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Decentralized Social is a layer-1 blockchain designed to decentralize social media by shifting ownership from platforms to users. Founded by Nader Al-Naji, it enables creators to monetize content through native crypto tools while developers build in a gasless environment. The network plans to switch to Proof of Stake consensus to achieve high throughput and storage scalability.
DeSo is a layer-1 blockchain constructed from scratch to decentralize social media for billions of users. The project aims to foster an internet that is user-owned, creator-led, and accessible to millions of developers globally. Currently, a small number of big-tech firms control the majority of online information. DeSo shifts ownership from platforms to users, allowing individuals to own their identity, profile, content, and social graph in a censorship-resistant manner.
Creators can monetize their work using crypto-native tools such as Social Tokens, Social DAOs, Social NFTs, and Social Tipping, enabling them to earn a living from their passions. Developers operate in a transparent, permissionless, and gasless environment where all data is on-chain, ensuring high composability and accessibility. The chain is designed to handle storage-heavy or infinite-state applications, facilitating non-financial web3 apps that were previously unfeasible.
Just as Bitcoin and Ethereum decentralized finance, DeSo seeks to do the same for social interactions. The team states that prioritizing users, creators, and developers over corporations will improve the world. Notable applications built on the network include:
Nader Al-Naji established DeSo in January 2019. A Princeton University graduate, he previously served as a software engineer for the D. E. Shaw Group and later joined Google, contributing to the Google Search and Google Ads teams. Prior to launching DeSo, Al-Naji secured more than $133M in 2017 to create Basis, an algorithmic stablecoin.
The non-profit DeSo Foundation backs the DeSo blockchain with a mission to promote social media decentralization. Al-Naji currently serves as the foundation's board chairman, overseeing a $200 million treasury dedicated to this goal. In October 2021, the foundation revealed the Octane Fund, a $50 million initiative designed to support developers.
The DeSo blockchain goes beyond standard social functions like profile and post creation by integrating native features such as social tokens (creator coins), tipping, and NFTs. These tools open up new avenues for money-enabled products, ranging from influencer stock markets to social NFT experiences, allowing creators on DeSo-powered apps to better monetize their work and engage with their audience.
By treating social data as a public utility, DeSo prevents creators from being locked into a few centralized platforms. All content resides on a decentralized ledger, making it instantly accessible to a growing network of independent third-party apps, similar to how DeFi applications operate on the Ethereum blockchain.
DeSo’s primary advantage is that it is not a general-purpose blockchain. It focuses on a specific set of social-oriented features implemented on bare metal, utilizing custom indexes that every node constructs during consensus while syncing with peers. This design enables storage scalability that general-purpose blockchains cannot match. For example, storing 1 GB of data on-chain costs as little as 1 DeSo, whereas achieving comparable capacity on existing smart contract infrastructures would cost millions ($1,000,000+) of dollars. The team has also announced a planned switch to Proof of Stake consensus by the end of year 2022, which is expected to deliver throughput of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second due to its strictly defined transaction schema.
Nader Al-Naji
Piotr Nojszewski
Ed M.
Steven Zeller