Although social media could be one of the big, breakthrough use cases for blockchain-based apps in the future, we may still be a long way from a decentralized service that can compete with Facebook and Twitter on scale. However, a new investment fund launched by Polygon and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian could assist accelerate the process.
Polygon, the layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six VC firm have promised $200 million to the creation of decentralized social media apps on Polygon’s network.
The fund is intended to foster projects that harken back to the “early Web’s open-source values,” according to a Polygon post. “As one Facebook engineer famously observed, the brightest minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” the post claims, implying that today’s social media behemoths have veered from that viewpoint.
This is Ohanian’s second Web3 social media-focused fund to be unveiled since the beginning of November. He announced a $100 million fund last month in collaboration with Solana, a leading blockchain network.
Finally, both funds appear to have similar goals in supporting decentralized social media ventures that challenge incumbent platforms’ supremacy. The $200 million Polygon fund will also focus on blockchain-driven games, according to Ohanian.
We’re still early in the Web3 era, and the most obvious prospects are in gaming and social media “In a statement, Ohanian added. “With an emphasis on gaming properties and social media platforms built on Polygon’s scalable infrastructure, this endeavor will do just that.”
Ohanian co-founded Reddit in 2005 and resigned in 2010, but he returned as executive chairman from 2014 to 2020 before quitting last year. This week, Reddit announced its plans to go public, and the popular online community is also extending its Ethereum-based crypto rewards project and developing an NFT marketplace.
Meanwhile, Ohanian is a strong supporter of cryptocurrency. While at his former VC firm, Initialized Capital, he was a seed investor in crypto exchange Coinbase, and Seven Seven Six has invested in Ethereum-based NFT game Axie Infinity, among other industry ventures. With over $3.7 billion in NFT trading volume to date, Axie Infinity is now the most popular crypto game.
Twitter is developing its own decentralized social media protocol, Blue Sky, which was revealed in 2019 by creator and recently-departed CEO Jack Dorsey. Meanwhile, Facebook is making a strong push into the metaverse, though some crypto developers are wary about the company’s potential position in an open, interoperable internet future.