Los Angeles, United States, Nov. 8, 2022, Chainwire Key Takeaways Salil Shah, former Meta and Pinterest executive, has joined DeSo, a new blockchain platform that has raised $200 million from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, CAA and Coinbase. The announcement comes in the wake of two consecutive months of over 120% month-over-month growth for the platform. Shah’s motivation for joining stems from his belief that DeSo has the potential to transform the creator economy. After years spent developing the category-defining technology powering its infrastructure, Sequoia-backed DeSo is hiring Salil Shah, a seasoned executive with experience at Meta and Pinterest, to scale the business. As the only layer-1 blockchain capable of powering content-rich social applications, and with over $200 million in funding from Sequoia, Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase, CAA and others, DeSo was already well-positioned for success. Now, with an experienced senior executive like Shah in place, DeSo can accelerate its mission to reimagine the creator economy and expand the scope of Web3 from solely financial applications to creator-focused social applications and much more. “Empowering and supporting creators is a mission I’m deeply passionate about,” Shah said. Shah mentioned that DeSo has built the first blockchain platform that allows social content to be stored directly on-chain, giving creators more ownership, the ability to engage with fans across platforms, and the opportunity to build direct financial relationships with fans. Shah joins Nader Al-Naji, founder of DeSo, and will complement Nader’s deep technical expertise with his extensive business experience as a senior executive and business leader. Leading an emerging category Shah joins as the emerging category of “decentralized social” is starting to show signs of early growth, with DeSo recently hitting 120% month-over-month growth (following 160% growth the previous month). “This growth is being driven by DeSo’s ecosystem of hundreds of third-party apps, which are now starting to find retention,” said Al-Naji. For example, Diamond App and Desofy have earned creators over $20 million in their early days off of novel monetization primitives, such as social tipping, social nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and social tokens. Meanwhile, tools like OpenProsper, a social block explorer, give unparalleled insight into the ecosystem. And other novel apps like Pearl, a Web3 Instagram, NFTz, a decentralized NFT marketplace, and DAODAO, a social Kickstarter-like fundraising tool, are launching and maturing. “We’re seeing a flywheel start to form,” said Al-Naji. “Now that we have a seed of users and content, developers are building apps like never before, which grows usage and content even more in a virtuous cycle.” DeSo was recently listed on Coinbase, and its mission of reimagining the creator economy has never been more relevant, with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recently proclaiming that Twitter should be “an open-source protocol” and the recent purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. About DeSo DeSo is a new layer-1 blockchain built from the ground up to decentralize social media and scale storage-heavy applications to billions of users. The DeSo mission is to decentralize social media the same way Bitcoin and Ethereum have decentralized finance. You can learn more about DeSo and claim your username on deso.com. Contact Arash Ghaemi DeSo Foundation ash@deso.org via: https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/former-meta-and-pinterest-executive-joins-decentralized-social-as-coo
