If you look at social media and crypto, there is one glaring, massive difference between the two: centralization.

While crypto has been the pioneer in offering decentralized value over the internet, social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have done that polar opposite. They not only sold user data (unbeknownst to most users) to the highest bidder, they have censored and taken away some of the most important voices of the day, at a time when we need them the most. Say what you will about the man himself, but they even deplatformed the President of the United States.

On one hand, the world seems to be careening out of control while the legacy and social media companies have embraced their role as the champion of all this. On the other hand however, crypto and decentralized blockchain technology have been seen not only as the next internet technology paradigm, but have also been embraced by those that want to take back financial control from the corrupt banking industry.

With SoBloks we have a unique opportunity to take the best of both worlds. We've embraced the sharing and information exchange pioneered by early social media and have begun to weave it into the decentralized global ledger that is not at the whim of a few companies or governments. With this approach we can become more censorship resistant and more open and transparent with data and processes.

We realized when we were building SoBloks that we needed to open it up. The first phase of this is with our governance plan. We envision governance eventually leading the way on why and how we build the platform. In the beginning, the SoBloks team will lead with a lot of the design and feature ideation. As we build over time however, and as the community grows, those that use the site day to day (not those that sit in an office and dream up better ways to sell ads) will be the ones that drive the direction.

None of this will be immediate. We are still working through beta level code and features. But we are starting, now, on the first steps. To do this, we are releasing an NFT series that the app will recognize and unlock voting rights for upcoming proposals. We have decided on 500 NFTs to represent all SoBloks governance going forward. Imagine for a minute if there were 500 regular people, spread out all over the world, that could highly influence how Twitter operated...

In addition to helping steer the direction of the platform, SoBloks Governance NFT holders will also gain access to special site features. These at the moment are tbd, but we will be providing updates as these are determined, and we are actively looking for the parts of the platform where this makes most sense.

Our platform of choice for launch is the Cardano blockchain. With Cardano's steady, predictable, and secure progress (no surprises - and that's a good thing!), we knew it would be an ideal platform to build on. While other chains have been hacked, rolled back, and broken a lot of things, we appreciate Cardano's steady pace of vetted, scientific progress. This allows us to have the confidence to focus more on building features versus worrying about unknown security issues or platform crashes.