What is Decentralized Social (DeSo)? 

A layer-1 blockchain for decentralizing social networks, DeSo – short for ‘decentralized social’ is described as a pioneering blockchain that is custom-built from the ground up in order to power and scale social applications. DeSo stores all of its data on a public blockchain and supports censorship-resistant, end-to-end encrypted group chats.

To date, there are over 100 projects operating nodes and building apps on DeSo. DeSo was created by the creator of BitClout, Nader Al-Naji. He was also responsible for Basis – a stablecoin project that was shut down in 2018 due to regulatory challenges. All investor funds were returned. 

DeSo reportedly raised around $200M in funding and has the backing of some high-profile investors in the crypto space including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia, Social Capital, Pantera Capital, among others.

DeSo aims to make social media accessible and monetizable by anyone unlike centralized social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The blockchain supports social media features that users are already accustomed to such as creating profiles and posts and also offers blockchain-native features e.g. social tokens, tipping, and NFTs. These are the features that could make it possible for creators to monetize. 

$DESO is the ecosystem’s native token which can be utilised for creating profiles, posts, purchasing social tokens or NFTs, etc. 

Getting started on DeSo is simple. You can visit https://www.deso.com/ to claim your username by signing up. 

If you have an account already, you can simply connect with your web3 wallet.

Otherwise continue to register your wallet address by connecting to a web3 wallet of choice. Here we used MetaMask to claim our username.

Once your wallet is connected, you can set your username etc. 

You’ll then be able to explore the DApps built on the DeSo blockchain. 

In order to explore these DApps you first need to get some $DESO tokens which are used for utility on the different apps and for transaction fees. 

You can purchase $DESO on Coinbase or Blockchain.com or other marketplaces including Diamond which is native to the DESO blockchain. Here we decided to try buying DESO using Blockchain.com and also using Diamond. 

Buying on Blockchain.com was pretty simple. All we had to do was fund the wallet which we did using Bitcoin Cash. We then sold the BCH for USD since we could only purchase $DESO using USD.

Once we had the USD, we then swapped it for $DESO. Next, it was time to try to also buy more $DESO using Diamond. 

We had to connect to the Diamond app.

You get a NFT certificate upon doing so. 

You can buy $DESO with crypto or fiat. Here we decided to buy with Bitcoin (BTC) so we decided to deposit some BTC into the Diamond app wallet. 

Once the BTC got credited we proceeded to swap it for $DESO.

You can track your transaction history on Open Prosper which is the analytics platform built on the DESO blockchain.

What Makes DeSo Unique?

• DeSo offers lower fees for onchain data storage.

 

• DeSo is a developer-friendly blockchain ecosystem, allowing developers to create web3 apps conveniently using programming languages like Javascript or Python.
• It claims to be the leading blockchain capable of powering storage-heavy applications such as social applications which tend to generate a lot of data. Most existing blockchains aren’t capable of indexing and storing data effectively. 
• DeSo is an open-source project 

What’s Next for Decentralized Social (DeSo)?

According to their roadmap, they have a lot in the works. 

If you’re interested in learning more about other web3 social media platforms such as Publish0x, Read Cash, Mastodon, Ecency, Crbn, and more, please check out the review.