Better known by the pseudonym Diamondhands, BitClout’s creator Nadar Al-Nadji announced the launch of the blockchain project DeSo (short for Decentralized Social), according to The Block.
Earlier Al-Nadji founded the stablecoin project Basis. It shut down in 2018 due to regulatory difficulties, returning $133m to investors.
Nevertheless, almost all Basis investors and other market participants supported the new project from Al-Nadji, investing a total of $200m in it. Among them: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Sequoia, Social Capital, TQ Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Polychain Capital, Pantera Capital, Arrington Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Distributed Global, Blockchain.com Ventures, Hack Ventures and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian.
“I think for most of them it was not only about making money, but also about creating a better platform for public discourse,” said the BitClout creator.
According to him, centralized platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram control conversations and profit from content they do not create themselves. The new project aims to monetise social networks and make them accessible to all.
DeSo will offer the functionality of traditional social networks, including profiles and posting, as well as new features: social tokens, tips and NFT. To use the new platform, a native asset DESO will be required.
According to Al-Nadji, demand and, accordingly, the coin’s price will depend on user activity:
“Like Ethereum, the more open the DeSo network is and the more applications built on it by independent developers, the more transactions pass through its blockchain and the more expensive DESO becomes.”
He noted that the DESO token was previously named CLOUT (BitClout) but was renamed with the launch of the new blockchain.
“We created BitClout as an early prototype to enable testing it and deploying it on the DeSo blockchain before the public launch,” said Al-Nadji.
He added that the $200m was raised via a token sale — more than 44,000 investors deposited bitcoins into the project’s wallet to obtain DESO.
The token sale ran from November 2020 to 11 July 2021. The total offering was 10.8 million DESO.
The DeSo Foundation, a new nonprofit, will direct funds toward developing the project’s ecosystem, supporting developers, NFT creators and other content.
In March, some members of the crypto community suspected a scam of the BitClout NFT marketplace, calling it “Bitconnect 2.0”. Shortly after, Radar Relay lawyers sent a warning letter to Nadar Al-Nadji, threatening him with litigation.
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