The first drops of gas on the fire are here: Everybody who joins now gets $10 in free CLOUT!

All existing users can get it, too. Have fun shopping :)

And here's the really awesome part: All users on third-party apps also get it...

If you're a third-party dev, you just got virtually unlimited funding to onboard users onto your app in an unprecedented push toward decentralizing the application layer of social media.


A signup bonus is much more important for the BitClout ecosystem than one might think.

Without some money to get started, new users can't try out any of the most exciting BitClout features.

Creator coins, diamonds, and NFTs are all initially inaccessible without it.

Why didn't we do this sooner? Two reasons:

1) BOTS. Bots have prevented us from being able to give signup bonuses since early April. There are days where we lost tens of thousands of dollars to them! Now we've finally managed to integrate with Jumio, which we're optimistic will solve this problem once and for all.

2) We also wanted to launch NFTs and be closer to launching notifications, app redesign, and a few other milestones before going all-in on blitzscale growth.

Note that, in order to solve the bots issue, Jumio requests that users scan some form of identification. We don't use this for anything other than the bot check, and you can see this because all of our code is 100% open-source:

https://github.com/bitclout/backend/commit/be466b5a1b73848b02e447a314f6f452c0bfaedc

We also know some users won't want to do this so it is, of course, skippable.

The ability to give new users money when they join now paves the way for a revamp of the onboarding that includes a deep tutorial where new users are walked through:

1) buying their first creator coin

2) giving a diamond

3) buying their first NFT

This will allow new users to *feel* the power of BitClout right when they join, rather than having to listen to us relentlessly explain it to them, as many of us do :)

But that's just bitclout.com. What about third-party devs? Is bitclout.com going to consolidate all the users because it gives away the most free money?

NO! The best part is that we built the signup bonus *directly into BitClout Identity*, which means all third-party devs get it too.

All without having to ask permission or do any additional work whatsoever. The signup bonus just appears in your app as long as you've integrated with Identity, and it's paid for entirely by us!

This signup bonus will hopefully supercharge development on BitClout.

Now, every user you onboard onto a third-party app gets free money that they can spend on *your* platform.

It's like every dev in the ecosystem just got virtually unlimited funding to pay for onboarding!

Often, getting users to try your app is the hardest part of making an app succeed.

Now imagine pitching a BitClout project to an investor now and being able to say "someone else is paying for my CAC, and my users show up with a wallet full of money ready to be spent on my app!" (CAC = customer acquisition cost)

A traditional social network could also never scale this way because:

1) You need a native wallet in onboarding, which only BitClout has.

2) You need a business model that's aligned with third-party developers, which only BitClout has.

The business model is everything. An ads-based model requires a single entity to consolidate users onto one platform/app.

In contrast, CLOUT value increases when *transactions* increase, and transactions can happen anywhere!

This makes BitClout the first social network truly aligned with growing a developer ecosystem.

How much are we willing to spend on signup bonuses?

Well, that's the best part: Every dollar we spend on onboarding has resulted in *much more* money being invested into CLOUT, which then flows to creators, resulting in more users joining in a flywheel.

It makes sense to invest unlimited money into onboarding as long as this is the case, and we expect it will be the case for quite some time :)

Now, with the bots issue *hopefully* mitigated, and with the core feature set nearing a fully-refined state, we're excited to start investing heavily in growth.

This is just the beginning.

And with every investment into growth, especially decentralized investments like this signup bonus program, money will flow to creators via NFTs, diamonds, and their coins.