A decentralized social media project that has received support from billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya is surging after reaching a major milestone.
In a new press release, Decentralized Social (DESO) says that over 1.5 million accounts have been created on its platform.
The layer-1 blockchain project aims to redefine the nature of social media applications by resolving scalability limitations as well as protecting users and content creators from centralized authorities.
Decentralized Social is open-source and stores all data on-chain, with plans to change its consensus model from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). It also offers a new decentralized autonomous organization launcher called DAODAO.
DeSo founder Nader Al-Naji says,
“With these new updates, we move closer to a world in which social media is not controlled by three centralized companies, but instead, is owned by the users and creators of the network.”
The news of DeSo’s growth comes just days after Tesla CEO and crypto influencer Elon Musk took to Twitter to ask if users thought the platform adhered to free speech principles. At time of writing, 70.4% of poll respondents have answered “no.”
Decentralized Social is one of a number of rising social media platforms seeking to be a more censorship-resistant alternative to other Big Tech platforms.
Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya mentioned DeSo back in October as part of his basket of investments to hedge against inflation.
“I’m very concerned about medium-term inflation… I want to own three things: hypergrowth [firms]… cash-generative assets… and then I want to own non-correlated assets: Bitcoin, Solana, DESO, a lot of the DeFi [decentralized finance] protocols because it’s a great counter-intuitive hedge…”
The project changed its name from BitClout last summer and raised over $200 million, including from venture capital firm Social Capital.
Decentralized Social is up 21.73% on the day and trading for $50.02. The altcoin was trading around the $31 level for most of the past week before exploding by 124% from the $37 mark to a high of $83.15 early on Monday.
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