An Irish social media start-up that rewards its users with cryptocurrency has raised over €200,000 in the first hours of its first equity crowdfunding campaign.
Waivlength, founded by former KPMG chartered accountant Niall O'Reilly, is a social media platform predicated on a more generous revenue sharing model and stricter protections against anti-social behaviour and hate speech than giants such as Facebook and Twitter.
"Every time you log into a social network such as Facebook or Twitter to post something or comment, you give up a piece of yourself in exchange for entertainment," O'Reilly said. "We want to change that by rewarding users with cold, hard cash in the form of cryptocurrency. On our platform, no personal user data will be sold to third parties."
The app, which is currently in the build phase, integrates Waivlength's native cryptocurrency ($WAIV) to offer financial rewards to users, with 70% of the token supply being used for reward contributions, and 45% of potential profits to be redistributed back to users.
Waivlength said the platform generates revenue in two ways: advertising revenues based on standard online cost-per-click, user base, impression number metrics, and commission incurred on cryptocurrency transactions on the platform.
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Users are ID-verified using banking quality know-your-customer (KYC) processes to eliminate the possibility of duplicate accounts and bots, and O'Reilly said Waivlength will be the first social media platform to fully verify its entire user base.
"Currently the big tech social media platforms are centralised business models where only the very top percent of content creators share in the financial rewards. Users get nothing apart from user enjoyment despite their personal data being the product sold to advertisers," O'Reilly said.
"Furthermore, large social media platforms have become hosts to bad actors, scammers, online abuse and hate speech. Twitter and Facebook have strong established networks and good upkeep. However, they are profit-driven at the expense of the user.
"A lack of verification makes for a low barrier to anti-social behaviour and reduced accountability for online behaviour. These platforms offer no return to the user for their social investment in exchange for their time and data,” he added.
The company has already built a 10,000-person community through the launch of a beta token trading project that generated $50,000 in trading commissions a peak market capitalisation of $4.2m last year
After receiving a $250,000 (€219,700) grant from the Algorand Foundation, Waivlength has, at time of writing, raised €220,000 of investment on Spark Crowfunding, nearly halfway towards its target of €500,000, in exchange for equity in the company through a SAFE Note.
Waivlength said it would use the funding to hire a machine learning engineer, a blockchain testing engineer and experienced heads of growth and marketing.
Photo: Waivlength founder and CEO Niall O'Reilly.
