Details

Last Funding Type

Seed

Last Funding Money Raised

$200M

Industries

Blockchain,Cryptocurrency

Founded date

May 1, 2019

Operating Status

Active

Legal Name

Deso Foundation

DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, that recently listed on Coinbase, has accumulated over 1.5 million accounts, and just crossed over $1B in volume transacted on-chain. DeSo is backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and many others.

Our mission is to decentralize social media the same way Bitcoin and Ethereum are decentralizing the financial system.

As a layer-1 blockchain, DeSo can be compared to other blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, etc... However, DeSo has several major advantages over these platforms, the largest being that it is designed to power storage-heavy applications (like social applications and marketplaces). To put it in perspective, storing just a 200-character "Tweet" on Ethereum costs ~$80, and costs ~$0.25-$1.00+ on Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, and virtually all other smart contract chains. In contrast, it costs 1/1,000th of a penny on DeSo, which is why breakthrough apps like Diamond, DAODAO, Pearl, OpenProsper, NFTz, and Entre, now possible exclusively on DeSo.

Today, social media is even more centralized than the financial industry was prior to the creation of Bitcoin. A handful of private entities effectively control public discourse, and earn monopoly profits off of content that they don't even create. Society’s answer to financial centralization was not to put Warren Buffett in charge of money, it was to use technology, namely Bitcoin, so we could have nobody in charge.

We believe the same type of technology will cause this conclusion to ultimately play out in social. DeSo’s advantages make it capable of breaking this status quo for the first time, and bringing competition and innovation back to social in much the same way Bitcoin and Ethereum have done for our financial system. Moreover, if DeSo succeeds, we will no longer need individual "dictators" to set a homogenous moderation policy for hundreds of millions of people.