Ten31 Announces Investment in Primal
Ten31 is excited to announce its investment in Primal’s Seed Round capital raise. Primal is a first of its kind platform for the Nostr protocol that combines a client, caching service, and analytics tools to address several unmet needs in the nascent Nostr ecosystem. Through the combination of its sleek client application and its caching service, Primal seeks to offer an end-user experience as smooth and easy as that of legacy social media applications like Twitter, unlocking the vast potential of Nostr for the next billion people.
As we’ve written elsewhere, Ten31 believes that the Nostr protocol (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) has the potential to be among the decade’s most significant steps forward for global communications. Nostr leverages public key cryptography to allow anyone in the world to create and manage a profile without permission, then seamlessly plug that identity and its social graph into any application using the Nostr protocol. Users can then transmit data including text, images, and video content through a distributed system of message relays that anyone can operate, ensuring resistance to corporate or government censorship. As an open protocol, Nostr allows any individual or company to freely build applications on top of its very simple architecture. Much like bitcoin, then, Nostr is permissionless, censorship-resistant, simple, and open, a powerful combination that has several significant implications:
No gatekeepers: No user is beholden to the whims of any middleman. If one relay won’t broadcast your content, you can just connect to another of the dozens that have already sprung up, and broad-based censorship just creates market incentive for paid relays, which can charge a fee to broadcast content. Even if all relays refuse to broadcast your data at any price, you can always run your own, meaning the days of online deplatforming are coming to an end.
Portable social graphs: Because each user’s content is tied to a public key identity (an “npub”), creators can build large social graphs across many different end-user interfaces (“clients”) – all their followers need to do is plug the creator’s npub into their favored client. This dramatically expands the network effects of the Nostr protocol since content isn’t siloed to one particular platform (as is the case with legacy social media like Twitter and Facebook) and can be automatically pushed to hundreds of clients at once. This also ensures creators can’t lose their audiences just because one client might not allow users to see their content, and they can’t be locked out of interacting with their followers (a problem that also plagued prior attempts at decentralized social media like Mastodon).
Better value capture: Creators on Nostr don’t lock their content into a centralized walled garden that can farm it for advertising dollars, demonetize it, or delete it on a whim (or at the behest of “misinformation” busybodies). So long as they maintain the security of their private key, anyone posting on Nostr fully owns their content and can receive value for it without permission or interference from middlemen extracting their cut, as evidenced by the proliferation of “zaps” – instant bitcoin micropayments over the lightning network – which have transferred nearly 1.2 billion sats (12 bitcoin) directly to creators over the past six months. This permissionless, direct value transfer can also become a powerful discovery tool since there is a real cost (and thus higher signaling value) associated with sending zaps, unlike “reposts” or “likes.”
Real market competition: While we expect some relays and clients to eventually begin charging for services (e.g. paid relays could charge for enhanced filters, clients could charge for premium features), Nostr’s architecture ensures all these entities will be highly constrained by true competition. Since anyone can set up a new relay and users can almost instantly port their profiles to a different client without losing followers, all service providers will need to fiercely compete on both the user experiences they offer and the fees they charge, a stark departure from legacy online communication platforms.
Rich, diverse ecosystem: Nostr’s simple, open standards allow developers to easily create a wide array of new applications, many of which were impossible or impractical before. While the applications with the most early traction have been Twitter-like social media clients like Primal, there is a host of other use cases already being built out, including longform content (Habla.news), music distribution (Stemstr, Wavman), marketplaces (CivKit, Nostr Marketplaces), exchanges (n3xB), and even totally new types of shared online content (Highlighter). We expect this ecosystem to grow substantially over the next several years.
Privacy: Users can interact on Nostr with a much higher degree of privacy than is possible on any centralized social media platform. There is no need to verify one’s identity or provide sensitive personal information to get started or enjoy a high quality user experience, which is increasingly important given the growing KYC burden imposed on Twitter users – something Ten31 partner Matt Odell has warned about extensively in recent months.
This compelling set of benefits has led to explosive growth in Nostr use since late last year when the protocol began receiving more attention. In just over six months, the total Nostr user count has ballooned from under 20,000 to somewhere in the neighborhood of 300-500,000 with users showing solid 30-day retention rates, and all without any marketing budget or paid influencer endorsements. The organic and rapid expansion of the Nostr ecosystem since late last year confirms our long-held thesis that the real “Web3” will not be built by centralized, closed-source companies peddling their own proprietary and worthless “tokens,” but rather on open standards and decentralized, censorship-resistant infrastructure, with monetization powered by bitcoin, the native currency of the internet. The opportunity for true innovation that Nostr opens up is substantial, and we’re not the only ones who think so:
All that said – and as Jack points out in the post above – Nostr still suffers from many of the limitations typical of an emerging technology standard. Most notably, Nostr applications generally still can’t offer parity with the UX of the more widely adopted centralized systems they seek to replace. While many talented developers and contributors have made great strides in improving client UX over the past 12 months, most applications today are still at least somewhat slower, clunkier, less reliable, and / or more limited in functionality than the more established mobile and desktop apps to which users have gotten accustomed over the past couple decades. As a result, Nostr users today have to be willing to tolerate some subpar UX elements, which tends to select for users who are ideologically motivated (e.g. proponents of bitcoin, open source software, and / or censorship resistance). To take the next step forward, Nostr applications need to continue improving in accessibility and ease of use.
Primal fixes this. Through a first of its kind caching service and fully open-source tech stack, Primal – available now on the web, iOS, and Android – regularly loads full Nostr profiles and conversation threads in under a second, while offering an infinite feed that users can scroll for hours on end without lags, crashes, or other performance degradation. The Primal client also offers a full suite of discovery features that social media users have come to expect, including advanced and fluid search tools, trending content, recommended profiles, and more, all while making optimal use of both bandwidth and device battery life. Taken together, all this functionality gives users a Nostr experience that feels, for the first time, truly comparable with what they can get on a centralized platform like Twitter.
Meanwhile, Primal’s caching service also helps strengthen Nostr overall, as it both reduces load on the network’s relays (thus reducing the tendency toward relay centralization) and adds another layer of content propagation that potential censors would have to shut down in addition to the relay network. Simply put, Primal levels up Nostr’s UX to bring its benefits to a mainstream audience while further bolstering its resilience.
Though Primal’s initial focus revolves around its Twitter-like client, users should expect much more to come over the next couple years. As discussed above, Nostr’s primitives enable much more than just a recreation of more resilient, censorship-resistant social media tools, and Primal will be at the forefront of pushing those new use cases forward while maintaining a commitment to best-in-class UX. With an expansive vision to make Nostr-based applications not just comparable to but even better than legacy platforms, Primal is set to become one of the world’s premier Nostr companies, and we’re very excited to help support those ambitions.