The decentralized social media moment has arrived. To see Jack and Elon tweet out against the centralization of the world's information is a clear signal that a big change is coming, and we are well-positioned to capitalize.

On the flip side, there are other macro factors that are out of our control. The war in Ukraine, historical inflation, and a wider market correction are all factors that impact us. All of this being said, we’ve always believed in “being so good that they can’t ignore you”. This past quarter we stayed heads down and made major progress in key areas as a result.

Below are some of the highlights from the DeSo community, app ecosystem, and more during recent months.

Marketing & Community

We’re ramping up our marketing and community efforts at every level. We’ve activated paid ads which we will increase as we clean up our acquisition funnels on the website. We’re in the middle of a major website redesign that includes improving our copy and the user experience to make it easier for people to interact with our ecosystem. 

And most importantly, we’re investing heavily in shoring up our foundations with key hires and refinements to our internal processes. Expect to see more content marketing, social media campaigns, and PR pushes moving forward.

We’ve also continued to do on-chain events on DeSo apps like Entre and ChimeIn, including ‘monthly updates with Alex’, ‘DeSo Demo Days’, and ‘Developer Hangouts with Ty’. We believe it’s important to continue to keep as much activity on-chain as possible, and we will continue to push to move as many activities onto DeSo apps as we can. #dogfooding

Outside of DeSo, we are also making sure that we are bringing our message to new audiences. Our Twitter spaces have been successful with an average of 1,000+ people per event. This is telling as it shows that more and more people are looking for a solution to the centralization of the world's information.

As the impact of COVID has finally started to wane, we have also begun flexing a muscle we haven’t been able to use much over the past year, and that is in-person events. DeSo had presences at almost every major crypto event in Q1 including Hack Week Miami, SXSW, and BTC Miami. Not to mention our epic 1 year DeSo anniversary event in LA, where it was amazing to see so many of our internet friends in person for the first time. There was also a large online presence for the event, as well as a meetup the same night in India.

Our partnership with Major League Hacking is also off to a strong start. Ty recently led a how-to build an app on DeSo which lives on the MLH YouTube channel. We will continue to look for more web2 developer communities to establish and build partnerships with to help build out the DeSo ecosystem.

We are looking for content creators in the DeSo ecosystem to collaborate with. Please reach out to us on Discord in the growth strategies channel for more information or fill out this form.

App Ecosystem 

In early January, we announced the first cohort of the Octane fund + development grant recipients. In total, we allocated $10M to 16 venture-backed teams and offered development grants to 23 additional projects/developers ranging from $20K-$50K. 

Just a few months in, we are already starting to see some really exciting developments from the teams. Apps like Diamond, Supernovas, and NFTz all underwent major overhauls and launches. 

In parallel, we saw apps like Kaleido, DeSo Messenger, and Purple Creator begin to open up their Beta programs for users to begin trying out.

Outside of the Octane teams, we also saw some great updates from development grant teams such as Mousai, which is looking to position itself to take on Spotify, and Overclout, a new node with features like live streaming and stories. 

A recent exciting development has been Minted Tweets by ItsAditya, which has seen impressive levels of engagement since launch.

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To help our Octane teams continue to grow, we have begun implementing new programs to assist founders. This includes monthly video calls on Entre with all of the founders, 1:1 coaching calls with teams, advising from product guru Ed Moss, connections to investors/mentors, and quarterly check-in forms.

While our overall user engagement is below where we would like it to be, there’s no denying that our core user base is strong, and there are many positive leading indicators that could see the DAUs take off rapidly.

We also saw DeSo hit some impressive milestones this quarter such as over 1.5 Million wallets created on DeSo, over 65 Million transactions and creators earning ~$25 Million in the past year!

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Tech/Protocol 

There are a lot of big updates in the pipeline for the DeSo protocol. With our next hard fork, we will officially be one of THE most sophisticated blockchains in the entire Web3 ecosystem. We will offer every primitive a team could need including Creator Coins, NFTs, DAO coins, Social Profiles, On-chain messaging, etc.

There will also be a handful of features for the upcoming hard fork for DAO coins. One of the new features we’re most excited about is DAO Coin limit orders. DAO Coin limit orders will allow you to buy and sell DAO coins for other DAO coins or DESO. Similar to being able to swap crypto for crypto on Coinbase but for DAO coins.

All orders are stored ON-CHAIN so anybody could build a DAO coin exchange/swap if they would like. DAODAO is building out a service called DAO swap that will allow users to exchange DAO coins on their platform.

Spending limits on derived keys are also complete and will go out with the hard fork. Spending limits on derived keys allow users to authorize derived keys with a specific permission set. The user controls how much DESO the derived key can spend on their behalf and which transactions the derived key can perform on their behalf.

Spending limits on derived keys provide more granular permissions on Creator Coins, DAO coins, and NFTs. Spending limits on derived keys allows for a more trustless approach to granting access to apps built on DESO.

Hypersync is also almost done with the merge this weekend and will go live with the next hard fork.

We’ve launched the beta version of our developer hub. The developer hub is designed to help web2 developers build on DeSo. Expect to see more developer-focused content on our website and on YouTube channels. This will help web2 developers learn how to build in web3.

DAODAO

We’re extremely excited about the upcoming launch of DAODAO. We believe it will fill a big gap in the DAO tooling ecosystem.

DAODAO allows anyone to raise money from anyone in the world. DAODAO is going to bring DAOs to the mainstream and be the next major crypto platform. Completely decentralized from the start, governed by its users as a DAO itself. You can bring your next big idea to life as easily as creating your own social media account.

The DAODAO community is growing with over 4,700 Discord members and 3,200 Twitter followers. Despite the platform not even being live yet, there have been 2,223 DAODAO NFTs sold and over 41,010 of DESO raised (~$1,718,319).

Macro Trends

Decentralized social is having a moment that will only get bigger with time. What Bitcoin did for decentralized finance, DeSo will do for decentralized social media. You could say that DeSo is on its way to having its very own Bitcoin moment.

While there are other protocols building in the space (which we take as a positive signal) , DeSo is light years ahead when it comes to a working decentralized social media blockchain with the necessary storage capabilities + social primitives.

Both Elon and Jack have spoken out against the current state of centralized social media. This is telling as they have spent their entire careers having an insider's view of how big tech operates. Current social media platforms grow bolder by the day as they completely ignore freedom of speech principles in plain sight, and also grossly undercompensate their creators. 

We’re in the early stages of a decentralized social media revolution that will only ramp up in the coming months and years.

While we will continue to make a big PR push, we’re starting to see DeSo show up organically in crypto publications as well. Cointelegraph just recently did a piece about how decentralized social media could be the next big thing. The founder and CEO of Entre, Michael Marra, was quoted in the article.

Additionally, we were on the front page of The Block Crypto for about a week. We expect to see more organic content about DeSo in the coming months.

To conclude, despite much of the most important developments happening behind the scenes, this past quarter was massive for DeSo. If Q1 was the quarter of quiet building, then you can expect Q2 to be the quarter of shipping. Get ready, DeSo summer is almost here and it’s going to be bigger than any of us could have imagined.