The Crypto Social Network
Built on DeSo, the Decentralized Social Blockchain
If you have questions after reading this doc, you can query this custom GPT model for clarification. The dev team also regularly checks this DeSo thread and the Focus Alpha Telegram channel, and you can ask questions there.
Focus is a new type of social network that mixes crypto speculation, social media, and generative AI. Focus is built from the ground up on the state-of-the-art Decentralized Social blockchain, aka DeSo, which is backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Coinbase. Focus introduces new ways for creators to monetize and leverages a new kind of viral mechanic we call the social airdrop to maximize retention and solve the cold-start problem.
All content on-chain, controlled by your wallet. Unlike with a traditional social network, all user content on Focus is stored directly on-chain, end-to-end encrypted where needed, meaning nobody can ever censor your content. This means that posting, following, messaging, trading, and all social primitives are controlled solely by users’ public/private keypairs, which they automatically get when they create an account. This has the added benefit that all content is automatically digitally signed by users’ private keys, making users’ identities impossible to forge or spoof, no matter how advanced generative AI becomes. With Focus, you can finally own your content and your identity just like you own your Bitcoin.
New ways to monetize. On the surface, Focus looks like Twitter but with anonymous crypto-enabled monetization mechanics that include paid reposts (aka decentralized ads), paid messages, unlockable content, subscriptions, and a feature we call Creator Coins that lets you invest directly in other creators’ revenue streams. In addition, because all content is on-chain, Focus pioneers uncensored generative AI to allow users to simulate new content from their favorite creators, both text and images, again leveraging crypto for anonymous, censorship-resistant payments. Furthermore, because all accounts on Focus are also crypto wallets, Focus introduces new feed algorithms based on wallet balance that are much more resistant to bots and gaming than traditional social network signals.
No company, just coins and code. Unlike traditional social networks, where a small group of venture capitalists and shareholders capture all the value, 100% of all fees are distributed directly to the holders of $FOCUS tokens, which anyone can buy and earn from day one. There is no equity and no for-profit entity behind Focus. Tokens will be purchasable and directly tradeable on the DeSo DEX, a fully decentralized on-chain order-book exchange, via the Openfund client. Notably, $FOCUS tokens are also used to incentivize early adoption via a novel viral mechanic we call The Social Airdrop…
Your profiles on other social networks are worth something, but how much are they worth exactly?
With Focus, you get $FOCUS tokens in direct proportion to how much influence you have on external social networks. To give some concrete numbers, someone with a thousand views per post would get a joining bonus of about $100 in $FOCUS tokens. In contrast, someone with millions of views per post, like Elon Musk or Obama, would get a bonus of approximately a hundred thousand dollars in $FOCUS tokens.
We plan to support X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, select email domains, DeSo, and OnlyFans at launch. Each network will have a slightly different reward function based on (1) the data we can collect when someone connects their account and (2) the value of user promotion on each platform.
In addition, if you refer someone to Focus, you get 10%
of their joining bonus and 5% of all revenues they generate on the platform. That means if you refer a significant influencer, you could get thousands of dollars
up-front and potentially thousands more when they start generating income on the platform. Referring is as
easy as sharing your link, and each external social account that your referee connects will earn them, and
you, a separate airdrop amount based on the value of that account.
To gamify the process of discovering peoples’ account values and inviting them to Focus, we introduce a tool that will launch alongside Focus called The Bounty Hunter. The Bounty Hunter allows users to immediately determine the value of all of their social accounts, as well as the value of all of their followers across all of their accounts. With this information, the user can not only determine how much their reward will be for joining, but also who the most valuable users in their network are, and how much they would get if they convinced them to join. It will also provide a concrete estimate of how much the user can earn from sharing their referral link to all of their followers.
Importantly, the maximum reward is only attained when a user posts on their other platforms about Focus, and leaves that post up for a sufficient amount of time (initially 7 days). This makes the social airdrop effectively a bottom-up, decentralized, token-enabled form of ad-spend designed to initially bootstrap the network, and to disproportionately reward early adopters who put their reputation on the line to support the platform.
In addition, all $FOCUS tokens distributed to users are locked for one year, and vest over 4 years subsequent to their one-year “cliff,” or five years total. This ensures that all users who receive tokens are fully-aligned with the platform for the long-term.
The best part is that everyone who gets a reward becomes an owner of $FOCUS tokens, essentially making them part-owners of the platform itself. Imagine if you could get a percentage of Instagram or Twitter right when they were starting out. WIth those platforms, the early adopters got nothing, but with Focus they can get founder-level ownership just for joining and referring other users.
With Focus, the social airdrop targets virality, but this is not enough. In order to build true lasting value, a social network needs to retain great content creators and content consumers, which is notoriously difficult to do early on. To solve what we call the “cold retention” problem, as we call it, we introduce a simple incentive we call “Post to Earn.”
At its core, Post to Earn takes the top creators on the Focus platform each week, as
determined by various signals, and distributes $FOCUS tokens to them (locked for one year with a four-year
vest thereafter, same as airdropped tokens). While the rewards will change dynamically as we iterate this
incentive in real time, the following simple schedule provides a concrete starting point:
This may seem generous, but it totals just $10.5 million per year, and guarantees no less than 100,000 high-quality creators engaging on a regular basis for as long as the incentive is active. Importantly, we would only be paying out the full amount if there are a large number of high-quality content creators that are worth spending on. So the spend will generally be highly-efficient.
But it isn’t enough for creators to engage on Focus– we need to create a meaningful
incentive for consumers to check Focus instead of checking other platforms. To help make Focus’s content uniquely engaging, Post to
Earn incentives will only be maximized when additional criteria are met, including:
This does not mean that creators will get zero for not meeting these other criteria, only that they will maximize their rewards by meeting them. Preference will also be given to creators who meet the additional criteria when assigning Post to Earn scores and rewards.
Importantly, Focus has a unique and unprecedented advantage against bots and gaming when it comes to determining the quality of user-generated content, which is that every user’s Focus account is also a crypto wallet. This means that wallet balance can be used as a signal, both to determine whether a particular account is a bot, but also to determine how much of a post’s engagement came from real users. In particular, wallet balance is both impossible to falsify and virtually costless for real users to maintain, making it generally superior to approaches that require monthly subscription fees. Other signals, such as the amount burned in fees on the platform, can provide additional non-gameable information as to each post’s true value.
To summarize, we believe Post to Earn can create unprecedented levels of retention that, when combined with the social airdrop, give Focus a very strong chance of solving the cold-start and cold-retention problems when it comes to content. And it’s only possible thanks to Focus’s wallet signals, which arise from the fact that every user’s account on Focus is also a crypto wallet.
Thanks to the DeSo blockchain and its Revolution Proof of Stake system, Focus users can transact in a variety of cryptocurrencies, including USDC, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, DeSo, and Focus tokens themselves, all for under 1/10,000th of a cent per transaction, including for cross-chain assets. What’s more, DeSo also supports the storage of content directly on-chain for 1/10,000th of a cent per post, which is much less than Solana at ~$1 per post or Ethereum at ~$100+ per post (source). This means that Focus can pioneer innovative monetization and content mechanics that are not possible with older high-fee blockchains or slower and heavily-censored fiat payment rails.
Paid reposts (aka decentralized ads). Focus turns advertising from
a centralized model to a peer-to-peer model using a new mechanic we introduce called simply “paid
reposts.” With Focus, any user can submit offers directly to creators to repost their content, and
those creators can choose to either accept the offer, instantly get the money, and repost the requested
content (with a “promoted” tag so people know it’s an ad), or reject the offer if they
feel the content is not relevant enough for their audience. This new model allows creators to directly
monetize their reach with just a few clicks through their inbox a day. During onboarding, all users set a
“minimum offer threshold,” which could be thousands of dollars for big influencers, to prevent
spammy offers from reaching their inbox. Offers below this threshold are still visible to the creator, only
in a separate tab that is essentially a spam folder. Creators can also set a separate “minimum
tip,” which they receive unconditionally, and which must be included in order for the offer to show up
in their inbox at all (similar to the paid message fee). Amazingly, all offers are sent and managed fully
on-chain using DeSo’s on-chain messaging infrastructure, meaning more sophisticated third-party apps
can be built to help creators manage their personal media empires. The Focus platform takes a simple 10% fee
from each offer that’s accepted, which is distributed directly to $FOCUS token holders.
Paid messages. Important people are constantly bombarded with spam
on traditional social media platforms, to the point where virtually no important person has truly open DMs.
Focus completely eliminates this spam problem by having every user set a “minimum message price”
during onboarding, which requires any non-followed user to pay a certain amount in order for a message to
reach the creator’s inbox. Messages that do not pay will still be visible to the creator, only in a
separate tab that is essentially a spam folder. While the message price for ordinary users may be low, e.g.
$0.01 for a typical user, for important users it could potentially be thousands of dollars or more.
Imagine how much someone would be willing to pay to make 100% sure that a top venture
capitalist sees their company’s pitch, or that a key strategic partner gives them a first
look. As far as we know, this kind of paid messaging system has never been tightly coupled
to a Twitter-like broadcast social network, and we believe it could vastly improve the quality of connections that users make. Amazingly, all messages are
stored and delivered fully on-chain thanks to DeSo, again enabling third-party apps to build “power
user” tools to help very important people manage their influx of messages, whether paid or not. The
Focus platform takes a simple 10% fee from each message, which is distributed directly to $FOCUS token
holders.
Uncensored generative AI. Generative AI has gotten to a point where, with just a few samples of a creator’s likeness, entirely new content can be generated. However, this functionality has yet to make its way into mainstream platforms– until now. Focus will give creators the full power of generative AI by allowing users to generate new content using the images that a creator has previously uploaded. Users will simply select images of their favorite creator from their history and provide a prompt to generate wholly new images. Creators will be able to set a fee for each query a user runs, and to earn an automatic royalty off of any income generated by the content (e.g. tips if the post is reposted). Focus will take a simple 10% cut of this revenue that will be distributed directly to $FOCUS token holders.
Unlockable content & subscriptions. Platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans pioneered subscriptions and unlockable content, and they process billions per year in revenue. But payments on these platforms aren’t anonymous, the platforms employ harsh censorship regimes, and the platforms suffer extremely high fiat payment processing fees. What’s more, cashing out from either platform requires creators to go through a very cumbersome KYC and approval process, which violates creator privacy, rejects many creators, and which most users frankly don’t have the patience for. Focus fixes all of these issues inherently by allowing creators to monetize with instant, permissionless, anonymous, low-fee crypto payments using their DeSo wallet. Although it may seem like a small improvement over existing platforms, it is important to note that no platform exists where users can pay creators for content anonymously, and we believe the market for such a service could be quite significant. What’s more, DeSo’s extremely low fees are critical to enable these new use-cases. Amazingly, all unlockable and subscription content is stored fully end-to-end encrypted on-chain, meaning that only the creator and their subscribers can see the content. Nobody else, not even the Focus devs can even see it! The Focus platform will take a simple 1% fee on this feature to completely undercut existing platforms, which charge ~15-30%, and this fee revenue will be distributed directly to $FOCUS token holders.
Creator Coins (aka tokenized creator revenue). Imagine being able to back an undiscovered creator, and then make money when they become a major influencer. Focus gives creators the ability to assign a percentage of their revenue to a token we call a “Creator Coin.” The upside for the creator is that they can directly sell a portion of their coins to raise funds, and they earn the trading fees associated with their coin. Anyone can have a Creator Coin simply by assigning a percentage of their revenue to it. Importantly, Creator Coins on Focus will be backwards-compatible with “v1” DeSo Creator Coins. Trading fees will be adjustable by the creator, with the default being 10%. The Focus platform will take half of whatever trading fee is set by the creator.
End-to-end encrypted content. While all content is generally stored directly on-chain via DeSo, it is important to note that all messages and all subscription and unlockable content on Focus is end-to-end encrypted directly with users’ wallet keys. This is again only possible because every account on Focus is also a crypto wallet, with native encryption/decryption capabilities. This means that nobody other than the parties involved can see the content– not even the Focus devs themselves.
Early on, to incentivize users to refer creators, referrers get half of the fee revenue. In particular, if the user generating the revenue was referred by another user, as will generally be the case with all users early on, then the fees will be split, such that the referrer receives half, and the other half is distributed directly to $FOCUS token-holders. This split will run for no less than one year from launch, and will continue as long as it is beneficial to the growth of the network, as determined by the Focus dev team. In practice, this means that a 10% fee quoted above would result in 5% going to $FOCUS holders while this incentive is active. This residual 5% that isn’t spent to incentivize referrals is what we consider the actual revenue of the Focus platform.
Even though Focus introduces many new ways to monetize, the platform’s economics are simple: Charge a modest fee on the income generated for creators, and distribute the fee revenue out to $FOCUS holders. The important thing to note about this is that $FOCUS token-holders are the sole beneficiaries of the fees earned by the platform. There are no “hidden” equity-holders, and there is no for-profit entity to extract rent from the token-holders. Simply put: 100% of income goes to $FOCUS.
By introducing new ways for creators to monetize, the Focus platform creates a base of fundamental value via fee revenue that is distributed directly to the $FOCUS token-holders. Even if this fee revenue is initially small, as we fully expect it will be early on, the value of $FOCUS tokens could be orders of magnitude larger as long as there is some belief that the platform will eventually grow. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: A large initial market cap of $FOCUS means we can afford to distribute more tokens via incentives, increasing the platform’s growth rate, and thus increasing the value of $FOCUS even further. We provide more details on the exact tokenomics in our tokenomics paper here.
The beautiful thing about this flywheel is that, as the value of $FOCUS increases, everyone who contributed to the platform’s success, i.e. everyone who holds $FOCUS, will hopefully see the value of their holdings grow with the success of the platform. Compare this to previous “web2” platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, where creators were seen as mere tools to entrench the platform, and then tossed aside once a network effect was achieved. Focus ensures that the value of the network effect that is eventually created is owned by the people who helped create that network effect, which we think is an amazing thing.
The Focus platform stores all of its content on the DeSo blockchain, whose code is 100% open-source. This means that, just like with Bitcoin, anyone on the internet can run a DeSo node that serves the Focus content, and every node on the network stores a full copy of all the data. This also means that anybody can build apps on top of the Focus data without the risk of being de-platformed, and they can even create their own completely novel UX’es and their own feed algorithms.
When you visit focus.xyz, you’re using our DeSo node, but there are already hundreds of nodes on the network, all run by people like you. In the long run there will likely be thousands of other nodes you could visit to get access to the same content, each with their own custom features. It also means that your DeSo wallet login on focus.xyz can be used on any app that integrates with the DeSo wallet.
What information is stored on-chain? Basically all of it. Every profile, every post, every engagement, every follow, every DM (encrypted), every token holding, and on and on... As we built out Focus, we strived to make it so that every single feature, including complex features like paid reposts and unlockable content, is a feature that a third-party app could permissionlessly provide an interface to, based solely on the data that’s available on-chain. No walled gardens, no “data moats,” no BS. This included a joint effort to upgrade the DeSo blockchain itself to allow it to cheaply handle every possible use-case, making DeSo arguably the most advanced blockchain on the planet, as users will soon experience first-hand.
In the same way that you can move Bitcoin from one wallet to another, DeSo makes it so that you can move your identity and content, in the form of your profile, followers, posts, token balances, etc anywhere as well. Thus, in some sense, we hope Focus and DeSo will decentralize social media in much the same way as Bitcoin is decentralizing the financial system.
If you have questions after reading this doc, you can query this custom GPT model for clarification. The dev team is also regularly checking this DeSo thread and the Focus Alpha Telegram channel, and you can ask questions there.
