Is Elon’s 9.2% twitter purchase a signal for DeSo (Decentralized Social)?

News of Elon’s twitter purchase sent the value of his 9.2% stake in the company soaring by 25% – from $2.89 billion as of Friday’s market close to $3.6 billion as of Monday morning. Since then, share prices and trading volume has gone way up today.

Not much is known about how Musk’s new investment in twitter, which makes him the largest individual shareholder, will impact or influence the company’s vision. The type of shares he’s acquired don’t appear to signal an immediate intent to own or influence the brand. However, Musk hasn’t exactly been a vocal advocate for new Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. 

He’s also been critically hinting for sometime that he wishes to see a more decentralized, open source social media alternative. 

With 4.62 billion users around the world and counting, social media seems to control the lives of many. In fact, users spend an average of 147 minutes per day – just over 2 hours – on “free” social sites that make millions profiting from their attention. 

The original premise of social media is noble – connecting with your friends, staying in touch with family. Lately, however, data breaches and security issues have left many users worried about just who has access to their data and what are they doing with it? Could decentralized social networks be a viable solution to concerns about data privacy and censorship?

One blockchain technology company has social media platforms worried: DeSo Blockchain – aka “Decentralized Social”.

DeSo Blockchain announced they have surpassed 1.5 million accounts created on its network. DESO coin (already listed on Coinbase) shot up 30% on the news.

Their belief is that social media shouldn’t be controlled by a small group of platforms limiting what we say while making billions showing us ads. 1.5 million users who are already active on the blockchain, signal this could be a sign of things to come.

Is Elon Musk getting on the DeSo bandwagon and starting his own social media company?

Elon Musk frequently turns to his Twitter account to air his concerns about social media and take polls from his very active base of followers.

Elon recently hinted at the future of DeSo, asking his Twitter followers if they think Twitter should be open source. More than 825,000 people replied with an emphatic yes.

That’s some serious support for DeSo’s mission. And with his recent twitter purchase, Elon could be more than a hint. DeSo is a new layer-1 blockchain built to scale decentralized social applications to billions of users, allowing people to build social apps on DeSo much like they do financial apps on Ethereum.

But that’s not all DeSo is doing. The team has also announced a new platform for launching DAOs called DAODAO. 

“With these new updates, we move closer to a world in which social media is not controlled by three centralized companies, but instead, is owned by the users and creators of the network,” said Nader Al-Naji, the Founder of DeSo.

DeSo believes the centralization of data under big tech companies must stop. Whether or not DeSo succeeds remains to be seen, but with 1.5 million accounts, they’re off to a good start — and so is DESO Coin.