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Synereo Announces Alpha Phase As World’s First Decentralized Social Network

Last Updated October 6, 2020 7:02 PM
Lester Coleman
Last Updated October 6, 2020 7:02 PM

Synereo, a Tel-Aviv based company developing a blockchain-based, decentralized social network and a platform allowing web applications to exist without centralized servers, will move into alpha phase this September.

The open source social network has been two years in the making and aspires to be the first fully decentralized network based on principles of what it calls the “attention economy.”

Synereo’s alpha is built on top of the company’s unique distributed “tech stack,” which utilizes blockchain technology to enable a peer-to-peer Internet. A software stack is a set of software components or subsystems to create a complete platform that does not require additional software to support applications.

Revolutionizing Social Media

The blockchain-based social network revolutionizes the concept of social media by placing control over content, personal information and monetization in its users’ hands.

Unlike incumbent social media providers like Facebook and Twitter, Synereo’s social network cannot record or store personal information, and does not sell it to third parties. The network also claims it will not target users with marketing messages.

All network transactions and relations are encrypted on a distributed ledger and accessible to permitted parties.

The ‘Attention Economy’

The Synereo network compensates users for contributions of storage and computation power when they support the distributed network with their personal devices. Additionally, the social network adheres to principles of the “attention economy,” providing users with monetary rewards for creating and curating content that people pay attention to.

Synereo’s alpha will include the following features:

● Text posting with featured images: Test users will be able to post simple text posts and images.
● Content labels (#hashtags): Posts will be taggable and searchable via hashtags.
● Decentralized search capability: Content, users and other items will be searchable on the network.

Users will be able to promote content by charging their posts with the test network’s native currency, AMPs. Accordingly, users will be compensated with AMPs when viewing amplified content. AMPs are currently traded on the Bittrex and Poloniex exchanges.

A Decentralized ‘Tech Stack’

Synereo is the top layer of a complete decentralized “tech” stack – the Synereo platform – that its partners are using to create fully decentralized applications (dApps). The Synereo team plans to create and support more “dApps,” as well as partner with other teams, to bring the best applications of the old web into a new, decentralized paradigm.

CEO Dor Konforty refers to the Synereo platform as “Android for the decentralized web.” “When wanting to develop an app for mobile devices, most people choose Android. We aim to be the same for dApps,” Konforty told CCN.com.

Development Revenue

Synereo plans to assess fees of less than 1% from certain transactions on the social platform and on apps on the network to maintain and further develop the platform and network. The platform will not take profit from social interactions on the social platform. “We believe basic human communication should be as free and unrestricted as possible online,” Konforty said.

Synereo will offer the following features in its new version:
• Deployment of decentralized nodes on local machines
• Creation of private connections among users
• Text posting with featured image hosted on the decentralized cloud
• Content labels (#hashtags)
• Decentralized search capability by user and label
• Content amplification with test-net AMPs
• 3-tier content viewing: browse, expand, and full view
• AMP rewards for completing certain actions on the application, as well as reporting usage statistics relating to the attention economy

Two Years In Development

The original plan was to build the social network on an existing blockchain, Konforty noted. However, in researching the options for a blockchain that would meet the requirements needed, it became apparent that no such platform was available.

CTO Greg Meredith, an ex senior-level architect at Microsoft, decided that Synereo needed to build its own blockchain based on the mathematical approach that he has cultivated.

Second Crowdsale Planned

Synereo raised $126,023 from its first crowdsale, which CCN.com reported last July, selling 22,719,689 AMPs and distributing 45,439,378 AMPs.

The platform is planning a second crowdsale on bnktothefuture.com in September to fund its operations. There will be another public sale of AMP’s as well as an equity offering.

“We expect these funds to allow us to further develop the social layer, finalize development of our new sharded, composable scalable blockchain, make fully operational our Rholang smart contracting language, and create the tools allowing developers to easily and modularly interface with any of the layers of our platform to create fully decentralized and distributed applications that have an easy time interfacing with one another and creating network effects between them,” Konforty said.

Featured image from Shutterstock.