Zebedee’s head of research and development, Chris Moss, CEO Simon Cowell, and CTO Andre Neves gather at a September 2022 meeting in Boulder, Colorado.
Zebedee
Video game payment firm Zebedee, which has more than a million bitcoin wallets and is backed by nearly $50 million venture capital, today moved its main ZBD application to Nostr, the rapidly growing decentralized competitor to Twitter. Instead of liking content like on Twitter and Facebook, users of social networks built on the Nostr protocol have sent each other 895,000 “zaps,” or tiny amounts of bitcoin worth $3.6 million.
The move, which will eventually let Zebedee’s users seamlessly leave the ZBD app to any of the dozens of applications now available on Nostr, might seem counterintuitive in the winner-take-all world of traditional social media. But unlike traditional social networks that control their users’ identities, the integration with the open-source Nostr protocol could also supercharge adoption by letting any of the 18 million registered Nostr users join the app.
“The ZBD app is now a Nostr client with full capabilities,” says Zebedee co-founder and CTO, Andre Neves, 31.
As Twitter’s estimated value has reportedly decreased by a third since Elon Musk bought it in October 2022 for $44 billion, Neves thinks the ability for users to send bitcoin from one social app to another and take their identities—followers and all— to competing applications, gives Nostr a competitive edge among a herd of similar platforms now picking off unsatisfied Twitter users.
“Zaps are inherently part of the social experience here so individuals are able to support their content creators,” says Neves. “It’s no longer just an influencers game. You can support and receive support from anyone and anywhere. Because this is the Nostr protocol. It works across other apps as well as Zebedee.”
New Jersey-based Zebedee was founded in 2019, to help video game developers pay users tiny amounts of bitcoin to their users. The company, which raised $46.5 million, now has 72 employees and is working with 220 developers to build apps that use the Lightning Network for bitcoin transactions. The next best-funded startup building on Nostr is Damus, backed by 7 bitcoin donated by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Among the early ZBD users are music streaming service Wavlake, podcasting platform Fountain and soon-to-launch Gesso, whose followers will be able to earn bitcoin by listening to music and podcasts, for example.
In spite of having 100,000 Discord followers, Paul West, the CEO of UK-based Fumb Games says the benefit of starting from scratch one more time will pay off by letting his company take any followers he gets on the ZBD social app to competitors in the future. “That’s a huge boost to a business,” says West, 35. “There’s no opportunity cost there. There’s no sunk investment.” Among dozens of applications being built on Nostr, are Twitter clones Damus, Primal, Amethyst and Iris.
Neves declined to share how the value of the bitcoin transacted using Zebedee, but said they’re conducting “tens of millions” of transactions per month. At the time of launch the Nostr-integrated ZBD app will be free, like Twitter and most other social networks. But also like Twitter they’ve begun to experiment with new business models.
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Over the coming months Zebedee expects to launch a number of services they could end up charging for, including on the user side, the ability to upload videos and let brands build communities, and on the developer side, “to create tooling around Noster,” says Neves, so other companies can more easily build competing interoperable apps.
“Because it’s decentralized,” says Neves, “ZBD growing is good for the network.”
Initially, a side-project of Zebedee employee @Fiatjaf, Zebedee’s cofounders were so impressed with his work they put him in charge of an internal project called NBD.WTF, to help manage the development of the protocol, and at least five other open-source projects dedicated to bitcoin. @Fiatjaf says he and the Zebedee team started working to integrate the app with Nostr back in November, “before Nostr got famous,” to demonstrate how the technology worked. But the strategy has changed now that more people know the protocol.
“It should showcase the possibility of integrating an existing closed platform with a user base into a larger open ecosystem,” he says.
The Nostr decentralized protocol is just one of dozens of competitors that have launched over the past few years. Facebook parent company Meta is building a decentralized social app on an undisclosed protocol, which is reportedly the same Activity Pub used by Twitter clone, Mastodon. Mastodon now has 6.5 million registered users. Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky has more than a million users on a waitlist to use the AT Protocol, and Zion, is building on the Lightning Network and the Microsoft
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