How DSCVR is building Web3 social media on Solana

0:01I'm ashon Addison from the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have Juan Bruce co-founder and CSO of discover Juan welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thanks for having me here Ashton you're very welcome excited to dive into web 3 social platforms social fi actually integrating more than just social media on chain but actually the

0:24transactions and the financial aspect of it as well I know you're on top of these kinds of things and there's also a lot of issues in traditional social that I think need to be solved and I know web3 can solve those so excited to dive into all that today I'd love to start our conversation off with just hearing a little bit about yourself and then we

0:42can dive into discover and then all of the rest sure as you mentioned I'm co-founder and chief strategy officer of discover we're a web3 social network that enables social fi and transaction right on the platform and my background is a mixture of design engineering being a startup founder and being an investor right prior to this I was both an investor at the crypto

1:11fund Enigma capital and developed blockchain and fintech startups with big corporate Partners at a company called 55 Foundry or KNX but my history is really the last 20 years of developing startups and Technology and being an investor even before crypto existed so started working on mobile

1:38devices at the design firm idio worked on in vehicle Tech at BMW worked on Media Tech starting Robert Downey Jr's Venture fund and a company called epoxy in the social media publishing space so really I've been doing things at the intersection of Social and crypto for over a couple decades very cool and I feel like a social

2:09platform there's bound to be one that takes off and has hundreds of millions to billions eventually users because everyone's looking for you know what's the next Facebook what's the next Twitter and of course it's going to have to be something to do with web 3 and there have been a lot of platforms that have attempted it in the past and nothing's really broken through

2:32yet although there are a lot of issues in traditional social media that need to be solved maybe you can talk about when you and the team were planning discover as a web3 social fi what are the main things that you're looking to solve but also making sure that it's not too complicated for people yeah I mean there's a lot unfortunately broken in web too social

2:56and nothing against those companies they're great people over there in a lot of cases working on hard problems but really they have a bit of innovators dilemma that's born out of when the platforms were born I mean there were times when we didn't have fintech we didn't have models of distribution and of course we had no crypto at the

3:21time so you know you're seeing things like users not really having control of their communities and their social experience but you also have problems with Partners having very little control of how they're involved in the in the platform having to fit into small little advertising boxes and models that really aren't very exciting or compelling

3:46for them and then creators that struggle with monetization you know when I think about social media having worked in it a long time it's really a trifecta of the user the Creator and the partner or the brand right and bouncing all of those so everybody's having a good experience and being able to do what they need to do is what makes social media work

4:09right and all three sides of those are unfortunately different degrees of broken in web too social and now it's really hard to change right because once you have a big business model and in a lot of cases you're reporting to the street on a quarterly basis if you want to go from you know the strictly driven model to something that's more Diversified you're going to go through a

4:35trough your Stock's going to take a hit and frankly it's just really difficult yeah that's a great point I feel like Faceook is the perfect example with that where you know it used to be the hot thing and then they were making so much on just advertising and then it got to the point where if you if you weren't paying them whatever you posted nobody would see it was just

4:56like you had to pay to get seen and then everyone just it's just got so sat that people are like you know what I don't even want to use the platform anymore let's move elsewhere yeah Facebook's a really interesting example because it's probably the platform that you know a dozen or so years ago had some of the most excitement from developers because

5:13they had something called the open graph and that actually allowed creators startups big Brands to build applications that could do very custom things now the problem was they couldn't figure out how to monetize that and that again comes back to Facebook being born in an era without you know fintech I mean there was hardly any fintech other than than PayPal and so

5:38that meant that all the monetization around those cool apps that were designed happened off platform and really didn't make any economic sense so you had big companies like Zinga and Spotify That Grew massively off of Facebook but all monetizing off platform and that's actually something we're trying to address today at Discover in that we are building an open API

6:00that allows these third-party projects other crypto projects that are looking for users and distribution to plug in and publish into our news feed but this time in web 3 social on Discover actually transact which was something you could never do a dozen years ago in the open graph days so really and I'm sure we'll talk about some of the other advantages of web 3

6:24social but we're trying to build a platform that brings back this open API brings back freedom for all three part parties to build interesting stuff on social and monetize yeah I would love to dive into that deeper because I want to know what are the things from web2 social that are good that you keep for example you know you have a feed you have your

6:49your profile you have your friends but then how do you attract them with those other Finance functionalities which may not be for everybody at least at the start you know I think some people they don't want to get overwhelmed with get have to do your wallet and you know create a bank pretty much just to have a social I just want to connect with my friends but all when

7:09you slip that in there in the in the in the right Doses and then I feel like it really adds value to the platform yeah well you touched on an aspect that was actually the second motivation for starting discover and that's the complexity right so we were really building all these complex fintech apps with big corporate partners and as you said we realize nobody really wants

7:33to deal with that and if you look historically at Social things like Facebook's login really won because people became comfortable with the platforms and then it became a simple way to log into a whole diversity of different applications and so it's our thesis that web3 social can serve a similar function but even more importantly smooth over all the

7:56complexity around wallets so with discover you can you know log in with Google login or whole variety of wallet logins sync a wallet and then never think about it again never think about your wallet address to receive an airdrop to tip and tokens to transact tokens to interact with an application in the feed and then we also even give people a wallet if they're not a power

8:24user and they're not bringing their own wallet that's non-custodial very much in the crypto ethos and something that they can use so we're really trying to smooth over the user experience and then for the projects that are integrated with us we're trying to make it so they have a smoother pipeline to users using the product and transacting right which is

8:52what everybody designing something on the internet web two or web 3 wants it's like how can I make that smooth to get the user through the experience definitely and one of the struggles I've seen traditionally with these web3 socials is the network effect of the current platforms status quo you know it's everyone's on X or on Twitter and there's a new one well

9:17like none of my friends are there so you know there's like that transitioning point where okay the functionality is better but there's a bit of time it takes to get people over there you know how do you as a team break through that to you know and break Beyond just crypto enthusiasts to General people that want to use social media yeah well I think the important

9:40thing is we're not trying to replace Twitter or replace telegram or Discord it's more the way that platforms like Instagram and twitch coexisted with platforms like Facebook and Twitter you would go to an Instagram because you wanted to have a photoc Centric experience you would go to Twitch because you were interested in gaming and you were looking for video content

10:04around that so the reason that you come to discover is because you're looking to actually engage with these projects and be able to do something transactional if you look historically at crypto it's fascinating because it was one of the first Industries born after social media and social media marketing was state-of-the-art and so it's been you know intertwined with social media since

10:30the very beginning but the irony is none of those Web Two Social platforms were actually built for crypto so you've ended up having to do some very clunky things like you know on Discord adding on Bots and things like that and so what we're really trying to provide is a place where all the crypto functionality is native and all of the community is

10:54centered on crypto right so obviously crypto Twitter has amazing reach but you go on Twitter and you probably had a life before crypto and so not everything you're looking at on Twitter is crypto Centric right so it's whereas you go on Discover and you can really kind of geek out and have your your crypto Centric moments of the day and if you're a

11:18Trader or an nft collector or an nft gamer you can really discover from other people like you and from your friends other crypto projects and ation that you're likely to like right and then there's a reward mechanic for being that Enthusiast around crypto good community members are often receiving airdrops from our partners right so and that's a

11:47benefit for the partners too because partners are try always trying to grow their communities and previously the problem was you know airdrops to grow a community were rather untargeted they were just Mass calls for wallet addresses on places like Twitter or Discord and we have both a social graph and an asset graph to be able to find good users right so we can find

12:11users who have been active in relevant communities we can find users who have received assets and airdrops previously got involved in the community and not just flip them not just acted like an airdrop Hunter so it's really a win-win for both sides in being this crypto Centric social destination that's great to hear and I do really like that the airdrop

12:39experience as well has gotten more targeted and you know before it used to just be like yeah let's get more wallets but since the some of the major layer 2 networks really built a criteria of like hey you actually need to use our platform and experience it and be one of the first to experiment in new things and I feel like with discover that

12:59tells tells us the same story as well hey come experience something and you may just be rewarded for being one of the innovators that are actually trying out the new technology absolutely very cool and I want to dive more into the blockchain and crypto side of it since we're in that now sure what is the best underlying technology for this social fi and does

13:19it work with all coins or sort of where where do you start yeah so I mean the way that we look at it is that there isn't one technology that we think will be a winner it's more nuanced and it depends on your application right similar to the world of web 2 it's not like you know everything in a startup is being run by a Amazon web services or Google Cloud you have a whole stack of

13:46Applications behind the scenes that are powering a consumer web experience so I think that's what we're going to see you know a few years from now in crypto now that said there's obviously enthusiasm around certain assets and so what we are aiming to do is serve users for whatever assets they're passionate about so we just launched on salana several weeks ago

14:16But prior to that we had been originally built on top of ICP and serving Assets in that ecosystem and actually grew to over 200,000 users wow even before launching on salana yeah I mean we don't do a ton of marketing but by many accounts we're actually the largest web3 social network and so our aim is really to get in and serve all of those communities and not just

14:46do it in a blanket way so we launched on top of salana and we're spending a lot of time on to build a social home for salana so that means working with I believe over 25 maybe 30 Partners to build out communities working with them on targeted airdrops on building Integrations and applications into the platform so for example we launched when

15:13we launched on salana we launched an alpha integration with magic Eden The nft Exchange where you can buy nfts right out of the newsfeed so if a user shares a magic Eden link to an nft that's visualized with a buy button you can do the complete transaction without ever leaving the feed right and so really our plan is to spend time with all these communities and make whatever

15:43assets work that the users want and that the projects want you know that's very cool and I like that integration with the newsfeed you know sometimes you're just scrolling and looking for information you not want to you don't want want to go to nft Marketplace and look through everything but something just happens to pop up that's interesting and the convenience of it

16:05being in the social feed being able to purchase the nft or sell your nft I feel like something that needs to happen yeah and that's just the tip of the iceberg we've done an experiment with social gaming putting a miname in the news feed where users could play the game and win an nft that then they could go redeem in the larger in the larger

16:28game we have experiments planned around defi you know obviously there's a lot of social conversation about defi but then kind of the irony is you have to go and make a few hop skips and jumps over to other websites and do things with your wallet to be able to actually engage in those protocols so the question for us is like why not make it possible to learn about something and

16:51engage with it all in the in the same place so really you know we're now making a call to developers to go you know use your imagination and think about what you would like to do in a social Newsfeed to connect with users and in 2024 we're going to be releasing our open API that's going to allow these thirdparty projects to integrate and publish these types of

17:22applications very cool Juan and I'm curious how far you take that or you should take that with Defi and these other kinds of financial applications you know at some point okay yeah you can interact with the defi platform through the social but then also there's the wallet and there's swapping and trading and all of a sudden you're you're a full-fledged exchange

17:42you know where's the balance between the financial transactions and the social part of it yeah so we're not trying to be the exchange but I do see a future where we have multiple exchanges that are interacting with users through our platform you know we're we're the social glue between the applications right and you know we're really trying to cross-pollinate these applications

18:08right so if we find you're interested in one type of defi on one chain and you might be interested in another def application that has similar aspects and learning and then in terms of you know exchanges obviously we were just talking about nfts some exchanges are you know specific to a certain type of asset and but you may find that let's

18:34say you're into gaming and you're doing gaming nfts that you're participating in games across chains right so being able to connect a new exchange to a user that's jumped into a new game that needs to get set up there these are all totally rational things so as it stands now we don't really have any limits on what we see in terms of the integration but it's a great point from a regulatory

19:01perspective we are not you know being the exchange yeah definitely and the open API integration sounds like it's going to open a lot of doors for in 20124 U I'm curious if there's anything else that people should be excited about for you know you guys have had great growth so far hundreds of thousands of users but and crypto is still small but I know that there's a lot of people

19:27that are eager to find web3 social platform I feel like there's and it's nice to try it out but also to get people to stick around I think is key what do you think else is going to make them stick around what's either in the platform right now or what you guys have planned in store for this road map yeah well I mean essentially the

19:47open API is what we're talking about now but we're looking at ways that users can monetize and obviously they could do that by Building open API applications but we also believe that other startups will build applications to help users monetize on top of the open API on behalf of us right so we're really trying to balance this ecosystem and in

20:15some ways like crypto often does it starts with the developers and so that's starting with the open API but then I said you know social media is always this triangle so we're thinking about how do we make the value proposition for the user and the Creator in addition to the partner that's building and so part of what we're doing and talking to the early Alpha Partners is talking about

20:38this dynamic because a lot of these partners are really strong in crypto but haven't had the experience in working behind the scenes in web 2 social so we're kind of educating on like here's the dynamic here are the needs that we're hearing from both the users and the creators and we're encouraging people to help build some of those applications now we're not ready to

21:00talk about it yet but we may actually as an example build some of those applications internally just to illustrate and then get developers to go okay let's let's do your version of it but I guess the thing I would say behi behind that is you know we already have a bit of a points and leveling system on Discover so users are earning points for good posts good

21:25behavior I'd say it's advantageous to be an early user and start collecting those points because we have big things in mind to be kind of beneficial around those points and to also you know as part of the API allow our partners to understand where users kind of sit in the in the leveling of the platform who are great creators and things like that very cool it's

21:53great to have a bit of a gamification and also building points and something to work towards you mentioned there's a lot of different ways to register to log in for the platform what is the what is the main way do you just go to the website or are there mobile apps how can people get an account that don't have one yeah you go to the website which is discover.

22:13one and discover is spelled dscvr o NE if you want to learn more about us in Old web2 social media you can follow us on dscvr one at Twitter and yeah but go to the website if you have any questions for me you can hit me up on Twitter at J Bruce jbr ruce and yeah come check it out

22:44you can you know now log in with Phantom wallet or if you're not not even that kind of crypto forward you can log in with a username and password or Google and get started it's it's it's we're it's pretty straightforward and every day we're making it more and more streamlined and better designed very cool well I'm going

23:11looking forward to checking it out and accumulating some points and I will definitely be following along for the updates in 2024 it sounds like there could be some great incentives and alignments for those early crypto users so thank you so much Juan for coming on I will leave the link to the Discover platform in the show notes below as well to make it easy and for your

23:31connections and all the best with everything web3 social moving forward let's definitely follow up in the near future sounds good thanks a lot I appreciate it Ashton