In 1776, our Founding Fathers declared their independence from centralized forces and started a revolution... Today I'm thrilled to announce that DeSo's Revolution Proof of Stake will launch the week of July 4th! The first app to be built on Revolution will be our next breakthrough SocialFi app, called Focus. And I'm thrilled to announce that Focus now has an official launch date of July 30th.
Revolution PoS is years in the making, and it marks the first time a truly decentralized blockchain can power a Twitter-scale social network. A few years ago, few even believed this was possible. In just a few weeks we will *show* the world that it's possible, with a launch unlike anything that the crypto world has yet seen. If you ever used BitClout, you know what's possible with DeSo, but that was only the beginning...
Revolution makes it possible to build a truly competitive SocialFi app on fully decentralized rails for the first time thanks to the following breakthroughs:
1. Twitter-scale apps at 500 posts per second, and thousands of DeFi transactions per second.
2. <1/10,00th of a cent per post compared to ~$1 on Solana and $100 on Ethereum.
2. 1 second confirmation times.
3. Data replicated across over a thousand permission-less validators, secured via end-to-end encryption where needed.
4. 20% staking APY paid to those who secure the network by staking their DESO.
5. State-of-the-art burn-maximizing fees that minimize congestion while maximizing value for coin-holders.
6. State-of-the art Fast HotStuff consensus, and the first of its kind in production as far as we know.
Put simply, Revolution will expand the benefits of blockchains like Bitcoin from simple storage-light applications like DeFi to apps that require heavy content needs like social apps, marketplaces, and much more. In that sense, Revolution can expand the market for crypto apps from simple send/receive/trade use-cases to novel SocialFi experiences we haven't seen before.
It starts with the launch of Focus. Focus leverages every edge Revolution provides while improving significantly on both the virality and retention of BitClout, the first SocialFi app we launched in 2021. Focus does so many novel crypto-social things that it's hard to describe until you use it for the first time. That said, Focus can be considered a spiritual successor to BitClout. It ties together crypto and social in new and interesting ways for the first time, with several viral hooks that could permanently change the existing airdrop meta. Perhaps most interestingly, though, we think Focus will take meme coins to a whole new level, and remember it's built by the people who originally kicked off the craze way back in 2021...
For me personally, the launch of Revolution and Focus this summer will mark the realization of *years* of effort. It took *so much* thoughtful building for us to be able to do what we're doing with Focus and Revolution. But I believe the more you invest in your advantages and compound them, the more impossible it will be for anyone to catch you when things hit.
ChatGPT seemed like a toy until, almost overnight, it became good enough to replace Google for many use cases. I believe that Decentralized Social and SocialFi will follow a similar path. The user experiences of DeSo apps will seem "toy-like" compared to traditional platforms until a threshold of usability is reached, at which point the right viral hook and the right SocialFi unlock will lead to a mass exodus from the existing social platforms. I believe all of the innovations that have gone into Revolution and Focus put us closer to that threshold than anything in the past, and by a significant margin. More importantly, though, the launch of Revolution creates a platform where *anyone* can now build crypto apps that cross the usability threshold needed to go truly mainstream.
If you believe in a future where content and social media is decentralized, instead of being owned and controlled by a handful of megacorporations, then this is it. We believe the next hit consumer app will be built on a truly open platform, and that's what we'll keep working on tirelessly with DeSo and Focus.