DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain specifically designed to scale decentralized social applications to one billion users. It offers traditional social features like profile creation and posts, as well as blockchain-native functionalities such as social tokens, tipping, and NFTs.

Unlike the focus on scaling decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, there has been limited investment in building blockchains that can handle the scale of social media applications. However, social media applications are equally large, if not larger, and hold significant potential for value creation. Existing general-purpose blockchains that claim to handle high transaction volumes are ill-equipped to meet the storage and indexing requirements of social media applications.

To draw a parallel with the centralized world, the infrastructure supporting the New York Stock Exchange is vastly different from that of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Similarly, a blockchain capable of scaling decentralized social applications to one billion users will differ significantly from one designed for DeFi apps. Therefore, the future of crypto lies in a series of specialized blockchains tailored to specific application categories, rather than a single general-purpose blockchain. DeSo is the result of over two years of effort to create a blockchain dedicated to decentralizing the social media category.

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 thats creator-led, user-owned, and open to millions of developers around the world to build off one another.

Today, theres 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 werent possible before.

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

In the same way, weve 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.

Its time to break free.

To learn more, make sure to check out the vision behind DeSo.

Check out some of our top apps:

Decentralized TwitterDecentralized FundraisingDecentralized Social NetworksDecentralized LinkedInDecentralized MediumDecentralized InstagramDecentralized TikTokDecentralized OpenSea

DeSo was founded by Nader Al-Naji 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].

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.