Announcing our updated priorities for DeSo and our associated products.

Focus, the SocialFi app where you're likely reading this post, needed some work on the infrastructure side to be able to handle higher loads. That work is nearly complete, at which point we will shift our efforts to new features and growth. Below is rough a list of what we will be focusing on:

• Post to Earn. A major lever we have is our Post to Earn program, which we are still working on. This program will reward those who create the best content, creating an initial base of content creators who are dedicated to the platform. It is difficult to construct a program that maximizes content quality, while minimizing bots and low quality content, but we are optimistic we'll be ready to ship something here soon.\

• Crypto subscriptions and unlockable content with major creators. We believe Focus can expand the market for subscription content and unlockable content, since it is the first product that offers crypto rails for these purposes, allowing users to pay with BTC, ETH, SOL, USDC, and USDT. In fact, the leading platforms don't even have a good means of charging for an individual piece of content, due to fiat processing fees making it cost-prohibitive. We will be working with some major creators to launch their paid content on Focus, where they will be able to unlock a new audience thanks to the enhanced crypto-native monetization tools available.\

• Feed marketplace. We are working on an improved experience on the Focus For You Feed, as well as a major upgrade of our Feed Marketplace, which is currently difficult for developers to plug into. Focus is the first product that allows anyone to create and, more importantly, monetize a third-party feed. Just subscribe to a feed and the developer will earn a monthly fee for curating your content. Nothing like this exists today, and we are confident it can solve a lot of the problems associated with centralized media bias.

• UX improvements. The onboarding on Focus will be streamlined and shortened, prioritizing ease of entry. There are many other minor improvements like this that we are prioritizing but this is a big one.

We have big plans for Openfund, our fully-decentralized order-book exchange, which hit record volume and fee revenue this month. A rough list below:

• Advanced order types. We will be shipping advanced order types, such as TWAPs, in the next month or so. Unlike TWAPs on other exchanges, TWAPs on Openfund will be fully self-custody, executing directly from the user's wallet using a delegated key. They will also allow users many more options with regard to how they're configured. This feature will also power the automated “buy-back and burn” programs for tokens like $openfund and $focus.\

• Enhancing liquidity. Openfund already has great liquidity for major pairs such as BTC, ETH, SOL, and DESO thanks to our automated market-makers. However, we are working on a liquidity program that will incentivize third-party liquidity providers, either through locked token airdrops or by sharing some of Openfund's fee revenues with them directly. Such a program needs to be carefully engineered, but we are excited to roll it out and take Openfund to the next level.

• HeroSwap DEX routing. HeroSwap is a companion product to Openfund that also saw record volumes and fees the past few months. It currently uses pools of liquidity to fulfill swaps, but we are working on having it hit the DeSo DEX directly, which will lead to better rates and also significantly improve liquidity.

• Margin and leverage. The natural next step for Openfund is to enable users to trade their favorite tokens with margin and leverage. We are currently scoping significant upgrades, uniquely enabled by DeSo's architecture, which will facilitate advanced margin and leveraged trading while remaining fully decentralized.

The DeSo blockchain itself, which powers all of our products, will be getting some major efficiency improvements. Among other things, nodes will run on a quarter of the memory, with several other more minor improvements to performance and decentralization.

Finally, we are still pursuing several DeSo-related growth efforts. Among other things, we continue to work to list $DESO and our other DeSo-native tokens like $FOCUS and $OPENFUND on as many exchanges as possible.

If you have any questions or suggestions for improvement, please let me know in the comments.