Decentralized Bitcoin-focused social media app Zion may use Nostr in the future

From identity to data, Zion’s CEO explains how he envisions the app expanding in the future.

The recent launch of the decentralized social media protocol Nostr took the world of distributed technologies by storm. Even Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block, has professed a fondness for the protocol, promoting its use, funding development, and using it himself prodigiously. Meanwhile, Zion, a decentralized social media app, has watched Nostr grow. I asked Justin Rezvani, CEO and Founder of Zion, if the two are competitive. But he made it clear that Zion and himself see the benefits and confirmed that he believes Zion will be closely intertwined with Nostr in the future.

“As for Nostr, Zion is an application and Nostr is a protocol, so we don’t see it as competition but as complementary,” Rezvani explained. “Zion will likely use Nostr in the future. What we are building is focused on innovation in messaging, ID and payments. Zion is the first app for this technology. What we’ve built on top of Decentralized Identity (DID) and Decentralized Web Nodes (DWNs) complement what Nostr is doing, and I’m very excited to see how adding Nostr will increase the impact of the developer user experience on Zion. This is part of our goal and what guides us, a better experience for developers.”

One aspect of the decentralized content rolodex that Nostr misses is data storage, Rezvani believes, but he says Zion addresses this well: “The idea that you publish a video and Nostr relays that content around the world just for free.” save is nonsense. You need a reliable data storage mechanism and I believe the combination of DID, DWNS and Nostr could be an incredible combination.”

Add to that the idea of ​​empowering content creators to directly monetize themselves. Zion was actually one of the first to seize this opportunity, beating Nostr, which has recently seen an explosion in micropayments activity.

“Zion has had 120,000 ‘zaps’ in our application since August 2021 when we launched and in the first six months that we were live,” explained Rezvani. “In a world where the cost of content is approaching zero, you need something to signal the most impactful content. When someone creates something meaningful that resonates with their audience, that should be recognized and rewarded.”

There were warnings raised regarding the key management and data protection of Nostr. While the protocol is relatively small now, these issues could pose major challenges down the road. Regarding how Zion will address these issues, Rezvani said, “We use mit Bitcoin anchored DIDs as your identity on Zion; When you create an account, we give you a 12-word seed phrase, we don’t disclose a private key,” a Video posted below on the previously linked Twitter thread.

Taking the crown as the world’s favorite social media platform won’t be easy, however. Bitcoiners particularly understand the power of network effects, and Twitter is by far the most 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’re tackling every day through the lens of decentralization. This starts with empowering the creator economy to take ownership of their content, their data, their communities, and build something that is truly theirs,” Rezvani said.

And he won’t be alone. Meta is reportedly beginning work on its own decentralized Twitter alternative and appears to be realizing the benefits such a platform can bring. With the entry of Meta, stiff competition is starting to brew that is healthy for the decentralized social media market.