Project Liberty, the initiative backed by real estate billionaire Frank McCourt that aims to disrupt today's social media platforms, has found a home on Polkadot, the framework of parallel blockchains conceived by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood.
Last year, McCourt, former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, put up $100 million to attack the existing social media structure, which he says struggles with issues related to user privacy and manipulation that regulation can't solve.
The solution, he believes, is an open-source, publicly owned infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) to make the Internet people-centric rather than giant platforms that collect data.
In fact, the idea of a centralized Internet protocol for identity, networking and messaging - much like HTTPS underlies the Web - has been an elusive goal since the early days of social networking, when people began to see problems, says Braxton Woodham, DSNP's creator.
Still, a commercial implementation is required to run the system, Woodham says, just as HTTPS requires a Web server.
"We started last year by looking in depth at over 30 different projects and finally concluded that Polkadot had features that made it particularly suitable for social networking," Woodham said in an interview. "We work with the Polkadot team at Parity Technologies to achieve scalability, latency and low cost volatility for messaging, which is essential for social networks. You don't see that with other chains."
A growing number of projects have chosen Polkadot's parallel but interconnected blockchains, called Parachains, to build on. The coveted Parachain slots have been allocated to projects backed by user communities through special auctions. Within Polkadot's parachain ecosystem, there is a category of projects intended for the common good that could include Project Liberty.
"Project Liberty will probably start as a standard parachain, at least initially," said Peter Mauric, director of public affairs at Parity Technologies. "There's a possibility that something like this, a very good service for everyone in the Polkadot ecosystem and Web3 in general, will later be chosen by the community as a public good chain."
A token associated with Project Liberty is also in the works, Woodham said. Details will follow later this year.
"The token is important because messaging is a resource and a token is used to manage stable bandwidth resources for messaging and social media that can scale," he said. "We think this will be really unique in the blockchain space."