SocialFi - Leading Public Chain: DeSo Market Analysis

Introduction

DeSo is a new social network built from the ground up with a custom blockchain where users can leverage their influence and content monetization mechanisms. Its architecture is similar to Bitcoin, but it has greater scale and throughput, and can better support complex social media data, such as posts, user profiles, fans, speculation predictions and other functions. And like Bitcoin, DeSo is a completely open source project, with no company behind it, only tokens and code. The project was launched in March 2021 under the name BitClout and later rebranded as Deso. Deso continues to advance its unique Layer 1 chain designed specifically for social applications. The chain was previously based on a hybrid proof-of-work algorithm derived from Bitcoin. In the first half of 2023, Deso will undergo a hard fork to transition the network to a proof-of-stake design.

In order to customize the chain for social applications, DeSo abandoned the general-purpose blockchains and instead defined a core transaction model specific to social applications. Standard social activities such as posts and profile updates as well as NFT transaction types are defined at the network level. Additionally, DeSo defines financial transactions that support standard token swaps, as well as DeSo’s creator tokens and social tipping feature called “Diamonds.” Diamonds act as a tipping mechanism for content creators. For every diamond tip (similar to a Like) a user receives, the more DeSo tokens they earn. Creator Coins are automatically allocated to accounts and can be purchased in exchange for DESO tokens. Hypothetically, as a certain account becomes popular, people will want to hold (buy) this creator’s coins, causing the price to increase for existing holders.

On DeSo, every profile has its own token that can be bought and sold by anyone. These tokens are called “Creator Coins” and you can have your own token simply by creating a profile. When people buy, the price of each token increases, and when people sell, the price decreases. It is similar to the model of Friend.tech.

All content in DeSo is stored on-chain, with the exception of raw images and videos, which are stored either in a centralized provider like Google Cloud or a decentralized provider like IPFS. With this design, the chain’s state keeps growing, limiting its long-term decentralization potential.

Ultimate vision

Today, posts submitted to Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter belong to these companies rather than the creators who publish them. As a result, the profits mainly flow to these companies. In contrast, DeSo stores all its data on a public blockchain, which means that anyone in the world can run a node that exposes their own managed feed. So, DeSo aims to develop a social app with the capacity to build a user base of one billion. Currently, there are over 100 projects running nodes and building applications on DeSo. Imagine if ESPN ran a node to manage the best sports content, or if Politico ran a node to manage the best political content. Furthermore, since DeSo is fully open-source, these players can even customize their UI and build custom algorithms to rank and post influential individuals in ways that serve specific target audiences. This will quickly transition us from a world where a few giants control the dominant feeds, to a world where consumers have thousands of feeds to choose from, each with its own specific focus. Anyone can run a node to manage their own feed and contribute data to the public resource pool, including profiles, posts, and followers, among others. Existing publishers can easily integrate social apps and experiences with their core businesses, enabling newcomers to innovate on a relatively equal basis with large companies.

Challenges faced by current web3 Social applications:

1. Performance bottleneck: Social applications have high concurrency, with potentially millions of people commenting or posting every second. While traditional general-purpose blockchains (Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, etc.) can scale to tens of thousands of “transactions per second,” scaling “posts per second” is a different challenge. Moreover, even a query from a million-level user is an impossible task on-chain.

2. Storage problem: Social apps involve a large amount of images, text, and videos, requiring significant storage. However, each block has limited capacity, with most blockchain sizes ranging from a few megabytes, and BTC only has a size of 1MB. Calculating at current prices, storing a link to Arweave or Filecoin on any of the aforementioned chains would cost between $0.10 to $1.00, which is too expensive.

3. High gas fees: If all the content is on the chain, then if users need gas even for comments, users will definitely be lost.

4. Content moderation: Because the content is published on the chain and is decentralized, there is no centralized review agency, so some content must comply with the laws and regulations of certain countries.

Then let’s see how DeSo solves these problems:

Advantages of DeSo

1. Blockchain Network Specifically Designed for Social Interactions: Generic blockchains typically do not support ordered lists, making it impossible without off-chain indexing. In contrast, DeSo itself supports indexes such as posts sorted by timestamp, profiles sorted by token value, bids on NFTs associated with NFT organizations, and many more. These indexes can be expanded as the user base grows, greatly reducing the complexity of running nodes and significantly increasing the decentralization of the ecosystem, as well as the number of applications that can be built on top of DeSo. The memory pool of DeSo nodes is also written from scratch to support querying social data without users having to wait for block mining. This enhances the “real-time” nature of DeSo applications, enabling them to compete with traditional centralized social applications.

2. Upgrade Roadmap: In order to support a user base of 1 billion, DeSo has the following roadmap planned: Phase 1: Proof of Stake - In this phase, Deso will implement a proof of stake mechanism. Phase 2: Larger Blocks - The average post size on the DeSo blockchain is currently 218 bytes. Deso will increase the block size to 16 MB every five minutes in this phase, which will support 4 million users. Phase 3: Warp Sync - In this phase, Deso will further increase the block size to 16 MB, enabling support for 30 million users. Phase 4: Sharding - In this phase, Deso will implement sharding, allowing support for 1 billion users.

1. Decentralized Censorship: With data being open, the top machine learning researchers from the world’s best academic institutions can build APIs to analyze data and identify and hide illicit content. Of course, Deso also has its own censorship protocols.

2. Infinite State Storage: DeSo is custom built from the ground up, and all data it stores and indexes follows a known pattern. Unlike storing and indexing profiles, unlike posts, unlike follows, etc… This level of customization not only makes storage 10,000 times cheaper than Avalanche or Solana, but it also allows all DeSo nodes to instantly query all relevant data.

1. User Security: DeSo desktop applications are secure sandbox environments, making it difficult for third-party attackers to invade. DeSo Identity is located at identity.deso.org and securely stores your sensitive account information in the browser’s local storage. To protect private key material, the identity service has minimal dependencies, a strict attribute security policy, and is audited by multiple security companies.

2. Low Gas Fees: On DeSo, you’ll never expect to pay more than a fraction of a penny for thousands of on-chain transactions. The average cost per post is < $0.000017, compared to Ethereum where the average cost per post can exceed $50 depending on Gas fees.

DeSo Application

While DeSo has a range of apps, stretching from blogging apps to fundraising apps, more than 75% of web posts come from three social apps: Desofy - a mobile social media application and the most prolific posting app on DeSo. Supported by the DeSo Foundation, this application allows users to earn money through diamond tips and NFT sales. Diamond – A web-based social feed product powered by the DeSo team. Its functionality includes all monetization aspects of DeSo, enabling users to publish short and long-form content on the site in addition to images and videos. DeSocialWorld – A multilingual social feed designed to cater to a global audience. It also showcases most of DeSo’s features, including content and monetization. Currently, the feature sets of the apps are very similar, given DeSo’s deterministic design. However, with the upcoming hard fork, DeSo will introduce access groups to build more custom features.

Funding

DeSo received US$200 million in funding in 2021, including investments from top institutions such as a16z, Sequoia, Coinbase Ventures, social capital, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the famous American social platform reddit. private investment, it can be said that the lineup is luxurious.

Project Team

The founder of Bitclout has revealed his true identity to the world - Nader AL-Nail. This computer science genius, who graduated from Princeton, has worked at quantitative hedge fund DE Shaw and Google. In 2019, he also raised $133 million from investors such as Bain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz for his stablecoin company, basis, earning him a spot on Forbes’ list of top 30 crypto entrepreneurs under 30. Additionally, he is a close friend of Coinlist founder Brian Tubergen.

Tokenomic

The total number of tokens is 10,808,492, of which 8,884,536 are currently in circulation, accounting for 82% of the total. The current token price is around US$44, and the peak price was US$800 (2021-12-14). The token distribution is not found, but it is basically unlocked at present. It’s over. Compared with the peak, it has actually dropped by 95% and has reached a value point.

In conclusion, this project is essentially building an infrastructure for socialFI. It has created a public blockchain with various tools that facilitate the development of socialFI applications. It takes a different approach compared to Cyber, which is more like a protocol or a collection of tools that allow you to create applications on different chains. From a fundamental perspective, this project seems to be doing well. The team has been working hard to solve problems, and it has strong backing from reputable investment institutions. The ecosystem has also seen the development of numerous applications. However, there is a significant degree of homogeneity, and there is a pressing need for standout applications to emerge. While it may not necessarily thrive during a bullish market, it should perform reasonably well in the next bullish cycle.

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