Segment 1: Questions from Cryptoiz
1. Could you please introduce yourself first and share with us the background of Solcial team?
Answer : Hey, This is Shri, I manage the marketing at Solcial, I’ve been in crypto space for a while, I joined Solcial because i was inspired by the idea of a censorship resistant decentralised social network.
2. So our community is really excited with Solcial, they even bought your pre-sale token. Can you share to us more about what Solcial is?
Answer : Solcial is a decentralised social network allowing users to interact without fearing censorship, and allowing content creators to be rewarded fairly at market value and without middleman.
Solcial is a mobile app (iOS and Android), as well as a desktop app, and a website. On Solcial each user has their own token, allowing you to invest directly in people. You get minted 1 millions coins when you signup, that supply is fixed and the same for everyone. These coins are yours, you can keep them or sell them (or send them to friends).
Then to follow people we have 3 subscription levels: you can follow someone for free (Tier 1) to access their public content (similar to Twitter or Instagram), and to access their private content (what we call Tier 2 and 3 subscriptions) you need to own their token, to be an investor in them. That’s what we called the “invest-for-subscription” model.
We also display your NFTs on a user profile, either just to show-off, or to buy & sell your NFTs with your friends.
All user content is stored on IPFS and accessed through a P2P layer that we developed. So it doesn’t rely on censorable servers or gateways. And the token related operations (minting, trading etc) are all on the Solana blockchain.
3. Please tell us more about the token utility..
Answer :
- The Solcial token will be used for 3 things:
- as a governance token for voting on the DAO.
- for having discounts on trading fees.
- and to buy the token of anyone on Solcial, you will need SLC as the base currency. Each user token is traded versus SLC (the Solcial token), and you need SLC to buy the token of anyone. A bit like Chilliz for the Fan tokens, to buy the football clubs coins like Arsenal or PSG, you trade them versus CHZ.
4. What are the major milestones Solcial has achieved so far?
Answer : We’ve met nearly all the goals now, the V1 is ready at 85% and we’re already using it ourselves. The roll out of the fully decentralised app will be progressive, first it will involve some centralised components in the early stage, and then we’ll roll out the P2P network progressively, until everything is decentralised. It should be seamless for our users.
5. Partnership is an important point, so can you list some big partnership you have now?
Answer : Yes, we are working on partnerships with other crypto and metaverse projects but we can’t communicate on that yet.
And we are backed by tier 1 investors: Solana Ventures, Alameda research, Rarestone, Newave Capital, NOIA Capital, Genesis Block ventures and more. They all provide us broad support from industry networks to community marketing.
Segment 2: Questions from Community
- Question: Solcial’s mission is to use social media to reach Web 3.0. As vital as universal acceptance of this unique innovation is. Is there a way for you to bring consumers and, most crucially, concept of work to Solcial? What strategies do you have in mind to gain credibility? @mahissap
Answer: Excellent question, that’s actually the most important. How to get a network effect. The key to understand is that a social network is a marketplace, you have supply and demand. You have content and users.
And to get more users they need to see new content, but to get more content you need new users to post it. So you have a chicken and egg problem to solve early on. And the only way to solve a chicken and egg problem for a marketplace is to start with a small niche, a small group, dominate that market, and then expand.
Here we’re starting with the market we know the best: crypto traders. People will be able to share their market analysis, trading calls etc, and interact together (either to speculate on each other, or to subscribe to their private content, their special insights etc). Once we get enough engagement with these first users, we’ll expand the user base to other groups that are lined up and ready to onboard.
- Supporting billions of users on one platform requires a large technological arsenal to make it possible. So, what is the technology that Solcial has adopted to make this possible and manage millions of users on its platform without crashing the servers? @tanmoy284910957
Answer: Good point, the solution that we have adopted is to not use servers at all. Instead we rely on a network of users, a peer-to-peer network where every user is a node in the system, helping both the decentralisation and the scalability of the platform.
On Solcial all user content is stored on IPFS and accessed through a P2P layer that we developed. So it doesn’t rely on censorable servers or gateways. And the token related operations (minting, trading etc) are all on the Solana blockchain.
The P2P layer also allows us to scale to 100 millions users at minimal costs.
You can read more about technical highlights of Solcial in our Technical Blog: https://medium.com/@solcial/distributed-social-network-855be56d720f
- What will happen if the user posts some “especially sensitive” content such as racism, pedophilia, murder, or anti-political action? @jokowowbgt
Answer: We’re a platform that can’t delete content. But we can hide content in the UI through moderation: users can report content that is illegal, and when the ratio of reports/views is above a certain %, we’ll hide the content in the UI and unpin the data from our IPFS nodes. Because the community (as a whole) has voted that this content is disgusting or illegal and should be hidden.
But if some community somewhere thinks that this content is important and should be visible, they can just continue to pin the content on IPFS and broadcast it using their nodes. So it will be visible to them via their direct links, but not visible on the UI to the broader audience.
- We’ve seen platforms like Hive, LBRY, Steem, Uptrennd which was later closed the main issue they have is token price as users are rewarded with tokens, how you’ll maintain the great demand of your token? @waniperih120310
Answer: We are not rewarding users with tokens, users will have their own token, independent of the Solcial token. And we have made the Solcial token a high utility token. You have 3 main reasons to hold SLC: to vote on the governance, to get discounts on trading fees, and to buy the token of anyone you will need SLC.
- A complete and wonderful project. So, what can I post on Solcial? Images, status, video, music,… Is there anything that I have to limit? @duykhang300502
Answer: Thanks, at first we’ll only allow users to post text and images, in the future we’ll include more fancy things (videos, audio etc)
- I read that Solcial has 3 subscription levels to follow people. Can you explain what is the difference between each Tier level? as content creators what are the benefits if we have a lot of followers? Can content creators create “private content” that must be accessed for a fee? @andy307774991
Answer : We have 3 subscription levels: you can follow someone for free (Tier 1) to access their public content (similar to Twitter or Instagram), and to access their private content (what we call Tier 2 and 3 subscriptions) you need to own their token, to be an investor in them. That’s what we called the “invest-for-subscription” model.
- Solcial allows anyone to share content, in which all participants are rewarded for their efforts. Can you explain how can a user and content creator profit from this platform? Is there a reward for each post, like, comment, or share on the platform? @bill59944974
Answer: On Solcial you sort of like a business, like a public listed company on the stock market. You have a price, and a market cap. And you are the one holding most of your token supply. So when people are interested in you, and in what you post, they buy your token, and your price goes higher. And so your market cap goes higher. So if you need some cash, you can sell a bit of tokens at this higher price to pay for a computer or a car, etc. You are like a startup really.
And on Solcial you are encouraged to post valuable content to your followers that have invested in you for a reason. You can share whatever insights, knowledge or information you want with them.
Whatever is your talent, or your value-add, as long as the world is willing to pay for what you offer, you can have a market cap, and create a business of your own. Even if you’re just a humorist, making jokes all day, people can buy your token to see your ‘premium jokes’ on their feeds. And you can monetize your talent by becoming like a public listed company. It’s a new economic model that allows anyone to become a business.
- What are your main features that distinguish you from other Social Media Platforms and what competitive advantages do you have? @Ichaaneta11
Answer: It depends which competitors we are looking at, the main advantages are surrounding our design, we are peer-to-peer and decentralised by nature.
The second advantage is that we are building on top of great technologies: Solana and IPFS, we are not rebuilding another layer 1.
Another advantage is that we have a community of crypto libertarian that truely support us in our mission. And this is invaluable to us.
- How will the project protect the copyright of users’ intellectual products? Where will Solcial revenue come from to maintain the project? @sitiqadriyah
Answer: If a copywriter submits a complaint, we can take down the copyrighted content from our IPFS nodes and hide it in the UI, but other users can continue to broadcast the content if they wish, the link will be a direct IPFS link. On Solcial the content is accessed via our P2P network, but stored on IPFS.
But our power is limited in the sense that it’s a decentralised, open-source protocol making available copyrighted content. It’s like when HTTP or FTP is used to access these files, there is little the authors can do, even against IPFS itself.
- Do you have AUDIT certificate or are you working to AUDIT your project, so that the security of the project becomes more secure and reliable? @paklatifsusanto
Answer: For security we’ve partnered with Kudelski security (the firm that has audited the Solana blockchain itself) that is auditing us.
