Interview with the Nerd: Laura -Forbole
and their Dream of Freedom dedicated to the new generations: DEStroy MOdern Slavery.
I first met the Fobole team in Seoul, during the Cosmos Network HackAtom held on 19–21 July 2019, where they won the 3rd place.
As it was at the beginning of my journey in diving into the world of blockchain, many of the concepts and presentations (that was too difficult to understand) ended up falling into a gray limbo of forgotten memories.
Despite my not being adequately technically prepared, two teams were able to impress me with the presentations of their projects in a completely sincere and genuine way:
Everett with Everett Protocol and Forbole with Desmos (and its first module Magpie).
I was lucky enough to deepen my familiarity with both teams and their works, which over time (and more knowledge on my part) undoubtedly confirmed what had been my first superficial opinion. But while Everett works in a sphere with which I don’t so often interact, I believe that Desmos answers in a more direct way to the everyday needs of any user, bringing the communication to another level of trustless experience.
Desmos network is not only a hymn to individual freedom, but also, it is the key that opens the door to a new way of communicating.
Through Desmos everyone has all the necessary tools to build his social network, according to their needs, expectations, and dreams.
But above all, Desmos is an uncensorable public blockchain in which it is possible to verify the identities of individuals & at the same time users can arbitrarily decide whether or not to sell their data for statistical purposes and receive compensation for this (remember that this already happens in the main blockchain platforms, but the social media itself retains all earnings).
Given the impact of the project and its relevance in the historical and social context in which we find ourselves, I am really grateful to the Forbole team for having lent themselves to an in-depth study of Desmos with me.
In particular, I want to thank Laura Nori, Communication Designer at Forbole | Desmos Network, who worked with me on this article in the hope to reach and make more and more users aware of the dark sides of traditional social media and why Desmos represents a real cultural revolution of our times.
Daniela: Hi Laura, it’s really a pleasure for me to have you as a guest of the Cosmos Guardian!
Before going more in detail about Desmos Network, could you describe briefly the team which is working behind the scenes of Forbole? What do you think is the peculiarity that distinguishes you as a group and that allows you to collaborate so synergistically?
Laura: Desmos is a project presented by the Forbole team, co-founded by Kwun Yeung and Terence Lam in 2017. It is based in Hong Kong but has members working remotely from different parts of the world. This means that you’ll always find someone ready to answer your questions, but that’s also because some of us don’t get much sleep 😂
The team behind Desmos, which is quite the same as Forbole, is composed by Leonardo Braganolo (Engineering), Rooty Chan (UX/UI designer), Terence Lam (Business & Management), Riccardo Montagnin (Engineering), Laura Nori — which is me 😅 (Design & Marketing), Steven Ping (Finance & Operations), Monika Pusz (Engineering), Kwun Yeung (Engineering), Shilin Zheng (Research & Content).
Forbole is a space where people can unleash their potential while working on things they love to do. It is a very open-minded environment where the opinion of each team member is highly regarded. This mentality leads us to great teamwork and a project that reflects everyone’s views.
D: I’m pleased to notice that there are a lot of women in your team: it’s always nice to see that in the blockchain gender differences are not a problem as they are in the vast majority of other workplaces.
In this regard, what are the problems that Desmos as a project wants to solve? What is the inspiration behind its creation?
L: Desmos wants to solve the problems caused by the centralization of social networks. People have no idea what goes on behind the scenes of what they do every day. Social networks are the biggest example of corruption, cheating and manipulation fancy dressed as friendly, fun and free platforms. People have no control over their data usage. Desmos is a public blockchain whereby anyone can build any form of decentralized social network where people will finally have the ownership of themselves. They will receive a reward when selling personal data to advertisers, social networks will split with them the money they make with partnerships and users actions. People will also bee free to write their thoughts on uncensored platforms.
D: I’ve always thought that the users’ own sovereignty is difficult, and perhaps too utopian, to achieve. But talking to you now seems to me more and more like concreteness. Surely you have a well-defined road-map to accomplish this climb to individual freedom: what are your goals in the short and long term?
L: Our main goal is to create a community of people who share our ideals and who want to claim their rights. There is room for everyone inside Desmos: for those who want to invest in our project, for developers who want to test our chain and users who want to try our first decentralized app built on Desmos (I will talk about it later 😉).
Apart from these community-related objectives, technically speaking we want to build a protocol that allows developers to build any distributed social network having the users in mind. To do so, we will also integrate with the IBC protocol to build a cross-chain system that allows to create decentralized profiles that can be accessed also by any other chain or decentralized application.
At the same time, we are building a set of tools to empower mobile and web developers so that they can create any Desmos-based application pretty easily and quickly without having to think too much about the blockchain-related stuff. We want to attract and help those people as much as we want to attract and help newcomers to the blockchain world.
D: Uh-uh! So many things are going on!
Speaking from the technical point of view, what is Desmos Network’s state of development? Is there important information you want to share with us about the progress achieved by the team?
L: We’re building Desmos testnet at the moment which is called Morpheus and it’s being regularly updated. At this time, you can perform the following actions: create a post, add a reaction to an existing post, create a poll, answer an existing poll, create a media post, become a validator node and undergo an update procedure. Other features will soon be available, such as the creation of a decentralized social profile and the possibility of using hashtags inside post messages. We’re also fixing bugs that we had the chance to identify thanks to the contributions by our validators, which has grown to 32 teams.
D: Now let’s talk about Mooncake, which has literally won me over since its first demo. Can you tell us which, in your opinion, are the ideal users and the points that distinguish this app from traditional social networks? Could Mooncake turn out to be one of the first concrete cases of use of the blockchain applied to everyday life?
L: The main differences with other social networks lie at the base: you will access the app as if it were a wallet, (no personal data are required) and you can publish any random thought on an uncensored platform. The ideal users are those people who want to be totally conscious and informed about the whole context they’re living with, even if it’s something as ‘simple’ as social networks. I hope the vibes inside mooncake will be very different, we want users to feel free but even more important to BE free while they’re using their favorite social networks.
What I care to clarify is that Mooncake it’s just a small drop compared to what can be done with Desmos. Companies can arm themselves with creativity and create their own personalized social networks, using Desmos as a tool.
I’ve recently found out that on average, people have 7 social media accounts. Facebook counts 2.500+ billion users and 500,000 new users every day. That means 6 new profiles every second. If we can convince even a teeny-tiny percentage of these people to use mooncake, well I’ve answered your second question 😅
D: I saw that you have recently launched a new column dedicated to the information of the basic terminologies related to blockchain: I am very impressed by this because I think that really many people underestimate the importance of caring and cultivating knowledge towards token holders.
A conscious holder can become a valuable ally and at the same time bring value within it through his own peculiarities. But I am curious to find out if this is also what motivated you to create this new series!
L:
I’m not asking people to know how the blockchain technology works, I’m asking them to acquire the necessary knowledge in order to make conscious decisions.
Why does the blockchain technology make certain things possible? Why should I trust any blockchain projects? What kinds of values are behind it? I admit it’s a scary world, which is why we thought of blossary as a column that brings all the basic information necessary to people who don’t work directly in this world. Blossary doesn’t start out as a teacher-student thing, it’s more of an “I’m new too, let’s learn together” kind of thing (which is actually the truth). In fact, since I’m new in this world, I acquire a lot of information from my team. If you want me to tell you a secret, I stole some caption from the article of Riccardo, my teammate, just right here on the Cosmos Guardian. 😂😅 I consider it one of the best articles to explain blockchain, and I find myself reading it over and over again 😂 Blossary was in fact inspired by his idea to make the blockchain understandable to everyone, but in an even more direct way and visually more appealing.
D: In consideration of what has been said so far, it appears that your team will be involved in several new releases in the near future. Is there any project (Cosmos related or not) you would like to collaborate with to bring more value to Desmos and Mooncake’s vision?
L: We think it might be interesting to collaborate with:
- BitSongOfficial: they could use Desmos to integrate the comments and reviews part to the songs.
- IOV, in particular Starname: we would like to integrate their name system within Mooncake to have human-readable usernames.
- Everett, in particular, we would like to use their new Keplr tool to create a web version of Mooncake
D: I can’t wait to see the result of these collaborations!
Now one last question: how can the members of the Cosmos community help in a concrete way to make your project being adopted exponentially?
I’m sure my teammates will have a lot to say, but personally I believe and hope that the cosmos community should start use and introduce to friends and family Mooncake and all the future decentralized social networks. Plus, if a lot of people will use Desmos, being Desmos itself based on Cosmos then they will most likely become part of the Cosmos community itself 💪🏼
INSERT COIN(S) TO CONTINUE…
And here we are at the end of this eighth #InterviewWithTheNerd! Yay!
With the Desmos team I’m working on a Mooncake review from a user’s point of view, and I must say I’m really looking forward to sharing this experience with you.
See you next week with another #ATOMic interview: KysenPool 🐾
Thanks to Josh.
