Primal – a company that seeks to develop bitcoin-infused applications for the Nostr social networking community – has recently garnered as much as $1 million in new funds from firms like Ten31 and Hivemind Ventures.
Primal Gets a Nice Chunk of Money
The main goal of Primal is to allow users of the program to send “zaps” (small amounts of bitcoin) to other users that post content or items they enjoy anywhere in the world. Primal founder and CEO Miljan Braticevic explained in a recent interview:
With Nostr, we now have a global publishing protocol with an open social graph that anyone can build on, as well as a monetary network attached to it in the form of zaps. I think that everyone will be surprised by how quickly Nostr-based products will reach, and then surpass the capabilities of the closed legacy platforms.
The big clincher of Primal is that it has an easy-to-use interface like what users of Twitter will see when they log onto their pages. Combine this with the open-source Nostr protocol, and what you have is a platform that is resistant to censorship and fully decentralized. So far, Nostr has about 30 million users, and the name is getting bigger and stronger every day.
Social media can be a dangerous playing ground given it’s ruled by conglomerates that have full say in what you can and cannot discuss. Ask any conservative poster, for example, and they’ll likely tell you they’ve been censored or had things taken down at some point, and if they haven’t, they’re constantly worried about what actions platforms may take against them in the future.
Putting conservatives aside, it appears nobody is safe. Robert Kennedy Jr., for example, is a member of the democrat party and recently threw his hat into the 2024 presidential ring. His goal is to beat Joe Biden and garner next year’s democratic nomination for president. A few years back, Kennedy was kicked off Instagram for posting what the company felt was disinformation regarding COVID vaccines (Kennedy has often claimed to be anti-vaccine).
The idea that social media could be decentralized as Nostr is and allow people to post as they would without interference from the hosting platform is impressive and gives people hope that they will be able to have open, direct, and truthful discussions without being retaliated against.
What to Expect
Discussing Nostr, Max Webster – the founder of Hivemind Ventures, which took part in the million-dollar funding round – commented:
Say [that] we have approximately 500,000 users with access to a Nostr Twitter-style client. Tomorrow, a new music player launches and each of those 500,000 users can now instantly log into the music player, and whatever new users the music player signs up can now also use the Twitter services.