Web3 Will Not Be Built on Smart Contracts • DeSo (Decentralized Social) Blockchain

We think that the difficulty of storing and indexing data in a scalable way is something that has been underestimated by most of the crypto space. For a long time, the entire space has been limited to finite state applications without much consideration for the wide range of infinite state applications, like social apps and marketplaces, that in fa... See more

Moreover, even though many blockchains claim to be able to handle thousands of transactions per second, aka TPS, this metric does not take into account the storage properties of the application at hand. There is a big difference between 50,000 DeFi transactions, which may generate zero bytes of new state data, as opposed to 50,000 social transactio... See more

These high on-chain storage costs prevent the vast majority of web 2.0 applications from being implementable on today’s general-purpose blockchains, even if using bridges to storage-focused blockchains such as Arweave or Filecoin. At current prices, even storing a single link to Arweave or Filecoin on a general-purpose chain would cost between $0.1... See more

DeSo is custom-built from the ground up to power social applications, and that means that all of the data that it stores and indexes follows a known schema. Profiles are stored and indexed differently than posts, which are stored and indexed differently than follows, etc... This level of customization not only makes storage costs 10,000x cheaper th... See more

While today's general-purpose blockchains have worked well for storage-light applications like DeFi, they cannot scale to handle storage-heavy applications like social apps and marketplaces. Imagine a world in which every ‘like’ or follow on a decentralized app cost $1.00+ in storage fees. Unfortunately, that is the reality now because of the stora... See more

Many believe that general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, and Solana will come to power everything on the web, including financial apps, social apps, and even Amazon-like marketplaces. But there’s a show-stopping problem that’s being widely overlooked: on-chain storage.

All the general-purpose blockchains on the market today, including Ethereum, Cardano, Avalanche, Solana, and others are ill-equipped to handle infinite state applications such as social apps and marketplaces.

Perhaps surprisingly, virtually all of decentralized finance, aka DeFi, consists of finite state applications. As long as you can store a handful of account balances, you can start to build arbitrarily-complex tools for people to trade, borrow, lend, etc... and you'll never have to store more than the ending balances in the long-term. This is becau... See more