- The original idea was to build microservices.
- Capsule will be to Facebook what vegan diet is compared to McDonald’s diet.
Capsule plans to launch a decentralized and simple social media platform and the plan has advanced to another stage. The startup has managed to close a seed round of funding at $1.5M. Beacon Fund is a dedicated crypto fund by Polychain Capital. It is focused heavily on the startups building on Dfinity’s decentralized network for next-generation open apps.
With a single tweet, Capsule raked in a pre-seed fund of $100K. Also, they have added seed financing to get a prototype to market by the end of this month. The mobile apps will also be under the focus and the startup will use the funding to build up the Capsule’s team where it is working with only four people.
The prototype:
Nadim Kobeissi is the founder of the Capsule. He is a cryptography researcher who formerly authored an open-source E2E-encrypted desktop chat application called Cryptocat. They’re on the way to launch an MVP this month once few tweaks are implemented.
“The prototype is ready,” he said. “We’re investigating switching some of the infrastructures from GUN to IPFS [InterPlanetary File System; aka a p2p hypermedia protocol], and improving the user interface. We could launch an MVP now but are choosing to hold off by a few weeks.”
Polychain, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Dfinity Foundation fund the $14.5M investment vehicle. They aim to provide support for entrepreneurs and teams that building on Dfinity’s Internet Computer (TIC). It is also known as a serverless architecture to natively software hosting and services.
The original concept:
Kobeissi’s original idea for Capsule was to build self-hosting microservices. He claims that the concept has not changed – but finds the potential for TIC to solve certain specific technical concerns.
Statement from the company:
“The Internet Computer will hopefully be helping us build a ‘customized mini blockchain to solve two issues with Capsule: Globally authenticated timestamps for posts as well as a root of trust for user’s authentication keys for posts,” he says. “We were looking to solve these issues somehow before this investment and were already considering Dfinity as the potential solution given that it has a programming language that allows for building these ‘custom mini-blockchains’ as we see them.”
“The rest will still be a self-hosting, self-contained, precisely engineered micro-services concept, with IPFS (previously GUN) as a decentralized database/connectivity back-end,” he adds.
The basic intention of TIC is to host every type of decentralized application. It will likely bring out a bunch of decentralized social media plays. For instance, last year Dfinity launched a proof of concept for an ‘open’ version of a professional social network, LinkedIn. And funnily, it is called ‘LinkedUp’.
“We think Capsule’s value will lie in its exceptional user experience, quality, performance, ease of use, and high-quality engineering that draws on advanced technologies such as TIC and IPFS without saddling bloat,” he says. “Others may use the same technology but I think we can do a good job on building something simple that just works and that is a pleasure to use.”
“Ultimately, I think that Capsule will be to Facebook what healthy, vegetarian diets are to a McDonald’s diet,” he adds more generally of his intent for the service. “Capsule may be a social media service but its relationship with its users and developers will be fundamentally different than Big Tech platforms.”
