#931 Nader Al-Naji On Building Decentralized Social Media

Nader Al-Naji is the Head of the DeSo Foundation In this conversation, we talk about building a decentralized social media network and why it's so important. We also talk about why the current social media landscape creates misalignments in incentive structures. ======================= This episode is sponsored by my favorite place to buy, trade, and stake crypto, Okcoin. They're the fastest growing US based exchange, serving over 190 countries globally with the easy onboarding and low fees. If you haven't tried them out yet, you should. They're on a mission to make learning about and buying crypto easier than ever, and they're all about bringing more financial literacy to everyone, something we can always use more of. From being the only exchange to integrate Lightning to contributing over $1M for Bitcoin core devs, they're doing incredible work to further the bitcoin ecosystem and they offer lots of other vetted utility assets from gaming to defi. With Okcoin, I feel confident that the future really will be ok. To get started, go to http://okcoin.com/pomp for some free bitcoin when you sign up. ======================= Fundrise is the largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That’s right, Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use, automated platform. See for yourself how over 190,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to http://Fundrise.com/Pomp today and, for a limited time, get $10 when you place your first investment. That’s Fundrise.com/Pomp ======================= Crypto is all about giving the power back to the people and our sponsor, Pipe, is doing that in a big way. Pipe is the world’s first trading platform that allows you to trade recurring revenue streams for up-front capital. And with Pipe’s new API, companies with recurring revenue can build seamless, embedded financing options into their platforms. One of the most interesting uses for Pipe’s new API right now is Compass Mining’s “Mine Now, Pay Later” which powers payment plans on bitcoin mining hardware so more miners can start or scale with a smaller up-front investment. Whether you’re looking for mining hardware or scaling any business with recurring revenue, check out Pipe to access growth capital with: No loans. No dilution. No restrictive covenants or warrants. Just growth on your terms And right now, Pomp Podcast listeners can access tens of thousands of dollars even millions fee-free for 12 months. Whether you are a bitcoin mining company looking to enable financing for your customers or a SaaS, DTC, or any business that has recurring revenue, sign up at http://pipe.com/pomp to start trading today. =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Nader Onaji is the head of the DSO Foundation. In this conversation, we talk about decentralized social networks and why some of the incentives in today's society are misaligned with ultimately what people are trying to accomplish. I really enjoyed this conversation with Nader and I hope that you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by OKCoin. They are my favorite place to buy, trade, and stake crypto. They're the fastest growing US-based exchange, serving over 190 countries globally with the easy onboarding and low fees. If you haven't tried them out yet, you

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  should. They're on a mission to make learning about and buying crypto easier than ever, and they're all about bringing more financial literacy to everyone, something we can always use more of. From being the only exchange to integrate Lightning, to contributing over $1 million for Bitcoin core developers, they're doing incredible work to further the Bitcoin ecosystem, and they offer lots of other vetted utility assets from gaming to DeFi. With OKCoin, I feel confident that the future really will be OK. To get started, go to okcoin.com/pomp for some free Bitcoin when you sign up. Again, if you want free Bitcoin, go to okcoin.com/pomp today. Today's episode is brought to you by Fundrise. You all know I believe that the best investors

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  both understand and seek out extreme asymmetry. Fundrise is here to help you do just that. It's the largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That's right, Fundrise is making high-end, private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use automated platform. Its 1 million users already know that the investment with Fundrise is capable of producing strong appreciation returns and income generation while helping to stabilize a diversified portfolio. That's more important now than ever in our inflationary environment. See for yourself how over 190,000 other investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10.

• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Go to fundrise.com/pomp today. And for a limited time, you'll get $10 when you place your first investment. Again, that's fundrise.com/pomp. Go check it out. And when you make your first investment, they'll give you $10 on top of it. Fundrise.com/pomp. Today's episode is brought to you by Pipe. Crypto is all about giving the power back to the people. And our sponsor Pipe is doing that in the big way. Pipe is the world's first trading platform that allows you to trade recurring revenue streams for upfront capital. And with Pipe's new API, companies with recurring revenue can build seamless embedded financing options into their platforms. One of the most interesting uses for Pipe's new API right now is Compass Mining's Mine

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, Pay Later, which powers payment plans on Bitcoin mining hardware so more miners can start or scale with a smaller upfront investment. Whether you're looking for mining hardware or scaling any business with recurring revenue, check out Pipe to access growth capital with no loans, no dilution, no restrictive covenants or warrants, just growth on your terms. And right now, Pomp podcast listeners can access tens of thousands of dollars, even millions, fee-free for 12 months. Whether you are a Bitcoin mining company looking to enable financing for your customers or a SaaS, DTC, or any business that has recurring revenue, sign up at pipe.com/pomp. Again, pipe.com/pomp to start trading today.

• 3:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, we have Nader joining us to talk a little bit about decentralized social networks. Nader, how are you?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Hey, it's great to see you guys.

• 4:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Dude, awesome background. You're killing it with the background.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like half a green screen, literally. I need to fix it, but I thought, you know, we'll get there one day. Need more Bitcoin, you know?

• 4:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I hear you. I love it. All right. I want to start first with what you think the issues with the current social networks are. So we've got Twitter, we've got Facebook, these are obviously massive, massive, multi-billion dollar companies. We're literally using some of them to communicate on a daily basis. What do you think the big challenges with them are? Like, what are they, where are their missteps?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, this is the funny thing, Pomp, is that if you look at social media today, it's actually more centralized than the financial system was before Bitcoin. I mean, you know, like, literally think about it, right? You have five companies that virtually control everything we see and do online, and we're over here trying to decide which billionaire we want to censor us. You know, it's, you know, who's going to own Twitter? Zuckerberg owns Facebook already. But Pomp, you know, you guys know the real answer, which is that we want nobody in charge, right? We want to own our information like we own our Bitcoin, and that's something that people really aren't talking about, you know? Like, it's funny, because the solution to centralization in the financial system wasn't to put Warren Buffett in charge of money, right? It was to use technology, namely Bitcoin, to completely

• 5:32Speaker 02

  overhaul it and decentralize it. And so, you know, what we think is basically the same overhaul is needed in social, and we think that blockchain is the answer there, too. And the reason it hasn't happened yet, we think, is because we basically still need to scale blockchain tech to be able to handle storing content, not just moving money around. So those are very different problems, right? So just for example, it costs $80 to store a 200-character post on Ethereum. It costs 25 cents to a dollar on Solana, Avalanche, Polygon. You know, that's not low enough to compete at scale with Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. But if we could, then we could really change things. We could actually make it so that you can own your content like you own your Bitcoin. Yeah.

• 6:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think, when you think about these problems, how much of it is censorship versus there's other issues that are playing out? Like, the censorship thing is very obvious. I think people understand that, and control is kind of interfacing. With that, are there other things or is it just let's get rid of the censorship?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Well, that's the interesting thing, Pomp, is when you decentralize something, you actually unlock the ingenuity of everybody all over the world, rather than a small group of people running a top-down or centralized organization. So just to give you an example, right, you know, when you got Ethereum going and you let anybody like build on top of that open financial platform, you got more innovation in DeFi in like two years than probably like the last 50 years in finance, right? And so that's really what putting content on an open platform on a blockchain does is now, instead of having one company or five companies really that are in charge of building the feeds, you can actually have anyone in the world spin up a social app and their own social feed

• 7:16Speaker 02

  with extremely low barrier to entry because they have access to all of that content. They can build a feed without having to go and acquire a billion users in order to be competitive. So essentially it lowers the barrier to entry to creating a social app, which not only gives you a lot more choice when it comes to moderation, like who do you want to moderate? But it also leads to better apps, better experiences, better everything. And so you're absolutely right. It's a problem of unlocking the entire world's potential and moving, really moving from centrally planned development of social apps to decentralized development, which I think can be a lot more efficient.

• 7:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you think about this idea of like a decentralized version being better, talk through a little bit. So there's the lack of control. There's this idea of like pulling on the community. What else is there that you see as the value of having it decentralized?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, generally speaking, you know, when I say decentralizing social media, I really mean actually putting your content on a blockchain. Like we work on the DSO blockchains designed to store social data and build social apps on. And so what that means is essentially you make an account. That account's actually a public-private key and everything that you do goes on-chain, just like if you were sending and receiving Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain or doing DeFi on Ethereum, right? So, but again, it's for social. Right, we're moving that disruption from just financial applications to social. And so what happens is when you follow someone, that goes on chain. When you make a post, that goes on chain.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  And the benefit of that is basically that any app that wants to build on top of that chain can actually get access to that open fire hose of content and start building more efficient apps, more efficient feeds. So that's what I'm talking about when, you know, I'm talking about decentralizing social media. It's putting the follow graph, the content, the engagement, the likes, and then all that other stuff actually on a blockchain.

• 9:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about, let's take Twitter as kind of the current event situation, if you will. If you were Elon and you actually got control of Twitter, which is still unclear whether he will be able to successfully do that or not, what do you think he should do? Like, what would you do with Twitter if it had all these users, but it's definitely centralized, hierarchical, and kind of as far away from what we're talking about as it could be?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  It's a great question. And I think the first thing you have to ask yourself is, do you care about the Twitter share price? Because if you care about the Twitter share price, then I actually think the ads-driven business model that it has today is probably the most efficient for extracting value from its network. So what that means basically is Twitter runs what I call an ads-driven business model. And that means that when you make a post on Twitter, they own that post and they don't let anyone else build an app on top of it. The only way that other people will see the posts that you make on Twitter are if you use Twitter's app. And the reason why they do that is because if they were to allow someone else, a third party, to run an app on their content, they wouldn't be able to monetize that app. They can't show ads as effectively on apps they don't control.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And so the ads-driven business model results in extreme centralization. It results in Twitter needing to basically consolidate all of the content and only allow its app on top of it so that it can be a broker between advertisers and its users through that app, right? So if you care about Twitter's share price, if you care about profits, then breaking that model is extremely risky because it's kind of... Kind of hard to make more money directly, you know, or rather you might be able to, but it's risky. So if you don't care about share price, the thing that creates more value, not about extracting value, creating value for society, is actually if you open up that content and allow anybody to build on it. So in particular, Twitter doesn't have to say, "We're going to be the only ones who make an app."

• 11:10Speaker 02

  We could actually let anybody build an app on top of Twitter's database. And actually, what's funny is most social networks actually started open in that way. So Facebook and Twitter started open to build their networks when they were in their growth phase. But the problem is that open model, at least in the centralized world, pre-blockchain, wasn't very monetizable. So while it's good for actually building a large network and creating maximum value for users, you can't actually extract as much value when you're letting any app in the world, any developer in the world, build content on your block, on your database. The thing that finally changes that for the first time, and it's a new business model, and it's a post I wrote on nattertheory.com that just went out today.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  The thing that changes that is the fact that blockchains can integrate money with social. When you can integrate money with social, you can have a different business model than ads that allows you to have an open platform like a blockchain, but you're making money in a different way that actually can make you more money than you made before. And I know that's a little bit high level, but I've been talking for a minute here, so I just want to give it back to you.

• 12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think that this-

• 12:16Speaker 02

  I can go into it.

• 12:16Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I think this difference between do you care about the share price or do you not is really important, right? And Elon publicly did say that this isn't about economics for him, it's about free speech. And so that would suggest he doesn't care about the share price. Let's hold that as the kind of assumption here.

• 12:35Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you think about that, I also wonder how important revenue then is. If you don't care about share price, maybe that means that in the short term, you can just, you know, tank it, right? You just don't care, it's private, whatever. But is it important to have revenue? So like, you know, one of the things that I said is if all you literally cared about was the free speech, then like, buy Twitter, bring it private. Fire 90% of the staff, basically outside of like the core engineering team, and open source as much of it as possible. And like, good luck, everyone. Let's go as a community. And my guess is that like some pretty cool, interesting things would come out of that. The question becomes, do you need revenue at all to actually make that sustainable?

• 13:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Or could it operate as a truly open source project? Where, you know, in the Bitcoin community, for example, there's grants and things like that that help fund some of the development. But there is no revenue model that goes to the kind of core team. How do you think about the importance of revenue in a world where you like open source a product like Twitter?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I actually think that you need a business model that makes money for certain actors in the ecosystem in order for the model to be sustainable. So if nobody is making money, I think the thing is going to fall into disrepair, right? I think you have to have some people making money. And it's good to start with your example of Bitcoin, right? With Bitcoin, on the protocol, you know, no one actively gets money for developing Bitcoin protocol. But there's an application layer on top of Bitcoin that are that's exchanges, you know, that allow you to trade and all kinds of other things, lending platforms, that do make money, right? They make money on fees, they make money on you doing stuff with your Bitcoin on that application layer.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  And so, and that's actually gives them an incentive to make sure that Bitcoin works, that Bitcoin functions. Obviously, the people who own Bitcoin have an incentive. And some of the biggest, you know, development teams are funded by people who own a lot of Bitcoin. So you definitely need some kind of thing that makes money and brings it back into developing and investing in the network. The question is, how do you do that with a social network versus something like Bitcoin? And I think that that actually brings us back to what would I do if I were to own Twitter? Right? Opening up Twitter's content and allowing anyone to build on it lacks that incentive to actually keep developing the network, right? Because how are you making money, right?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  You know, you could charge developers for, you know, for like, you know, using your API in their Apps, but that's probably, I actually doubt that's necessarily going to make you enough money to even keep the lights on necessarily. Right? So you really need something that's more efficient, and that's actually where blockchain comes in. Right? So the thing that blockchains are really good at, and the reason why actually fully disrupting the architecture of Twitter from a centralized server to a blockchain can really pay dividends, which is that blockchains are really good at mixing money and other things, in this case, social. Right? So when you build social media on a blockchain, you get access to completely new product features that you can transition to a fee-based model, a fee-per-transaction-based model, rather than

• 15:48Speaker 02

  just, you know, charging developers or ads like it is today. And the way that works is you basically have microtransactions or macrotransactions that you couldn't do with the traditional payment rails. So NFTs are the most example, the biggest example, but they're actually not necessarily the biggest. Right? You actually want something that's more integrated with social. So there's, you know, creator coins that are tied people's reputation, speculating on a post, you know, speculating on how popular it's going to be. These kinds of product features, you could actually maybe charge enough fees that you have enough of an incentive to maintain the network.

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Joe, John, what questions do you guys have? My question would just be around the challenges that you think come along with this. Like, what worries you about trying to make this happen?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that in general, you know, I'm just trying to do the most efficient thing for the world, and I think everybody is, you know, Elon included. And, you know, I think that, I mean, the good news is that I think that blockchain's kind of like disruptive march, at least technologically, is almost there, right? We're almost, I mean, with DSO today, you're at a point where you can store a post for one ten thousandth of a cent, which you couldn't do even last year, right? So from a technological standpoint, we're there. I think the question is whether we have the products, the social products that we need to disrupt Twitter. So basically, my theory is that blockchain, so maybe just to go back a second. Blockchains are really good at microtransactions, macrotransactions, and what

• 17:17Speaker 02

  What I call regulatory arbitrage, right? So basically, if you're trying to build something on traditional Twitter, you're bound to the traditional payment system. And that's really bad at small transactions. There are very high fees on small transactions with credit cards. But it's also bad at big transactions. So you know, there's a risk of chargebacks that makes big transactions really inefficient with the traditional payment rails. Blockchains can fix that. They can actually make both of those extremely efficient. And if you think about it, the lack of blockchain, the lack of good micro and macro transactions is a big part of the reason why the early internet went into the ads-driven model rather than something based on charging fees or something even based on blockchain. Right? And so, so I think that the question is, are there new products that you can build

• 18:02Speaker 02

  that leverage microtransactions and macrotransactions in a new way that are strong enough for users to want to use them instead of Twitter? Right? And so I think the answer is absolutely yes. And I think in the next year, we're going to see products that mix money and social media in ways that we haven't thought of before. And that's actually going to break the network effect of Twitter's currently centralized model. But if we don't see those products, it'll be a lot harder to transition from the currently centralized model to a blockchain-based one, which again, can be more efficient because it's open and anyone can build on it. Yeah. So.

• 18:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Andrew, I have a question. Excuse me. My question would be regarding around like lots of people are trying to build these decentralized social medias and all different avenues, normally just copying kind of what the tech giants are doing, I believe. How do you guys win?

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I think basically with any blockchain, the way that it works is, and this is a really interesting phenomenon, but blockchains are actually very, I call it anti-fragile, because all it takes is a single killer app being built on a blockchain in order for it to actually dominate whatever field that it's in. So the way that that works is with Ethereum, for example, right? You started, you know, when Ethereum launched, everybody was kind of like, okay, what's the killer app that's going to make Ethereum take off? It ended up being ICOs. And. In 2017. And the reason why a killer app is kind of anti-fragile is when you have a killer app

• 19:34Speaker 02

  that's built on a blockchain, what happens is that brings users and content and wallets that then entice other developers, they incentivize new developers to keep building on that blockchain, which brings more users and more apps in a virtuous cycle and creates a network effect, right? So Ethereum actually built this around financial applications, right? So one ICOs came, you know, it's kind of, people were like, hey, I can raise money in a way that I couldn't before, do an ICO. That was the beginning. But then all the wallets that got on-boarded in 2017 from all of that activity incentivized the creation of Compound and Uniswap and Yield Farmers and all that stuff, right? So the exact same phenomenon is going to play out with social and with a blockchain,

• 20:17Speaker 02

  a social blockchain like DSO, where a single killer app that mixes money in social and interesting ways is going to create a seed of content that incentivizes other developers to start building on this platform in an unstoppable loop. And we saw the beginnings of that with a prototype app we launched a year ago called BitCloud, that got, now we have over 1.5 million wallets on DSO listed on Coinbase. But it was all because that single app, BitCloud, incentivized hundreds of other developers to build on the platform. Now BitCloud's not even the most popular app. It's diamondapp.com, there's Supernovas, cloudfeedapp.com, all these other apps. But it was from that seed that that network started to grow. And once we have a more retentive app, an app that's, you know, that your mom is going to,

• 21:02Speaker 02

  you know, actually use, which is on the way, I think in the next few quarters, a lot of people are launching things, that's going to start the network effect for real.

• 21:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha. Nader, one of the things that I think is really interesting as well is talent retention. So if you think about, you know, at Twitter, I can only imagine just the kind of turmoil that's going on internally, you know, are we going to keep the existing executive team? Is Elon going to buy it? Now all of a sudden, Tom Abravo, it sounds like Blackstone or somebody is trying to get involved, or Carlyle, whoever, like, all these people now are like, oh, Twitter's for sale, like, let me, I've got a bid, right? And so if you're an employee, you may just Like, ah, I don't even know who's gonna be running this place in six months. Like, I may just exit stage right. How does that change when you have something that's decentralized? And it's more of like, uh, open source? Do you get better talent, worse talent? Is it kinda the same distribution?

• 21:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, how do you think about the talent, uh, that is needed to build this stuff? And like, which system's better, uh, if there is one that's better?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's super interesting because, uh, you can run decentralized organizations in lots of different ways. Uh, you know, you can actually have a, a, a team building a blockchain that looks a lot like Twitter, right? If you wanted to. With DSO, the way we've chosen to structure it is we're fully remote. And obviously, everything is 100% open source, just like Bitcoin. So anyone in the world can build on it. And what we found is several advantages, uh, from that open source model is, uh, you know, one of them is that basically, uh, people, because they're just passionate about what we're doing, they start contributing to the open source, uh, codebase. And then, when they're doing that, we actually get to see how good they are. And then we're like, hey, we'll pay you, you know, a combination of Bitcoin and DSO, uh, you know, to start, uh, to start working on this.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And so I think it's just a way, way, way better funnel, a pipeline of talent. And you're really unlocking ingenuity from all over the world. I mean, you know, we have a couple of college kids who have contributed more code to DSO than, uh, you know, some of our engineers, you know? So, um, I think what changes basically, especially if you embrace the fully decentralized model for development, uh, is, um, the fact that your open source brings people in from all over the world to, to build the blockchain. Uh, and, uh, yeah, you're really just accessing a much bigger pool of talent. Uh, but then, we're not even talking about the app layer on top of the chain, right? So with DSO, there's the DSO blockchain, and then there's the apps built on top of it.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Just like with Bitcoin, there's Bitcoin, and then there's all the exchanges that allow you to trade it in a centralized fashion. With DSO, the key is that the app layer can actually be decentralized, right? So with Twitter, we're kind of looking at this one team that controls this one app that we all use. But when things get decentralized, anybody can build an app on the DSO blockchain. And so instead of having one team, one app, It's thousands of teams, thousands of apps from all over the world. And what's really cool is that basically if someone, let's say in another country, like let's say in India, believes that he can do a better job of running a feed algorithm for people in India, he can do that with no barrier to entry and no cold start problem by building on DSO. So suddenly you get a feed built by someone in your local country,

• 24:11Speaker 02

  probably actually competes with a few other feeds built by other people in India, rather than using a homogenized McDonald's-like interface that's built by people in Silicon Valley, not even in your own country. So the app layer gets decentralized as well as the development of the infrastructure, right? So it's very interesting.

• 24:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of think through this. When you think out, you know, 20 years, is every single social network going to be decentralized and open source? Or is it likely we'll start centralized and decentralized?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  It's a great question. I mean, so I think the speed at which we get to a dominant decentralized social network, let's say a decentralized social network with like a million users, right? Let's say, is, I think that that happens faster if there are really exciting combinations of money and social that blockchains can do that are hard to do in the centralized model, right? I'm very optimistic that's the case. And for that reason, I think in the next year, we're going to see some really interesting stuff launching, especially on DSO. So that actually determines kind of the speed at which a decentralized social platform becomes popular. And then the level of dominance, you know, if you have that one killer app, that new kind of experience,

• 25:27Speaker 02

  I think it becomes very dominant very quickly, right? Again, because you have all these people all over the world that start building on it in this very decentralized fashion. You're really unlocking the globe's like human ingenuity. So I think if we hit that killer app, the takeoff to being 100 million users or more actually can happen really, really quickly. So I, you know, I would expect that in a few years, you know, there's at least one, you know, social network built on a blockchain that has. Has, you know, 100 million users across its application layer. But, you know, I'm ever the optimist, right? So.

• 26:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I hear you. What um, what do you think? If you had to pick right now, what is the current social network that is most likely to end up getting to kind of open decentralized, you know, new world first rather than the the startups or the challengers?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm obviously gonna say DSO, I mean, which we're working on.

• 26:29Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, like Twitter, Facebook, like the incumbents.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes, it's a great question. So I think an interesting thing, Pom, is basically that Facebook actually like saw this coming, right? Basically saw, hey, like, if you can build on a blockchain, there are all these different types of advantages that can lead to better products. And that's why they prioritize Libra, right? And, you know, Libra was, was, yes, it was a push for, you know, getting dominance over the money supply, but really it's also building a better rail that you can then use to build better products. And so I think Zuckerberg said, hey, like, you know, we don't want to have to integrate with the blockchain. We want to have, we want to own the blockchain that we're going to integrate with for these new social products. And so he went that approach. Unfortunately, the government, you know, shut it down.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  I was, I actually was kind of sad when that happened because I think Libra could have really generated a lot of innovation in social. Because it would have potentially shifted Facebook from that ads-driven business model to that blockchain-based business model in the most efficient possible way. And but, you know, that didn't happen, unfortunately, and it goes back to how difficult it is to do things at these heavily scrutinized companies like Facebook and Twitter. But, um, you know, I think that now the way that that existing dominant players decentralize is they integrate with a blockchain that's built externally, right? Whether it's DSO or something else, you know, whatever, whatever becomes dominant, you know, for that novel social killer app use case, they integrate with it.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  If you're asking me, you know, to me, Facebook moves quite swiftly. You know, I think they'll be probably the swiftest to adopt whatever interesting killer app feature, financial feature happens on on chain. But, uh, but hey, you know, we'll see, maybe, maybe TikTok surprises us. I would be surprised if it was Twitter that that leads, leads the charge or pioneers integrating with a social blockchain.

• 28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks, Pop. Yeah, so you can go to DSO.org. You know, that's where, you know, we talk about the DSO blockchain and why it's important. And then aside from that, diamondapp.com. I'm at Nader on diamondapp.com and it's just that that happens to be one of the most popular DSO apps. Of course, there are hundreds of others listed on DSO.org that you can use if you don't like it, but that's the one I use and you can find me there.

• 28:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Listen, thank you so much for coming on. This idea of a decentralized social network and the battle between Elon Musk and Twitter is going to be one to watch. So we'll see what we'll see how it plays out, but I think.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  I'm excited, man. I think whatever happens is going to be good for the world and that gets me excited. So it's going to be fun.

• 29:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I think he's got an uphill battle, but we'll see what happens.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  I wish him, I would really wish him luck. I really, I really want him to succeed.

• 29:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree. All right. Sounds good. See you later, buddy. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.