Last Updated on May 31, 2023 by Bitfinsider

Despite the fact that toxicity on social media is frequently on plain display, billions of people still utilize it. One cryptocurrency firm hopes to change this reality by releasing a new social media program that rewards positive conduct while discouraging what users judge to be undesirable. This startup has tens of millions of smartphone users mining their native token.

The initially text-based social platform Fireside Forum, developed by Pi Network, has a token-based system where users can reward and elevate posts they like or penalize ones they don’t. The company hopes that the Pi Network model will aid in the suppression of content that is seen as spam, false, harmful, or all of the above.

Web3 should address some of the shortcomings of web2 social media, such as information overload, false information, trolling, and online violence, according to Chengdiao Fan, co-founder of Pi Network and holder of a social computing PhD from Stanford. In a way, conduct will be automatically moderated by employing the potent web3 tools, such as blockchain and cryptocurrency, as a mechanism to establish disincentives and incentives and a balance between the two.

People can receive benefits when their posts are popular, just as users can promote content created by their online competitors.

Since launching Pi Network in 2018, or around five years ago, its founders have claimed that one of their goals has been to create a social media platform free of the numerous features that frequently ruin users’ experiences on conventional networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

According to Stanford PhD and co-founder of Pi Network Nicolas Kokkalis, “It’s been proven that when people add even a small economic incentive or disincentive into their actions then all of a sudden they become a lot more rational.”

By adding 45 million “engaged” users who downloaded its app in order to mine its Layer 1 token, Pi Network has so far increased the size of its ecosystem. According to the company’s owners, “engaged” users are those who have downloaded, signed in, and mined tokens from their software.

According to the business, it is a “utilities-based ecosystem for third-party apps on a mobile web platform,” which “offers a mobile-first mining approach, with low financial cost.” The Pi Network cryptocurrency is presently only used within the company’s ecosystem and does not trade on any external exchanges.

We are currently in a stage that we refer to as the “enclosed mainnet,” Kokkalis remarked. In this phase, users are executing a decentralized KYC (know your customer) application that we have built while being migrated from the mobile app to the blockchain.

In order to remove the bot-run phony accounts that frequently irritate Twitter users, the firm uses a KYC process that is largely focused on ensuring that its users are real people.

The blockchain-enabled social media platform Pi Network is not the only one aiming to challenge the status quo. Users of Lens Protocol can create an NFT version of their profile while still keeping control of their “connections, posts, and data.” The startup claims that users may smoothly switch between platforms, bringing their profile and data with them.

Mastodon has promoted itself as a “decentralized” social media platform and a direct rival to Twitter, despite not being a blockchain-based application. According to Statista, the platform had more than 10 million active users as of March.

Fan and her co-founder Kokkalis claimed they had known for a long time that charging users can help to assure authenticity, and Twitter’s recent decision to start charging some users membership fees was “validation” of that claim.

Pi Network has three million members who will first be allowed to register for Fireside Forum after passing the company’s KYC and migrating to the blockchain, in part by utilizing a digital wallet, according to the founders.