New Social Media Dapp on KOINOS

A Direct Rival To Hive?

Last week @andrarchy announced the MVP (minimum viable product) of a new dapp on Koinos in December. Since it is MVP, it won't exactly be a finished product, but instead will show a taste of what it could grow into. The screenshot gives us a hint as to the name of the dapp: it's fairly clear that it will be called KOINOS SOCIAL. That's not exactly an attention grabber, but I guess names can still change.

So why is this of importance? Well I guess to me it's simple, we might get some competition on the web3 social media front. It's clear that this dapp won't be a next friend.tech or stars.arena. It is built on a true web3 chain that is actually decentralized. But perhaps exactly for this reason it might have a hard time gathering attention. It's usually the fancy VC funded stuff that goes "mainstream", although as we have seen it's generally a very short hype before the lights blow out. KOINOS like HIVE does not have millions of $ to put into marketing etc. Organic growth will have to do. But that has been actually quite successful for $Koin after its recent 4x. There was a bit of drama involved before that, but what recent events have showed me is that KOINOS does have a vibrant and resilient community. The chain has grown and has potential.

Do we know more about the dapp?

Yes! At least I am fairly confident that KOINOS SOCIAL will be based on the post by Hive account@jga. You can read about it here

Some of the ideas are very close to what we have here on Hive, like a 7 day curation window (with authors and curators). But due to the proof of burn concept of Koinos, rewards will be distributed quite differently. While Hive's reward pool is based on inflation, the rewards on this dapp will come from "Sponsors" that burn their Koin in a pool dedicated for this dapp. Part of that Koin will be used for funding the reward pool. A big disadvantage of that is ofc that it is quite literally dependent on bigger accounts to fund the dapp. If nobody is willing to do that, there won't be any rewards to distribute. It's unclear if such a concept based on donations could actually work in practice, since people tend to not participate in such pools (and instead try to maximize their rewards). But I can also see there being a kind of snowball effect in which users get excited in receiving rewards and direct some of their funds towards the pool etc.

It's also important to note that the data won't be stored as text on the chain, but as hashes. This of course removes the load on the chain, but it also means that the data won't be immutable. Instead, data will be stored on app servers that will also be funded through the pool (which means that there will be even less rewards distributed to the users of the dapp).

Finally, rewards are distributed based on the amount of reward tokens one holds. It's unclear to me how they will first be distributed. Is it based on the amount of Koin sent to the reward pool? These tokens will then be distributed after the 7 day vote window 1:1 with Koins. It is also mentioned that the "governance" token (is that the reward token?) will have a linear decay (until 2 years). This is a good idea since early adopters will have a vote advantage as votes pile up.

Conclusion

So, will this be a Hive killer dapp? Probably not. There are quite a few differences that make the two unique. Both have their pros and cons and it will be interesting to see how the community will respond to such a dapp (that might not be familiar with Hive or Steem). It's also clear that Hive has evolved in the last years to be more than a social media dapp. We have web3 games, decentralized video content storage solutions, defi, NFTs and the work by Hive account@vaultec will give us actual smart contracts soon. But I will definitely sign up for KOINOS SOCIAL and try it out.