Founders Q&A: Rasmus and Mikaela of Supernovas

Want to experience Decentralized Social?

Our founder's spotlight series continues with Supernovas.

What is Supernovas?

Supernovas – Social NFT Marketplace – DeSo Blockchain

‍
The NFT social network built on top of DeSo.

Founders of Supernovas, Mikaela and Rasmus, explain what Supernovas is, their DAO's upcoming launch, and why they chose to build on DeSo.

What's your background?

We (Mikaela and Rasmus) are new to building in web3, but are not new to crypto.

Rasmus' Background: Built and launched his first startup, Feddy, one of Finland's first on-demand delivery services, in 2015. He then joined the Uber operations team in 2016 and was part of the re-launch in Finland in 2018.

Shortly after that, he joined Rocket Internet to lead startup Franksmile in 2019 as a Senior Expansion Manager and then joined IQM Quantum Computers as the Head of Business Development in 2020.

Mikaela’s background: Worked in talent acquisition for Goldman Sachs, supporting the build-out of product, marketing, and tech teams for the Apple Card from 2017 to 2020 before moving to Finland in 2020.

Mikaela also did growth hacking for Icebreaker.vc in Helsinki before moving to Truly Agency as a Growth Hacking Lead from 2020 to 2021.

In addition, worked as a Social Media Content & Community Manager for Girls Who Travel (now named Her Adventures) from 2018 to 2021, scaling the community from 0-80,000+.

What are you building on DeSo?

Supernovas is like Twitter, except there is not one person owning and controlling your social graph, community, assets, monetization, and data – you are, as it should be.

Supernovas also take decentralization and ownership a step further in becoming Supernovas DAO.

‍

Becoming a DAO ensures that the Supernovas community members who create value for Supernovas can own the platform they are creating value for and enjoy capturing the financial and governance rewards that come with ownership.

The combination of modern and intuitive UX with low-hurdle onboarding, gasless minting, and the lowest possible transaction fees make Supernovas a platform in which anyone can become a successful NFT creator or collector.

The combination of multiple chains – Ethereum, Solana, and DeSo – under one decentralized, community-owned platform – unites these previously blockchain-native NFT communities socially in the same place where NFT commerce happens for the first time.

Supernovas DAO allows Supernovas to stay true to our core value of decentralization while rewarding our community for value-adding activity, NFT minting and collecting, and trust created through democratic tokenomics with attractive incentives.

Why did you choose DeSo?

Supernovas – Social NFT Marketplace – Powered by DeSo

DeSo was the only choice that allowed us to build what we wanted in terms of decentralized social media features in a scalable way. DeSo enables the supercharging of our social features and NFT communities within Supernovas while keeping everything on-chain, maintaining transparency, and allowing us to scale up to a billion users.

By building on DeSo, Supernovas NFT creators and collectors can enjoy community, monetization, and ownership like never before.

Supernovas creators have the following features:

Their own creator coin people can buy or sell
Weekly rewards earned by active users (minting/selling an NFT, buying an NFT, or referring another active user)
Transportability and ownership of their social graph
Portability of their audience from app to app
Ability to earn 5% of every referred contribution to Supernovas DAO
Decentralized direct messages and soon group messages
Post-to-earn through social tips

This is unprecedented, as this is not currently possible on NFT marketplaces where user accounts consist of public keys. Decentralization is at the epicenter of Supernovas’ values.

What do you like about building on DeSo?

‍

daodao NFT – Built on top of DeSo Blockchain

Aside from the fantastic features DeSo enables on Supernovas, DeSo is relatively easy to build on, and they genuinely care about the developers building on their protocol. Not having to deal with smart contracts has enabled us to iterate rapidly and try new things that would have been too cumbersome, expensive, or impossible, to build on other chains.

DeSo has an incredible team and a grand vision that we really align with.

What are some use cases for your app?

Supernovas users now can:

Mint virtually gas-free NFTs in 1 click, with decentralized file storage on Arweave, on DeSo, Ethereum (via layer-2 Immutable X), or (soon) Solana blockchains
NFTs can be up to 200mb, and can be image, video, 3d, or audio content types
Earn weekly rewards for being active on Supernovas and minting/selling NFTs, buying NFTs, and more
Browse Supernovas Discovery to discover up-and-coming creators, featured works, new and trending NFTs, explore different categories of NFTs, and more
Have their own creator coin that anyone can buy or sell, in which creators earn a percentage of each investment
Interact with their community directly through decentralized social features, like posts, comments, likes, social tips, direct messages, social feeds, and more
Participate in the Supernovas Referral Program and earn 200% of all transaction fees their referral brings in through being active on Supernovas

What’s coming next for Supernovas?

1-click collection minting for all chains (e.g. DeSo, ETH, SOL), in which creators can bulk-mint an NFT collection at once
DAO creation, DAO profiles, DAO discovery, and DAO management features to serve communities of all kinds
Recommendations, personalized feeds, and enhanced discovery
Decentralized group chats

Why is building out decentralized social media important?

Supernovas data on OpenProsper – Powered by DeSo Blockchain

We could probably go on about this for ages.

However, building out decentralized social media is crucial because we believe in a decentralized future. Decentralized social allows us to innovate completely new kinds of social interactions and experiences that are made possible by open data and money-native features, which is really exciting to us.

Unfortunately, over time, it has become normalized to accept giving away all of our data, including our social graphs and content, for the opportunity to interact online with our networks.

We've traded our privacy away for the human need to feel connected, but we've become more disconnected.

There are some critical problems with centralized social media today:

1) If a centralized social platform doesn't like what you say or post, they can take down your entire network, and there's nothing you can do about it as it does not belong to you.

2) If a centralized social media network's centralized server goes down, so does your profile. Nothing is permanent or guaranteed.

3) When you join a new social media platform, the community you've built does not come along with you. Instead, you have to build your network and profile entirely from scratch.

4) You are the product of the social media platform, not the customer. Centralized social media platforms use your social graph to help themselves monetize. Users never see a dime of their network's value on a centralized social platform.

5) Your social graph data is not only sold to advertisers to sell us products we might like but also has the power to use that same data to influence one's thinking and perspective across social and political spheres.

On Supernovas, you finally own your social graph, and if you're an active user, you become an owner of the platform, too, and can enjoy the benefits of the value you create.

Supernovas social links

Website: https://supernovas.app

DAODAO

https://daodao.io/d/supernovas

Diamondapp

https://diamondapp.com/u/maensivu

https://diamondapp.com/u/fransarthur

https://diamondapp.com/u/supernovas

Our Investor Memorandum: https://investors.supernovas.app/investor-memorandum

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/supernovasdao,

https://twitter.com/nftqueenpin

https://twitter.com/frans__arthur

Discord:

https://discord.gg/UwaAz2nnQk

‍

Our founder's spotlight series continues with Supernovas.

‍

What is Supernovas?

‍
The NFT social network built on top of DeSo. Founders of Supernovas, Mikaela and Rasmus, explain what Supernovas is, about their DAO's upcoming launch, and why they chose to build on DeSo.

What's your background?

We (Mikaela and Rasmus) are new to building in web3, but are not new to crypto.

Rasmus’ background: Built and launched his first startup, Feddy, one of Finland's first on-demand delivery services, in 2015. He then joined the Uber operations team in 2016 and was part of the re-launch in Finland in 2018.

Shortly after that, he joined Rocket Internet to lead startup Franksmile in 2019 as a Senior Expansion Manager and then joined IQM Quantum Computers as the Head of Business Development in 2020.

Mikaela’s background: Worked in talent acquisition for Goldman Sachs, supporting the build-out of product, marketing, and tech teams for the Apple Card from 2017 to 2020 before moving to Finland in 2020.

Mikaela also did growth hacking for Icebreaker.vc in Helsinki before moving to Truly Agency as a Growth Hacking Lead from 2020 to 2021.

In addition, worked as a Social Media Content & Community Manager for Girls Who Travel (now named Her Adventures) from 2018 to 2021, scaling the community from 0-80,000+.

What Are You Building on DeSo?

Supernovas is like Twitter, except there is not one person owning and controlling your social graph, community, assets, monetization, and data – you are, as it should be.

Supernovas also take decentralization and ownership a step further in becoming Supernovas DAO.

‍

Becoming a DAO ensures that the Supernovas community members who create value for Supernovas can own the platform they are creating value for and enjoy capturing the financial and governance rewards that come with ownership.

The combination of modern and intuitive UX with low-hurdle onboarding, gasless minting, and the lowest possible transaction fees make Supernovas a platform in which anyone can become a successful NFT creator or collector.

The combination of multiple chains – Ethereum, Solana, and DeSo – under one decentralized, community-owned platform – unites these previously blockchain-native NFT communities socially in the same place where NFT commerce happens for the first time.

Supernovas DAO allows Supernovas to stay true to our core value of decentralization while rewarding our community for value-adding activity, NFT minting and collecting, and trust created through democratic tokenomics with attractive incentives.

Why did you choose DeSo?

DeSo was the only choice that allows us to build what we want in terms of decentralized social media features in a scalable way. DeSo enables the supercharging of our social features and NFT communities within Supernovas while keeping everything on-chain, maintaining transparency, and giving us the capacity to scale up to a billion users.

By building on DeSo, Supernovas NFT creators and collectors can enjoy community, monetization, and ownership like never before.

Supernovas creators have the following features:

Their own creator coin people can buy or sell
Weekly rewards earned by active users (minting/selling an NFT, buying an NFT, or referring another active user)
Transportability and ownership of their social graph
Portability of their audience from app to app
Ability to earn 5% of every referred contribution to Supernovas DAO
Decentralized direct messages and soon group messages
Post-to-earn through social tips

This is unprecedented, as this is not currently possible on NFT marketplaces where user accounts consist of public keys. Decentralization is at the epicenter of Supernovas’ values.

What do you like about building on DeSo?

‍

Aside from the fantastic features DeSo enables on Supernovas, DeSo is relatively easy to build on, and they genuinely care about the developers building on their protocol. Not having to deal with smart contracts has enabled us to iterate rapidly and try new things that would have been too cumbersome, expensive, or impossible, to build on other chains.

DeSo has an incredible team and a grand vision that we really align with.

What are some use cases for your app?

Supernovas users now can:

Mint virtually gas-free NFT’s in 1 click, with decentralized file storage on Arweave, on DeSo, Ethereum (via layer-2 Immutable X), or (soon) Solana blockchains

NFT’s can be up to 200mb, and can be image, video, 3d, or audio content types

Earn weekly rewards for being active on Supernovas and minting/selling NFT’s, buying NFT’s, and more
Browse Supernovas Discovery to discover up-and-coming creators, featured works, new and trending NFT’s, explore different categories of NFT’s, and more
Have their own creator coin that anyone can buy or sell, in which creators earn a percentage of each investment
Interact with their community directly through decentralized social features, like posts, comments, likes, social tips, direct messages, social feeds, and more
Participate in the Supernovas Referral Program and earn 200% of all transaction fees their referral brings in through being active on Supernovas

What’s coming next for Supernovas?

1-click collection minting for all chains (e.g. DeSo, ETH, SOL), in which creators can bulk-mint an NFT collection at once
DAO creation, DAO profiles, DAO discovery, and DAO management features to serve communities of all kinds
Recommendations, personalized feeds, and enhanced discovery
Decentralized group chats

Why is building out decentralized social media important?

We could probably go on about this for ages.

However, building out decentralized social media is crucial because we believe in a decentralized future. Decentralized social allows us to innovate completely new kinds of social interactions and experiences that are made possible by open data and money-native features, which is really exciting to us.

Unfortunately, over time, it has become normalized to accept giving away all of our data, including our social graphs and content, for the opportunity to interact online with our networks.

We've traded our privacy away for the human need to feel connected, but we've become more disconnected.

There are some critical problems with centralized social media today:

1) If a centralized social platform doesn't like what you say or post, they can take down your entire network, and there's nothing you can do about it as it does not belong to you.

2) If a centralized social media network's centralized server goes down, so does your profile. Nothing is permanent or guaranteed.

3) When you join a new social media platform, the community you've built does not come along with you. You have to start building your network and profile entirely from scratch.

4) You are the product of the social media platform, not the customer. Centralized social media platforms use your social graph to help themselves monetize. Users never see a dime of their network's value on a centralized social platform.

5) Your social graph data is not only sold to advertisers to sell us products we might like but also has the power to use that same data to influence one's thinking and perspective across social and political spheres.

On Supernovas, you finally own your social graph, and if you're an active user, you become an owner of the platform, too, and can enjoy the benefits of the value you create.