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Altcoin Traders Get a New Darling as Bitclout Creator Launches DeSo

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Fredrik Vold

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Fredrik Vold

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Last updated:

October 23, 2023

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After the creator of a controversial decentralized social media protocol, Bitclout, Nader Al-Naji, announced his new project, Decentralized Social (DeSo), its native token, DESO, received a warm welcome in the market today, with traders bidding its price up by nearly a third in the past 24 hours.

“DeSo, short for “decentralized social,” is the first and only blockchain custom-built from the ground up to power and scale a new category of decentralized social applications to hundreds of millions of users,” the team behind the project said, adding that BitClout, a social app built on the DeSo blockchain, was created “as an early prototype.”

At 13:35 UTC, DESO (previously CLOUT), ranked 96th by market capitalization, traded at USD 96, up by 21% over the past 24 hours. The strong gains positioned the token as today’s best performer among the 100 most valuable cryptoassets, far ahead of the next coins on the list. However, its daily trading volume is less than USD 2m and is the lowest among the top 100 coins today.

30-day price chart of DESO (formerly CLOUT). Source: Coingecko.com

The project’s creator, formerly known only by his pseudonym Diamondhands, is a former Google engineer who also founded the stablecoin start-up Basis, which shut its doors in 2018.

Writing on Twitter on Tuesday, Al-Naji said that the re-launch of the decentralized social network has taken “over two years of all-consuming research and development,” and that he believes it can “fundamentally change social media for the better.”

It also appears that the founder himself is not the only one who believes in the rebranded project, given that the associated DESO has already gotten a flying start through a private token sale worth over USD 200m to high-profile investors. Among these are Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Social Capital, TQ Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Blockchain.com, and many other well-known names in the crypto-focused venture capital space.

“The fact that DeSo can store and index social media data at scale is a major breakthrough for the blockchain space, and we believe it will enable a whole new era of disruptive decentralized applications,” Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital, was quoted as saying.

So far, there are more than 140 projects that have been built or are in the process of being built on the DeSo blockchain, according to the tracking site BitHunt. Among them is everything from NFT marketplaces, to social token exchanges, and Clubhouse-like social platforms.

Judging from the reactions of community members on Twitter, the newly renamed token is already being noticed by traders:

Anyone else out there paying new attention to this $DeSo (Decentralized Social) token now?

$1B cap, $100 per. Not small, but still pretty small for crypto. 100x potential imho. @a16z, @chamath, @sequoia and others behind it … formerly known as BitClout.
— Mark Jeffrey (@markjeffrey) September 22, 2021

However, not everyone is enthusiastic about the prospects an investment in DESO could bring, with one popular community member sharing screenshots of several falling key metrics on the Decentralized Social blockchain.