpenSea](https://nftz.me/)


# Who Are the Founders of DeSo?
DeSo was founded by [Nader Al-Naj](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nader-al-naji-86b14a3a/)i in January 2019. After graduating Princeton University, Al-Naji worked as a software engineer at the D. E. Shaw Group and later at Google on the Google Search and Google Ads teams. Before DeSo, he raised over $133M to start an algorithmic stablecoin Basis in 2017.

The DeSo blockchain is supported by the non-profit DeSo Foundation, whose broad mission is to support the decentralization of social media. Al-Naji is currently the chairman of the board of the DeSo Foundation, with a $200 million treasury behind it to support its mission.

In October 2021, the DeSo Foundation announced a $50 million developer fund, known as the [Octane Fund].

# What Makes DeSo Unique?
The DeSo blockchain supports not only traditional social features like creating profiles and posts, but also novel blockchain-native features like social tokens (creator coins), tipping, and NFTs. 

These features unlock vast new categories of money-enabled products, from social NFT experiences to influencer stock markets. These features enable creators to more effectively monetize their content and connect with their followers on DeSo-powered apps.

Because DeSo treats social data as a public utility, creators aren't locked-in to a handful of centralized apps. All content on DeSo is stored on a decentralized ledger and is immediately available to a large and growing network of independent third-party apps, akin to DeFi applications on the Ethereum blockchain.

DeSo's biggest advantage lies in the fact that it is not a general-purpose blockchain. Instead, it supports a narrow set of social-oriented features that it implements on bare metal, using custom indexes that every node builds during consensus when it syncs from its peers. 

This allows the DeSo blockchain to reach highly-scalable storage capabilities that are unparalleled by any general-purpose blockchain. For instance, the cost of 1 GB of on-chain storage on DeSo is as low as 1 DeSo, whereas even the best existing smart contract infrastructures require millions ($1,000,000+) of dollars to achieve the same. DeSo has also announced switching to a Proof of Stake consensus by the end of year 2022, which is expected to reach a throughput of hundreds of thousands transactions per second, owing to the strictly defined transaction schema.

DeSo is the first layer-1 blockchain built from the ground up to decentralize social media and scale storage-heavy apps to billions of users.

Arweave is a decentralized storage network that seeks to offer a platform for the indefinite storage of data. Describing itself as "a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets," the network primarily hosts "the permaweb" — a permanent, decentralized web with a number of community-driven applications and platforms.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Arweave.

The Arweave network uses a native cryptocurrency, AR, to pay "miners" to indefinitely store the network's information.

The project was first announced as Archain in August 2017, later rebranding to Arweave in February 2018 and officially launching in June 2018.

Arweave

Immutable positions itself as the first layer-two scaling solution for NFTs on Ethereum. According to Immutable, its blockchain does away with Ethereum’s limitations like low scalability, a poor user experience, illiquidity, and a slow developer experience. Instead, users benefit from instant trading and massive scalability while enjoying zero gas fees for minting and trading NFTs without compromising user or asset security.

Thanks to this technology, users will be able to create and distribute assets like ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens on a massive scale. Chris Clay, the game Director of Gods Unchained, a project already building on Immutable, stated that Immutable allows Gods Unchained to implement a new meta-system that was previously impossible. In this fashion, Immutable aims to create a world-class experience for users and developers alike.

Immutable

SuperVerse

Akash Network

Illuvium is an open-world fantasy battle game built on the Ethereum blockchain. Often touted as the first AAA game on Ethereum, Illuvium looks to provide a source of entertainment to both casual gamers and hardcore DeFi fans through a range of collecting and trading features.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Illuvium.

The world of Illuvium is inhabited by creatures known as Illuvials, who can be captured by players that best them in battle and nurse them back to health. From then on, they become a loyal part of the player’s collection and can be used when battling other adventurers as part of Illuvium’s auto battler gameplay.

The game is a fusion between an open-world exploration game and a PVP battle game. Players can spend their time exploring the expanses of the game world or building up their team of powerful beasts.

Illuvium has been in development since 2020, and is being built by a worldwide team of more than 40 individuals, including the co-founders; serial entrepreneur and early cryptocurrency adopter Kieran Warwick, and experienced game designer Aaron Warwick, who are brothers. (And who are coincidentally also the brothers of Kain Warwick, the co-founder of DeFi platform Synthetix).

The ILV token has a number of uses within the Illuvium ecosystem. It’s the main token used to reward players for their in-game achievements, entitles players to their share of the Illuvium Vault and is used for participating in the governance of the game via the Illuvium decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Illuvium

HELLO Labs

Wilder World

Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract parachain on Polkadot. Moonbeam makes it easy to use popular Ethereum developer tools to build or redeploy Solidity projects in a Substrate-based environment.

Moonbeam is much more than just an EVM implementation: it’s a highly specialized parachain that mirrors Ethereum’s Web3 RPC, accounts, keys, subscriptions, logs, and more. The Moonbeam platform extends the base Ethereum feature set with additional features such as on-chain governance, staking, and cross-chain integrations.

Moonbeam’s Ethereum compatibility is unmatched:

Minimal Changes: developers can use existing Solidity smart contracts right away, with no need to rewrite or reconfigure

Use Existing Developer Tools: connect popular tools like MetaMask, Hardhat, Waffle, Remix, and Truffle via a complete set of Web3 RPC endpoints. Use well-known Javascript libraries such as Web3.Js or Ethers.Js.

Unified Accounts, Addresses, and Signatures: use your existing Ethereum H160 accounts & ECDSA signatures to interact with Moonbeam

Tap into the Most Integrations on Polkadot: use existing oracles, bridges, wallets, and other tools that are already building on Moonbeam

Moonbeam provides integration and connectivity between Polkadot Parachains as well as with other chains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin via bridges. Moonbeam was started in 2019 by Derek Yoo of Pure Stake.

Moonbeam

Ribbon uses financial engineering to create structured products that deliver sustainable yield. Ribbon's first product focuses on yield through automated options strategies. The protocol also allows developers to create arbitrary structured products through combining various DeFi derivatives.

Structured products are packaged financial instruments that use a combination of derivatives to achieve some specific risk-return objective, such as betting on volatility, enhancing yields or principal protection.

Theta Vault is a new product that automates a covered call strategy to earn high yield on ETH. The vault runs a covered call strategy and sells out of the money call options on a weekly basis for yield.

The primary risk for running this strategy is that depositors could potentially give up upside in exchange for guaranteed yield. By selling a call option, users are basically promising to sell the asset at the strike price, even if it goes above it (a.k.a selling early). Because of this, if the price of the asset moves up significantly in a short period of time, it is possible for depositors to have "negative yield" on their ETH.

However, this only happens if ETH/USD appreciates significantly, so depositors will still be up in USD terms. The vault also sells call options that are very out of the money, which means there is a relatively low chance of the options getting exercised.

Ribbon Finance

Axelar claims to deliver “secure cross-chain communication for Web3.” The project provides a decentralized network and tools to help builders of decentralized applications (dApps) with seamless cross-chain communication through its protocol suite, tools and APIs.

Axelar features three core components – a decentralized network, a software development kit of protocols and APIs, and a set of gateway smart contracts for cross-chain connectivity.

Powered by a decentralized network of validators, anyone can join the network, build on it, or use it. Apps builders can interact with a simple API atop a permissionless network that routes messages and ensures network security via proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

AXL is the native token of the Axelar network. The protocol also supports the cross-chain transfer of several native tokens via their wrapped ERC-20 versions, including AVAX (Avalanche), ETH (Ethereum), FTM (Fantom), GLMR (Moonbeam), and MATIC (Polygon).

Meanwhile, Axelar has raised capital from top-tier investors, including Binance, Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital and others.

Axelar

Audius is a decentralized music streaming protocol initially built on POA network, but now living on Solana. Audius was launched to remedy the inefficiencies of the music industry, which is plagued by intransparent music rights ownership and intermediaries standing between artists and their audience.

Audius aims to align the interests of artists, fans, and node operators through its platform powered by its native AUDIO token. Artists can upload music, stored and distributed by content and discovery nodes, that fans can listen to for free. Currently, Audius rewards content creators through rewards like featuring in the weekly trending lists. In the future, it plans to integrate stablecoins for artists to offer paid content, as well as artist tokens that give fans the ability to access exclusive content, potentially cooperating with platforms like Rally.

Audius

RenderToken (RNDR) is a distributed GPU rendering network built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, aiming to connect artists and studios in need of GPU compute power with mining partners willing to rent their GPU capabilities out. Conceived in 2009 by OTOY, inc. CEO Jules Urbach and launched in 2017, RNDR held its first public token sale in October of that same year, followed by a private sale period lasting from January 2018 – May 2018, wherein a total of 117,843,239 RNDR were sold at a price of 1 RNDR = $0.25 USD equivalent of token.
During the private sale period, early adopters were onboarded onto the RNDR Beta Testnet, where beta node operators and artists worked collaboratively with the RNDR team in building and testing the network, up until its public launch on April 27th 2020.

Render

Quant launched in June 2018 with the goal of connecting blockchains and networks on a global scale, without reducing the efficiency and interoperability of the network. It is the first project to solve the interoperability problem through the creation of the first blockchain operating system.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Quant.

The project is built as an operating system distributed ledger technology— and Overledger Network — for connecting different blockchain networks. The project is billed as the first OS to be built for blockchains.

The main aim of Quant — using Overledger — is to bridge the gap that exists between different blockchains. The backbone of the project is the Overledger network, which Quant bills as the ecosystem on which the future digital economy ecosystem will be built.

Overledger allows developers to build decentralized multi-chain applications (known as MApps) for their customers. For developers to build a Mapp on the network, they must hold a certain amount of Quant tokens (QNT).

Quant

Ocean Protocol

Kadena is a proof-of-work blockchain that combines the PoW consensus mechanism from Bitcoin with directed acyclic graph (DAG) principles to offer a scalable version of Bitcoin. Kadena claims it can provide the security of Bitcoin while being able to offer unparalleled throughput that makes the blockchain usable to enterprises and entrepreneurs alike. Kadena's unique infrastructure is decentralized and built for mass adoption because of its multi-chain approach.

Kadena promises industrial scalability that can support global financial systems and can be scaled as necessary. It also vows to remain energy-efficient at scale and deliver more transactions with the same energy input, another difference to Bitcoin. Moreover, Kadena offers crypto gas stations, which allow businesses to pay for their customers' gas fees and remove a massive pain point in adopting blockchains for business.

Kadena has already scaled its network from 10 to 20 blockchains and can do so again in the future, if necessary. This final addition to Kadena was its private Kuro layer-two blockchain, which supports up to 8,000 transactions per second across 500 nodes.

Kadena

Nakamoto Games

Vulcan Forged is a blockchain game studio and NFT marketplace. They are the makers of VulcanVerse.

PYR  is the native utility token that is used for:

Fees for marketplace settlement

Staking in VulcanVerse land and other assets

Upgrading and sustaining game asset levels

Play-to-earn rewards

Access to our game developers and NFT dapp incubation program

Vulcan Forged Platforms and games include:

*VulcanVerse, a Grece-Roman fantasy metaverse made up of 10,000 plots of land

Anvil, a crypto-less and gas-free NFT engine for easy game and dApp onboarding

Vulcan Market, a gas free NFT marketplace for all Vulcan Forged games

Berserk, an NFT online TGG

Frenzy, a create-your-own tournament platform with PYR as it’s reward token.

Vulcan Forged (PYR)

Moonriver is an Ethereum-compatible, smart-contract parachain on Kusama. It is intended to be a companion network to Moonbeam, where it will provide a permanently incentivized canary network. New code will ship to Moonriver first, where it can be tested and verified under real economic conditions. Once proven, the same code will ship to Moonbeam on Polkadot.

It does this by providing a full EVM implementation, a Web3-compatible API, and bridges that connect Moonriver to existing Ethereum networks.

This allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonriver with minimal changes.

Moonriver

Verasity is an open-ledger ecosystem designed to fight advertising fraud, provide open access to infrastructure for publishers and advertisers, and reward users for watching video content. Verasity also provides payment solutions and a rewarding staking ecosystem with 15% yields guaranteed through to April 2024.

Powered by a mix of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cutting-edge blockchain technologies, Verasity is building the most powerful advertising ecosystem in the world through VeraViews; developing an open-access payments platform through VeraWallet, the VeraCard, and VeraPay; and enhancing the attention economy through its patented Rewarded Video module.

Verasity

Helium (HNT) is a decentralized blockchain-powered network for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Launched in July 2019, the Helium mainnet allows low-powered wireless devices to communicate with each other and send data across its network of nodes.

Nodes come in the form of so-called Hotspots, which are a combination of a wireless gateway and a blockchain mining device. Users who operate nodes thus mine and earn rewards in Helium’s native cryptocurrency token, HNT.

Helium’s goal is to prepare IoT communication for the future, identifying inadequacies in current infrastructure from its birth in 2013.