July 2024

OpenSocial Protocol, a composable infrastructure layer for building social applications, announced today a $6 million strategic backing led by Framework Ventures and North Island Ventures, with participation from other investors including Hivemind Capital Partners, Stratos, Moonrock Capital, Chorus One, HV Capital, X Ventures, Gate Labs, Panga Capital, Aspen Digital; and super angels like Jordi Alexander (Selini Capital), Sreeram Kannan (EigenLayer), Luca Netz (Pudgy Penguins), Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon Labs), Yaoqi (Altlayer), Robinson Burkey (Wormhole Foundation), Gabby Dizon (YGG), Mik Naayem (Dapper Labs), Cygaar (Abstract), Regan Bozman (Lattice Capital), Muddy Water and more. Built by Everest Ventures Group, a leading Web3 operating group in Asia focused on consumer applications, OpenSocial Protocol provides open-source, multichain social application infrastructure tools that enable users and communities to build social decentralized applications (dApps) without coding experience. This is a vision that OpenSocial stands by as it helps to lower the barriers of entry for users who are looking to create their own community app. Along with the $5 million seed funding round and $15 million in OpenSocial Protocol ecosystem funds raised previously, OpenSocial Protocol now has $26 million in funding to support the protocol’s development. Earlier investors include Portal Ventures, Animoca Brands, OKX Ventures, and renowned Web3 entrepreneurs include Smokey the Bera (Berachain), Jason Yano (Blockworks), Roham Gharegozlou (Dapper Labs), Brian Fabian Crain (Chorus One), Mike Dudas (6th Man Ventures) and more. “We think that the OpenSocial team is well positioned to become a major player in the growing SocialFi movement across Asia,” said Framework Ventures Co-Founder Vance Spencer. “Their team is immensely talented and has prior experience scaling apps and onboarding millions of users. We’re excited to partner with the team as they expand to support several promising new apps.” "We believe that OpenSocial is building a sustainable social platform that can bring millions of new users into crypto, and we're thrilled to be supporting Allen and his highly capable team in this effort," said Travis Scher, Co-Founder and Managing Director of North Island Ventures. "The strategic backing accelerates OpenSocial’s ability to deploy its infrastructure across all major chains and ecosystems, launch a user-friendly platform where creators, moderators, and users can easily build communities, and develop new dApps tailored for the existing Web3 culture and communities. We aim to help empower and launch 1,000 community apps by 2025," said Allen Ng, Co-Founder of OpenSocial Protocol. OpenSocial Protocol hits 30,000 onchain users in 2 weeks as the first app goes live OpenSocial Protocol aims to onboard thousands of apps by providing infrastructure and a customizable user interface layer, ensuring true ownership of intellectual property and community relationships, and offering better-aligned monetization and financial incentives for communities and users. It is building the necessary open-source infrastructure to enable the largest multichain community economy by solving three key challenges: user retention, spam bot prevention, and user growth beyond the crypto-centric audience. SoMon (short for Social Monster), a Reddit-like forum built to empower communities with true ownership, became the first app to launch on OpenSocial Protocol on June 19 with over 30,000 onchain active users, an average engagement time close to 20 minutes and over 300,000 onchain transactions, excluding spam bots, in just two weeks, solving one of the key challenges in any social media platform. Another app that is launching on OpenSocial is Zeek, a social collaboration network that allows users to harness the value of their community-building networks through onchain social bounty mechanics and reputation building. In June, Zeek completed its own $3 million fundraise. OpenSocial: Enabling scalable, multichain social apps without coding experience OpenSocial Protocol’s modular design with easy-to-deploy social tools on a multichain approach enables creators and communities to compose apps quickly and economically. Features are either on-chain or off-chain and include feed, chatroom, text/video/audio/posts, comments, reactions, voting, share, on-chain social graphs (social data and structure), tribes (user and topic-based communities), megaphones (advertising engine), as well as plug-ins (token issuance, DAO tools, betting, voting, bounties, matching, mini-games). By embedding social functionalities into the core experience across different verticals, onchain social helps break down silos and enables greater connectivity and engagement across the entire ecosystem. "We believe social has the potential to be a major catalyst for mainstream consumer adoption. Every creator and community builder should be owners and entrepreneurs," Ng added. EVG has also deployed 80 developers and builders to develop the infrastructure for onboarding thousands of community apps with just a few clicks. By actively working with early adopters to integrate thriving communities, redefine data sovereignty, and implement sustainable economic incentives, OpenSocial is paving the way for a future where anyone can cultivate meaningful yet sustainable social connections and true social data ownership. About OpenSocial Protocol OpenSocial Protocol (OpenSocial) is a multichain Social infrastructure empowering creators to effortlessly build community apps. Leveraging its robust social graph and modular design, OpenSocial enables transparent content promotion to specific user groups, ensuring fair value distribution among all stakeholders. OpenSocial offers one of the best data, tooling, and financial layer, and its vision is to enable the largest multichain community economy. OpenSocial Protocol is founded by Everest Ventures Group. Website: www.opensocial.co Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenSocialLabs Media contact: Gemma Lo / gemma@opensocial.co About Everest Ventures Group Founded in 2018, Everest Ventures Group (EVG) is a Web3 operating group driving mass adoption of Web3 by building products with real use cases that are set to onboard the next million users. Headquartered in Hong Kong with a global team of over 300 individuals, EVG has built and launched 15+ products across Social (OpenSocial Protocol, SoMon, Zeek), Gaming & Culture (Mugen Interactive, Legend of Arcadia, Last Odyssey, LiveArt) and FinTech (Aspen Digital). As an early investor and lead advisor, EVG has contributed to 10+ unicorns and 150+ defining projects such as Celestia, Berachain, Wormhole, Dapper Labs (Flow), Animoca Brands, Immutable, The Sandbox, Yuga Labs, Kraken, Lukka, Dunamu and Blocklords. Website: https://www.evg.co/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EVGHQ/ Disclosures: Information contained herein is accurate as of the date of publication and is subject to change. This is not investment advice and readers should not construe discussion of any particular organization as a recommendation to purchase or sell, or a solicitation of an offer to purchase or sell, any securities or digital assets related to such organization.