From identity to data, Zion’s CEO explains how he sees the app expanding in the future.
The recent introduction of the decentralized social media protocol Nostr has taken the world of distributed technology by storm. Even Block CEO Jack Dorsey espoused his penchant for the protocol, encouraging its use, funding its development, and using it extremely often himself. Meanwhile, Zion, a decentralized social media application, has observed the growth of Nostr. I asked Justin Rezvani, CEO and Founder of Zion, if the two were in competition. But he clarified that he and Zion see the benefits, and confirmed that he thinks Zion will be closely tied to Nostr in the future.
“As for Nostr, Zion is an application and Nostr is a protocol, so we don’t see it as competitive, but complementary,” Rezvani explained. “Zion will likely use Nostr in the future. What we’re building is built around innovations in messaging, identification, and payments. Zion is the first application for this technology. What we’ve built on identity (DID) and Decentralized Web Nodes (DWN) is complementary to what Nostr does and I’m very excited to see how the addition of Nostr will increase the user experience impact for creators on Zion. of our purpose and what drives us, a better experience for creators.”
One aspect of the decentralized content rolodex that Nostr lacks is data storage, Rezvani believes, but he says Zion caters to that well: “The idea that you’ll post a video and Nostr relays around the world will just store this content for free is nonsense. You need a reliable data storage mechanism and I think the combination of DID, DWNS and Nostr could be an amazing combination.
On top of that, there’s the idea of empowering content creators so they can monetize themselves directly. Zion was actually one of the first to take this opportunity, beating Nostr, who recently witnessed an explosion in the micropayment business.
“Zion has had ‘zaps’ in our app since August 2021 when we launched it and had 120,000 ‘zaps’ in the first six months of going live,” Rezvani explained. “In a world where the cost of content is going to zero, you need something to flag the most impactful pieces of content. If someone creates something meaningful that resonates with their audience, it should be recognized and rewarded. .
There have been warnings lifted regarding key management and privacy of Nostr. Although the protocol is relatively small now, these issues could present great challenges later. Regarding how Zion will address these issues, Rezvani said, “We use bitcoin-anchored DIDs as your identity on Zion; When creating an account, we give you a 12-word seed phrase, we don’t expose a private key,” quoting a video posted below on the previously linked Twitter thread.
Taking the crown as the world’s premier social media platform won’t be easy, however. Bitcoiners especially understand the power of network effects, and Twitter is by far the most widely used platform in the world. But that does not deter Zion.
“Legacy networks have real problems that need to be solved now, and that’s what we run through the lens of decentralization every day. It starts to empower the creator economy to take ownership of their content, data and communities and build something that is truly theirs,” Rezvani said.
And he won’t be alone. Meta is would have start working on its own decentralized Twitter alternative, apparently realizing the benefits such a platform brings. With the entry of Meta, fierce competition, healthy for the decentralized social media market, is beginning to brew.