Quick take:
- Three friends founded the startup as an experiment to build a new social media model.
- Users can set an NFT as their profile picture, among other existing NFT-related functions.
- The platform will roll out new features that give users more ways to interact with NFTs in a social context.
Web3 social network, DSCVR (pronounced ‘discover’), today announced that it has raised $9 million in seed funding led by Polychain Capital, an American investment firm that focuses on investments in crypto and blockchain technology.
Other investors in the round include Upfront Ventures, Tomahawk VC, Fyrfly Venture Partners, Shima Capital and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI).
Launched last August, DSCVR has already onboarded 100,000 users, produced one million posts and comments and generated what it claims is “millions of dollars in NFT rewards for users.”
DSCVR is built on the Internet Computer blockchain. On the platform, users can already set an NFT as a profile picture, pair a wallet and create NFT verified roles. Users can also create an NFT-gated portal (a community channel), as well as view and transfer their airdrops, while NFT community builders can airdrop NFTs to their members on DCSVR.
DSCVR has plans to roll out new features that give users more ways to interact with NFTs in a social context. These include gifting non-fungible tokens to posts and comments; integrations with other token and NFT ecosystems and a Discord bot that will enable gated content by NFT ownership.
The platform will also provide 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); and more.
DSCVR was founded by three friends. “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.”
According to TechCrunch, Porter made the decision to build the platform on Internet Computer after meeting Dfinity’s president and chief scientist, Dominic Williams. At the time, Porter was working on a blockchain-based smart contract project as a consultant at BCG.
He became involved with Dfinity – a non-profit foundation that develops the Internet Computer protocol – and later left his tole at BCG to work full-time with Dfinity. However, controversies are swirling around Internet Computer. It is currently facing a class action lawsuit claiming the ICP token is unregistered security. Polychain and Andreessen Horowitz were implicated as they took the lion’s share of the 24% of the current supply of ICP tokens at the time.
DSCVR aims to be the standard for Web3 social media. The new capital will allow the platform to expand its team and acquire the resources needed to eventually set DSCVR on a community-run path. Currently, the startup is actively seeking engineers, a product designer, and a product manager.
Stay up to date:
