Web3 Social Platform DSCVR Raises $9M Seed Round Led by Polychain Capital
DSCVR has onboarded over 100,000 users, produced a million posts and comments, and generated millions of dollars in NFT rewards to users.
DSCVR, a Web3 social content network running on the Internet Computer blockchain, has quickly set the standard for illustrating what’s possible when operating a social platform entirely on-chain. NFT integrations, community gating and voting, and a variety of cross-product collaborations have stoked remarkable growth in users and engagement since DSCVR’s launch last year — culminating in its recent announcement of a $9 million seed funding round led by Polychain Capital.
Launched last year, DSCVR has already onboarded over 100,000 users, produced a million posts and comments, and generated millions of dollars in NFT rewards to users.
“We initially created DSCVR as our personal experiment to see if it would even be possible to build a modern social web application on a blockchain,” said Rick Porter, CEO and Co-Founder at DSCVR. “With our exponential growth in users, this raise will help us accelerate our roadmap and make Web3 accessible to anyone who knows how to use social media.”
Other participants in the funding round include Upfront Ventures, Tomahawk VC, Fyrfly Venture Partners, Shima Capital, and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI), as reported in TechCrunch. “The team at DSCVR truly understood how to build and develop social media communities and how to scale a Web3 platform. It is rare to see both skills in the same company,” said Upfront’s Mark Suster.
DSCVR has tirelessly built on its early successes by continually iterating on the platform and responding to the needs of its users. “That’s the massive paradigm shift that’s happened in Web3,” said Porter. “Now we can progressively make changes and understand our users better.”
New features on the horizon will include gifting NFTs to posts and comments; integrations with other token and NFT ecosystems; a Discord bot that will enable gated content by NFT ownership; the ability for other projects to use DSCVR’s gating technology; governance tools like mod elections; enabling DSCVR’s communities to become decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs); as well as additional ways to interact with NFTs and fungible tokens in a social context.
Building on the Internet Computer has allowed DSCVR to build a full-stack (frontend + backend) application that is completely decentralized, while running at the necessary speed to close the performance gap for users who are used to Web2 product experiences.
Porter has consistently stressed the importance of integrations and collaborations to the continued growth of DSCVR and the overall IC ecosystem. “Integrations are going to be key to the success of your application,” he said recently during the Internet Computer’s Supernova hackathon. “We’re building together — this is an ecosystem of applications. So if we’re going to be successful, we have to work together and provide common interfaces for us to be able to do that.”
His remarks echoed a theme that he emphasized earlier this year during a panel at Shanghai International Blockchain Week.
“A year from now, the idea of integration is just going to be completely ingrained into the thinking of a typical IC developer,” Porter declared. “It’s easy to facilitate these things over the Internet Computer. And the community definitely has the right mindset to make these things happen.”
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