Yours raises funds for bitcoin based Reddit alternative

I met the CEO of reddit, Yishan Wong, at a restaurant in San Francisco in the summer of 2014. Yishan shared with me his vision of reddit as internetland, like a nation state with no physical borders. The only thing missing from internetland was money, so the users could pay each other for their work. Cryptocurrency seemed like the right tool for this, because it was native to the internet, just like reddit itself. I joined reddit as the world’s first cryptocurrency engineer to help Yishan implement his vision.

Unfortunately, Yishan resigned shortly after I joined. Without his support, I was unable to continue the project at reddit. But I couldn’t let go of the idea.

In the summer of 2015, amidst turmoil in the reddit community, I wrote an article called “Fix reddit with bitcoin” that struck a nerve. A lot of people liked the idea of an internet community with a real economy. Not just reddit users, but people from all social media communities and traditional media found the idea compelling. This needed to exist.

I started working on the idea full-time with the help of hundreds of community contributors. Early in 2016 I got serious about turning the project into a business, and sought out a technical cofounder who could help me solve the hardest challenges. After interviewing many qualified candidates, Clemens Ley stood out for being both exceptionally capable and having an exceptionally relevant background.

After finishing his PhD in computer science from Oxford and postdoctoral research in Switzerland, Clemens was struck by the same insight as myself for bringing monetary incentives to social media. Clemens left academia to found BetTube, a way to earn money for supporting popular YouTube videos, and Hapori, a reddit-like website with an integrated bitcoin wallet. He followed my career at reddit with interest, and when I published “Fix reddit with bitcoin,” he reached out wanting to help, and became one of the first contributors.

Clemens and I spent two weeks in March, 2016 working together in the Bay Area, and we realized we would be ideal cofounders. We came to a formal agreement and began dedicating our full-time effort to the project — “Yours”.

Our goal is to integrate a wallet into social media so that users, including content creators, curators, moderators, and everyone else, can earn money for the work they do. If it’s your content, your money, and your community, what better name for the project than “Yours”? Yours is the community that belongs to you.

Shortly after we finished our first prototype, we realized we had a problem. Each user had a bitcoin wallet that put bitcoin transactions on-chain, and transaction fees were 5 cents and quickly rising. With an estimated cost of 5 cents per piece of content, the transaction fees were too high. We needed to find a way to lower transaction fees, while maintaining the non-custodial properties of genuine bitcoin transactions, to make our product viable.

Fortunately, the team at Lightning Network had proven theoretically that this was possible with a network of smart contracts. We read their whitepaper, and several others, and began to design and build our own implementation of a micropayments system. After six months of full-time effort, we had a working micropayments wallet in a web browser. The world’s first.

Our top priority now is to smooth out the rough edges in our micropayments system and integrate it into our social product. Along the way, we are beginning to demo our technology 1-on-1 to our community members. Our product is flexible, and we’re using our community’s input to guide the final design. We want to be sure our product really works for them.

For most of our history, Yours was self-funded. After watching our progress, DCG reached out to us and offered to fund our work. As the premier investment firm in the bitcoin and blockchain space, we were delighted at the prospect of having DCG invest in our company. DCG lead our angel round, and other investors include Boost VC, Huiyin Group, GaiaX, and individual investors in the bitcoin and blockchain space. We have raised a total of $177.5k.

Meanwhile, we have been studying the Silicon Valley philosophy for business and intend to grow our company in the Bay Area. Clemens is based in Munich and is applying for an O1 visa to immigrate to the US. Wish us luck — it will make a huge difference to the future of our business whether Clemens is or is not able to immigrate here.

We would like to thank our investors for placing their bet on us. We think this is a huge opportunity and we are fortunate to have the best investors in the industry as our allies. We would also like to thank our community members who have helped us from the early days when our project was just an idea. Without you, we couldn’t have come this far.

We expect to launch to a general audience sometime in early 2017.

Ryan X. Charles is a distinguished programmer with 20+ years experience. He’s previously lead development teams for BitPay, Copay, and Reddit. Charles is currently CEO of YoursNetwork.