Blockchain
AUSTIN, Texas — Social networking app MeWe is adopting the Frequency blockchain, constructed on Polkadot, to convey self-sovereign blockchain-based identities to its 20 million customers, the MeWe workforce introduced at Consensus 2023 right here on Wednesday.
The mixing will enable MeWe’s customers to take management of their identification knowledge and act as a basis for controlling the info they’ve on social networks, the blockchain agency mentioned.
Social networks create the so-called social graph to map the interconnection of relationships between individuals, issues and pursuits. This key info largely stays within the palms of massive tech firms, and it’s usually used to cater ads to particular customers. Consider how Spotify allows you to see what your mates are listening to and suggests music to you.
At a panel at Consesus 2023, Braxton Woodham, president of Amplica Labs, a key contributor to the Frequency blockchain, mentioned that “we have to pull that energy again” from these personal entities, and the groups are at present centered in making the entire net socially conscious.
The Frequency blockchain creates a “social identification” that allows a person to be on the social graph, and which individuals can use throughout purposes that signal onto this imaginative and prescient of Web3. This work is envisioned as a layer that permeates the net as key infrastructure. Customers personal their identities and management their privateness settings on completely different purposes, Frequency mentioned.
Frequency is a parachain of the Polkadot blockchain, that means it units its personal guidelines and follows its personal logic however is appropriate with the primary Polkadot chain in addition to different parachains. Parachains pay a complete lease to Polkadot, usually with funds gathered from their communities, as a substitute of a charge for every block. This boosts the system’s scalability and stability, in accordance with Frequency. As such, the Frequency blockchain can deal with quite a lot of throughput, wanted for social media purposes.
MeWe customers will have the ability to decide in to the Frequency blockchain adoption. The social media app was based in 2012 as a social community with a give attention to privateness.
The Frequency blockchain advanced out of labor of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), one other know-how that allows purposes to ship Web3 options to their customers. DSNP was supported by Challenge Liberty, a non-profit funded by actual property billionaire Frank McCourt to disrupt social media.
In September 2022, McCourt International, the billionaire’s funding agency additionally led a $27 million funding spherical into MeWe. Amplica Labs, the important thing Frequency contributor and DSNP creator, is a part of McCourt International.
Learn extra: Meet ‘Frequency,’ Polkadot’s New Decentralized Social Media Parachain