Blockstack: a serious competitor to Facebook and Twitter
In 2013, Ryan Shea founded OneName to allow Bitcoin users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies using an identifier instead of aliases and alphanumeric addresses. At that time, Facebook weighed $ 100 billion and Bitcoin was only capitalized at $ 1.5 billion. Shea was convinced that if blockchain technology could send value in a decentralized way, it was entirely possible to remain in control of one's personal data and identity, without going through Facebook or any other central authority.
In 2016, Shea and co-founder Muneeb Ali renamed One Name to Blockstack , and began building a more general stack of blockchain tools to power an entire Internet without centralized servers. The start-up raised more than $ 50 million at its ICO , which included prominent investors such as Union Square Ventures or the brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss .
Towards self-management of users' personal information?
This year, a flaw has been revealed in Facebook. Indeed, last March, it was reported that the personal data of 87 million users had been acquired by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica , in order to sell them to politicians campaigning, as the former candidate to the US presidency Ted Cruz, or the current president of the United States Donald Trump. This news may well bode well for Blockstack.
"The euphoria around cryptocurrencies will fuel interest in decentralized applications" [...] "And decentralized social networks will potentially be the largest category of recipients," Shea said in an interview for Forbes.Indeed, the discovery of this parallel data network, designed to influence Facebook users, has shown that the private information of millions of people can not be entrusted to anyone, much less to a company with centralized servers. Shea hopes that this case will bring general awareness on the part of users. According to him, they might have to ask for a new form of social networks , like Blockstack, where personal data does not need centralized control .
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To attract developers, Blockstack has frozen $ 1 million in start-up funds , intended for early adopters wishing to use its technology to reverse the business model of social networks. The money will be divided and distributed to teams of developers who will then have 3 months to build a wide range of social media networks , ranging from hyper-local group platforms to full-fledged Facebook clones, which give users control over their own data.
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Recipients of the money will also have access to the company's blockchain-based identity management solution, called Blockstack ID, and a native storage solution, called Gaia, designed to give end users Wide range of decentralized applications ( DAPPs ) control their own data.
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After this first three-month period, fund recipients will be able to receive additional funding from the Signature Fund ($ 25 million), set up for more traditional venture capital investments.
Although the Winklevoss have first-hand experience with Facebook, Shea says his company has not yet turned to their expertise: "They are great people, and we have been discussing the possibility of engaging with them. but we have not done it yet . "
While Shea and Muneeb struggled to get their OneName platform adopted in 2015, similar models have recently gained prominence , such as Mastadon , a decentralized social network; Steemit , who pays its users according to the interest of the published content, or Kik, who is creating his own cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrencies and the concept of self-sovereign identity as a coup de grace for today's social networks?
Following the scandal of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica affair, the majority of Facebook users have remained faithful to it. The problem here is that a social network - like any business that relies on network effects - is inherently as powerful as the number of people who use it.
To overcome the lack of critical mass of users, crypto-tokens similar to ether could play a determining role. In the same way that start-ups can issue new chips based on the Ethereum blockchain, Blockstack blockchain users will be able to issue their own crypto-tokens . By giving early adopters of a nascent social network like Steemit access to a potentially valuable token and giving them access to the service, developers could create an incentive to register long before the network is competitive. relationship to established centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter .
"Some networks will probably have a token component, where tokens are distributed to the first users, which can be used to buy different features" (similar to the Kik model), says Shea, but he adds, "I also think there will be decentralized social networks without crypto-tokens " .
Christopher Allen, the lead architect of blockstream startup Blockstream, who raised $ 151 million in venture capital, coined the term "self-sovereign identity" as part of his series of workshops. Rebooting the Web of Trust.
Among the best-known protagonists seeking to provide this layer of identity is Hyperledger Indy, a free software created by the Sovrin Foundation, which is hosting its own ICO . Hyperledger Indy focuses on creating a universal platform that gives users total control over their own identity.
"Self-sovereign identity is more than a blockchain. [...] To a certain extent, it's an ideology designed to respect the individual, " says Allen.
"In the end, Facebook owns the information, which is why they can sell it to other people," he added.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, seems well aware of the target that recent controversies have drawn on his back. In Zuckerberg's annual "personal challenges" post, he concluded by recognizing that cryptocurrencies and other technologies using cryptography have the potential to "take the power of centralized systems and put it back into the hands of people. But that also entails risks, especially the difficulty of control "
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