Social media on the blockchain could be ‘absolutely huge’

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried thinks that making use of blockchain expertise to social media could possibly be an enormous alternative. 

Talking at Breakpoint, in Lisbon, the crypto billionaire stated, “I feel social media on the blockchain — I proceed to assume this could possibly be completely big. I feel it solves a number of current ache factors, that are actually coming to the forefront of society proper now.”

Bankman-Fried added that this might require a technique to change messages in a safe and personal means — one which could possibly be accessible to a number of user-interfaces. He stated this protocol would must be composable and cross-platform.

As an enormous Solana-backer, it’s no shock that he pointed to Solana to deal with this goal. He claimed that Solana would have the ability to deal with such a process, since it will possibly course of a big quantity of transactions (at the moment handling round 2,300 transactions per second). 

Bankman-Fried additionally mentioned how DeFi may scale extra quickly, particularly by integrating with pre-existing platforms — similar to social media platforms.

“One potential technique to completely supercharge DeFi adoption is to first construct an important product however then mix it with an already current huge userbase. And plenty of of those userbases are order of magnitude greater than all of DeFi to date and also you discuss concerning the adoption to date that we have seen within the trade however that may simply pale compared to what a single gigantic platform can convey ahead,” he stated.

He added that he was excited to see whether or not it is maps, current social media platforms, fintech platforms or pure progress that may do that and assist scale DeFi to lots of of thousands and thousands of customers, “as a result of that is the place all of the upside is.”

How blockchain can reinvent social media

Blockchain expertise could possibly be used inside social media in some ways. It could possibly be used to make sure that all content material on the community is uncensorable by storage on a blockchain. Or it could possibly be used to tokenize varied components, similar to rewarding customers for creating good content material.

There are already some initiatives attempting to attain this aim. Hive is one blockchain platform that helps a number of social media running a blog platforms. DeFi lending platform Aave is working on a protocol for decentralized social media. Social community Gab additionally has plans to undertake blockchain expertise. Plus, Twitter is exploring the way it may construct its personal protocol, which Twitter would then undertake — a challenge referred to as BlueSky.

Prolific crypto challenge founder Dan Larimer — who constructed BitShares, Steemit (which later successfully turned Hive) and EOS — can be constructing a brand new protocol for social media, known as Clarion. Though in contrast to his earlier initiatives, it seemingly will not have a blockchain or a token.

Reddit can be experimenting with blockchain expertise. It has a few tokens for 2 of its subReddits — r/Cryptocurrency and r/Fortnite — though they’re nonetheless working on testnets for now. According to a Reddit engineer known as Rahul, the social community plans to maintain experimenting with this expertise in order that when it is scalable, it will possibly exchange karma with tokens. This might convey tokenization to all of Reddit’s 500 million month-to-month customers.

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