Today we are excited to announce that the DeSo Foundation is partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) as their official Web3 sponsor for the 2022 Hackathon League season and Local Hack Day events. 

In order to fully appreciate the magnitude of this partnership, it is important to understand the current state of Web3 development. Despite Web3/crypto being plastered all over social media and press releases, the reality is that the vast majority of developers around the world have still never worked with the technology.

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Take for instance this chart below which shows the % of stack overflow questions per month based on different programming languages. The 2 most popular Web3 languages: Rust and Solidity still only make up less than 0.5% of all stack overflow questions combined.

While these other layer 1 blockchains have introduced incredible innovation in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, their programming paradigms have a steep learning curve for many new developers entering the space.

It was from spending years of learning and building on these other blockchains ourselves that the DeSo Foundation team realized that there needed to be a better way to approach development for the decentralized social space.

Enter Smart Services

Last week we published a post titled Introducing Smart Services: Bringing Millions of Web2 Developers Into Web3 by Re-Imagining Smart Contracts. The post described a new programming paradigm that the DeSo Foundation is bringing to Web3.

Essentially, all a smart service refers to is a simple centralized web service that conforms to a certain set of basic constraints. These constraints allow for discoverability and interoperability between smart services regardless of which underlying blockchains they're tapping into. Furthermore, they allow developers to leverage the programming languages they are already familiar with (Javascript, Python, etc.) as well as existing Web2 APIs.

While smart services do trade off some decentralization and censorship resistance, we believe that this trade off makes sense given the enhanced developer accessibility, cross-chain interoperability, composability, and scalability.
It’s also important to note that content and assets still live on the DeSo blockchain, which we believe are the most important aspects of the entire ecosystem to always keep on-chain and decentralized.

All of this adds up to an opportunity for any developer in the world to easily leverage our blockchain to build truly decentralized social media apps, aka true Web3 development.

Finding the Next Great Social Media Founder

Today the DeSo ecosystem is ripe for the next viral social media application to be built, with over 200+ apps already live on the blockchain, 60M+ confirmed transactions, and an additional $50M being poured into teams through the Octane Fund. 

Despite all of this great momentum, we recognize that there is still a long way to go. Specifically, we haven’t seen a truly viral app on DeSo that has attracted millions of users yet. Finding this app won’t be easy. The incumbents are some of the most well-capitalized and successful businesses in history. However, we feel that the time is now for a new wave of social media apps to come about.

That brought us to an important question, which was “where do we find the next social media founders?” While we believe that great founders/teams may come from anywhere in the world, there was one demographic in particular that was of particular interest: college students.

Whether it was Mark Zuckerberg famously founding Facebook from his dorm room or Evan Spiegel launching the first version of Snapchat (“Picaboo”) with his Stanford classmates, it is clear that college students have a strong track record of launching successful social media apps.

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That is why we are so excited to partner with Major League Hacking which is one of the largest early career developer communities in the entire world. With over 120,000+ students participating across hundreds of weekend-long hackathon competitions we felt that they were the perfect partner to help introduce the DeSo protocol to more developers.

With smart services, these students will be able to build and launch DeSo apps in just a weekend. In turn, tens of thousands of new developers that have never gotten exposure to Web3 development will be able to get their feet wet with what is likely one of the defining technological shifts of their lifetime.

We can’t wait to see what all of the 2022 Hackathon season and Local Hack Day participants build this year. And who knows…maybe some of them might even build the next big social media app!