Key Points:
1) A blockchain delegated for scaling social media is required
2）An identity across different social media apps will allow easier adoption of the platform
3) Creator coins are the backbone of DeSo’s economy
4）DeSo is growing steadily with 1.7M wallets and 74.7M transactions till date
Table of contents
3. Creator coins and the DeSo Economy
3.3 Contributing to the platform
4.1 Decentralized Instagram—Pearl
4.2 Decentralized Opeasea—Polygram+NFTz
6. DeSo Circulating supply and wallet count
8. Thoughts on current issues with Socialfi projects and Deso
8.2 Education on tokenomics and economy
1. DeSo
DeSo, short for “decentralized social”, is the first and only blockchain that is custom-built for decentralized social applications.
The idea behind DeSo is that they believe that a blockchain delegated for scaling social media applications requires architecture vastly different from a single general-purpose blockchain. Compared with DeFi transactions, which may generate zero bytes of new state data, social transactions may generate tens of megabytes that need to be stored, indexed, and queried. Today's most advanced blockchains fail completely at handling this type of transaction. Therein lies the value proposition of DeSo as they provide a solution to this while keeping costs low. For example, posting multiple posts a day may seem costly on a general-purpose blockchain but the transaction fees per post for the last 30 days on DeSo is a mere $0.00002.
DeSo aims to provide an open-source platform where Creators on the DeSo platform can benefit from a decentralized social media, owning and monetizing their own content. The economy works in such a way that both creators and users of the platform can benefit together, creating a win-win situation for every user.
The problem with centralized social apps is that the data and content does not truly belong to the creators, instead they are owned by the corporations who provided those social platforms. This benefits the corporations instead of the true creators and DeSo aims to change that.
2. The DeSo Identity
There are multiple ways on how you can sign in to the DeSo ecosystem. The power of the DeSo economy is that it uses a single identity (DeSo identity) across all of the dApps deployed on the DeSo blockchain. This can be done either with a wallet (usually metamask), or Web2 choices like your email address, apple ID or google ID. With one identity, users can get access to multiple social media platforms with different functions and features.
The profile or DeSo identity used for diamond (twitter) is the same as the one used for Mousai (Spotify) and this creates a compounding effect for the value of the creator coin. Fans can buy in to creator coin from either platform, thus increasing the creator’s reach across multiple platforms (See screenshots below).
3. Creator coins and the DeSo Economy
Every user on the DeSo platform can create their own coin. These are typically used by creators for engagement with their community and are called “creators coins”. Users of the platform can “buy into” their favorite creators coins and benefit from it when the coin price increases.
For example, The CEO of Apple may have an account on DeSo and upon the announcement of a new iPhone, the price of his creator tokens may soar, benefiting fans and followers who have bought in earlier when the token is cheaper. Same can be said for a celebrity singer who announced a drop of a new song/album.
Creators can set their founder reward percentage and with every buy transaction for their creator coin, the founder will receive the designated percentage as a reward. For example, if the founder reward is set at 10%, any purchase of 100 DeSo of the creator coin will mean 10 DeSo worth will go to the creator's wallet. A more detailed example can be found below when we cover some of the apps on DeSo.
3.1 The NFT play
Every post on diamond can be converted into an NFTs. Creators can make use of this feature to have further engagement with their audience. Perhaps a celebrity singer is planning to have a concert, selling these NFTs as tickets can also be an option for them.
Moreover, creator or coin-holder royalty can be put in place for every NFT sale, allowing the creator to benefit themselves and their communities. Imagine supporting your favorite content creator and getting benefits like a percentage of every NFT sale they push out. This will drive more fans to buy into the creator coins, in turn raising the price of the coin. Smart economy play!
NFTs can also be used as an access pass to premium content from the creator. Perhaps alpha or sneak peaks to an artist’s new work, or discounted rates for future drops. It is really up to the creator on how they would like to structure their NFT utility.
3.2 Social Tipping
Mainstream streamers on popular Web2 platform stream content usually for free and usually get donations from their fans. These are done in the form of diamonds on their Diamond up but can also be in the form of DeSo across the whole ecosystem.
I have also included some screenshots below on how social tipping works on different platforms as well as the currencies used.
Every user on the DeSo platform can create their own coin. These are typically used by creators for engagement with their community and are called “creators coins”. Users of the platform can “buy into” their favorite creators coins and benefit from it when the coin price increases.
For example, The CEO of Apple may have an account on DeSo and upon the announcement of a new iPhone, the price of his creator tokens may soar, benefiting fans and followers who have bought in earlier when the token is cheaper. Same can be said for a celebrity singer who announced a drop of a new song/album.
Creators can set their founder reward percentage and with every buy transaction for their creator coin, the founder will receive the designated percentage as a reward. For example, if the founder reward is set at 10%, any purchase of 100 DeSo of the creator coin will mean 10 DeSo worth will go to the creator's wallet. A more detailed example can be found below when we cover some of the apps on DeSo.
3.3 Contributing to the platform
Users can also contribute to the platform by running a node. Running a node will give you full access to every profile, post, follow, creator coin trade, etc. So, what can you do with all this data?
By running your own nodes, you can curate content on what the global feed can be. For example, a creator who does sports content can curate feeds based on posts on the DeSo platform revolving around only sports.
This is powerful as the key to this is that it can be curated. For example, ESPN can curate a feed on a social media platform that ONLY does sports content.
Providing relevant content or feeds may also indirectly contribute to the creator’s coin value, in turn benefiting those who supported the creators by ways of buying into their creator coins. Everything comes full circle!
3.4 Build your own features
Running a node also allows you to build your own features and run it on your own node to back it up. Dark mode? Better filtering? These can all be supported out from your own node.
4.The DeSo Ecosystem
There are currently over 100 projects on the DeSo Ecosystem. While some of them may still not be live, it is evident that many people are building on the DeSo blockchain aiming to be the next Web3 Socialfi phenomenon.
These projects – true to DeSo’s economy model, can also be supported through creator coins. Followers can buy into promising projects and hope to buy in early to the next Web3 “tiktok” or “Instagram”. Projects ranging from DEXes, Music, NFTs, Social Media platforms can all be found on the list. The full list of projects can be found here.
There are even e-commerce marketplaces that can be found on the platform and DeSo is the currency used for purchases.
Some notable dApps on the DeSo platform now are Web2 equivalent social media platforms, with the likes of diamond (Twitter), Mousai (Spotify), Desofy (Facebook), Entre (Linkedin). There is even Cloutvista, which acts as the “google search” for the DeSo ecosystem.
Here is a deeper look into some of these apps:
4.1 Decentralized Instagram—Pearl
Pearl is a new social platform built for creators and their communities to grow and earn together. Using the technology of Web3, Pearl is creating a platform that provides creative and economic opportunity for all types of creators through unique monetization features. This platform has not been officially released yet.
The first cohort of the Emerging Creators Accelerator is launching October 18, 2022.
The Emerging Creators Accelerator is the free virtual program created to mentor and uplift emerging creators succeed in the new creator economy and Web3. Its aim is to teach how to monetize in the future tech landscape and start making your mark early before mass adoption saturates the space. Creators will participate in 5 workshops, over 5 weeks, across a variety of Web3 and Creator Economy topics. To be considered a Creator: You’ve built a community of about 10k-250k followers and are aged 18+.
Pearl also lets users directly support their favorite creators. Users first need to purchase DESO to buy Creator Coins. They buy a creator’s Coin as a way to back a creator, show support, connect, or gain access to any perks a creator offers. Users can purchase a subscription for $4.99 monthly. After purchasing a Subscription, they have access to all of a creator’s historic exclusive posts and future posts.
Creators enable the Creator Coin so fans can show their support, earn perks, and Royalties. Creators earn 80% of their subscription revenue while the remaining 20% is distributed in Royalties, proportionally among their coin holders. Each time a user buys Creator Coin, creators earn 10% of the purchase price.
Source: https://pearl.app/faqs
Ranked by market capitalization, Pearl has the highest MC currently which is $140,788. Then Afterparty with $31,160.
4.2 Decentralized Opeasea—Polygram+NFTz
Polygram and NFTz are both DeSo's NFT marketplaces, however, NFTz has more functions such as social. Everybody who has ever made an account at NFTz.zone has a creator zone where all the NFTs (created, purchased, or received) will be shown. Meanwhile, NFTz is a DeSo node for NFTs.
The following graphs are the top collections of Polygram and NFTz respectively.
Some statistics of NFTz- NFT Sales on Oct 11 is $2.3k, among which auction Sales are $1.6k. NFT activity transaction per day is 13,247 now on NFTz. More details can be found about NFTz in the table below.
5. DeSo Ecosystem Stats
Using analytics tools already live on the DeSo Ecosystem, you can look at the stats of the ecosystem and determine how well the blockchain is doing,
A recent snapshot on Altumbase shows that there are a total of 4,089 new user profiles and 2,972 daily active users, or that there are a total of 27,713 diamonds currently circulating on the DeSo ecosystem. This information can also be broken down further to trending daily creators, or top daily followed creators, etc.
6. DeSo Circulating supply and wallet count
Based on the stats provided on OpenProsper, another analytics platform on the DeSo ecosystem, there are currently 10.6M circulating supply of $DESO and a total of 1.7M wallets currently.
This shows good growth for the DeSo ecosystem and signifies adoption for the platform with the number of wallets and creators both growing steadily over time.
A look at the transactions count on the blockchain also shows a steady increase over time, which means the DeSo blockchain is slowly being adopted by users.
7. $DESO token price
$DESO is currently trading at $15.74 and has a market cap of 164M and a 24 hours trading volume of $3.8M.
Since its launch, the price of $DESO peaked at $192. It has seen a decent increase in its price after stagnating for a few months in the last two weeks. It is listed on Coinbase, CoinEx, Blockchain.com and BitMax.
DeSo is also backed by VCs like Coinbase, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz and has raised $200M till date.
8. Thoughts on current issues with Socialfi projects and Deso
8.1 Adoption
As with any social platform, the key reason why the platform is successful is because of adoption. There needs to be users using the platform in order for the social media platform to truly grow.
Though the stats of DeSo reflect that there is a steady growth on wallets and transactions, the platform can only truly grow once adoption reaches critical mass. In my opinion, emphasis has to be placed on attracting quality creators who will post and use the platform and its different dApps on a daily basis. With the creators making the shift first, the followers and fans will soon follow.
8.2 Education on tokenomics and economy
Users of the platform may also not be aware of how the token economy works. As such, education is often needed to let users know how the win-win situation can benefit them when using the platform. In my opinion, once users of the platform understand how the “game” works, there will be better adoption across all the dApps available on the DeSo ecosystem.
8.3 Ecosystem
Most Socialfi projects are currently pretty much standalone with their own token economy and user base. In my opinion, DeSo has done a better job in this aspect, integrating all the different social features and projects within its ecosystem. This will bring value to creators, users of the platform and the platform token $DESO. An ecosystem is also very important to ensure cross-pollination within projects in the ecosystem, growing user bases of all projects.
8.4 The future of DeSo
The current products on DeSo are old content covering Web3 concepts and might not be enough to meet the needs of encrypted users. However, we feel that DeSo is the platform for new Socialfi projects to begin, and there is plenty of room for innovation in this space. The value of DeSo would soon lie in this potential as although it is also critical to reduce the cost of on-chain social data storage, this can be adjusted through economic models and can be easily imitated and surpassed.
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