According to an announcement made at Consensus 2023 on April 26, social network MeWe will be integrated with Polkadot's parachain Frequency blockchain network. The announcement added that the company will begin moving its user accounts onto the network this quarter.
Launched in 2012, MeWe was touted as a "Facebook alternative" with supposedly better privacy protections. An Axios report in September said the network had more than 20 million users. Frequency launched in November as a Polkadot parachain.
At the 2023 Consensus panel titled “Laying the Web3 Foundation Through Decentralized Social Networking and Data Rights,” MeWe CEO Jeffrey Edell said the move would see MeWe make a permanent commitment to users’ data ownership: “Blockchain is like doubling down on privacy. so now you allow the technology to do what the company promises […] One day MeWe could be bought by someone, a big company, in which case the privacy aspect could be lost , but once we work on the blockchain, we work on privacy. "
"We never do surveillance, we never amplify bad news or misinformation, that's not what we do, so we're very logically ready to go into the Web3 world," he said, adding, "We have to move into that slow and be Cautious, but give it your all."
According to the announcement, the integration between MeWe and Frequency is based on the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which Woodham is working on as part of Frank McCourt's Project Liberty. McCourt is allocating $100 million to the program in June 2021 . Amplica Labs was the initial technical contributor to Frequency. Its president, Braxton Woodham, who was also on the panel, stressed that the partnership between Frequency and MeWe won't solve all of social media's problems at once. However, he claims that it will provide a basic framework on which application developers can build to solve various problems in the future.
"Social networking is about a lot of different problem, from user experience to artificial insgorldms," He SAID, Explaining That '"It," s almost imageible to solve all problem at only, so the approach we've ben together is, let's, let's Connecting our digital presences on the web to create social networks. This builds the ability to attack the data layer and solve those hard problems."
