Known by his alias Diamondhands, BitClout creator Nadar Al Naji has announced the launch of blockchain project DeSo (short for Decentralized Social), reports The Block.
Al Naji had previously founded the stablcoin project Basis. It shut down in 2018 due to regulatory difficulties, returning $133m to investors.
Despite this, almost all Basis investors and other market participants supported the new project from Al Naji, investing a total of $200 million. 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 co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
"I think for most of them, it was not just about making money, but also about creating a better platform for public discussion," shared the BitClout creator.
According to him, centralized platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram control users' conversations and profit from content that they do not create themselves. The new project aims to make social networks monetisable and accessible to all.
DeSo will have the functionality of traditional social networks, including profile creation and post writing, as well as new features: social tokens, tips and NFT. DESO's native asset will be required to use the new platform.
According to Al Naji, the demand and hence the price of the coin will depend on user activity:
"As with Ethereum, the more open the DeSo network and the more applications built on it by independent developers, the more transactions go through its blockchain and the more expensive DESO becomes."
He noted that the DESO token used to be called CLOUT (BitClout) but was renamed with the launch of the new blockchain.
"We created BitClout as an early prototype so that there was an opportunity to test it and leverage it on the DeSo blockchain before the public launch," Al Naji said.
He added that $200 million was raised through a token sale - more than 44,000 investors deposited bitcoins into the project's wallet to get DESO.
The tokensale lasted from November 2020 to 11 July 2021. The total offering was 10.8 million DESOs.
The new non-profit organisation DeSo Foundation will channel funds to develop the project's ecosystem, supporting developers, creators of NFT and other content.
As a reminder, in March, some members of the cryptocurrency community suspected BitClout, a marketplace of non-interchangeable tokens, as "Bitconnect 2.0" in a scam. Shortly thereafter, Radar Relay's lawyers sent a warning letter to Nadar Al Naji, threatening him with legal action.
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