As per a blog post from their CEO, the blockchain-based social media platform Voice will be open to worldwide users from August 15th. Additionally, starting July 4th, people worldwide will be able to read posts on Voice with or without an account.
Until recently, Voice had been only available to US citizens. From August 15th, users who pre-registered for an account will be able to invite international friends to participate in the social network.
Voice is financially backed by Block One, the company behind the EOSIO software that powers public blockhains like EOS, WAX, and Telos. Block One invested 150 million dollars into Voice back in March to allow the project to operate more independently.
While many EOS investors had high hopes that the social media platform would launch on the EOS platform, the team made an announcement earlier this year that Voice would run on it's own custom-built EOSIO blockchain. However, according to Voice's official FAQ, they aim to leverage EOS and other public blockchains in the future.
In 2016, Block One CTO Dan Larimer co-founded Steem, the first blockchain-based social media platform that rewarded users directly for their participation. Leveraging his experience building Steem, Larimer was able to envision an optimized system and came up with the idea of Voice.
A major problem with Steem was the excessive number of bot and spammer accounts that flooded the site with unwanted content. To combat this, Voice requires that users go through KYC, and post content using their full legal name and an authentic photograph. While this measure has significantly reduced spam, it has also held back many privacy-concerned users from signing up.
It remains to be seen if the KYC requirement will be a major roadblock to the growth and expansion of Voice. It could be argued that existing blockchain-based social networks like Steem and Hive have already built up solid communities using alternative methods to deal with spam, such as giving the community the power to down-vote undesirable content or add ill-behaved users to blacklists.
On the positive side, one of the primary factors that led to Steem's success is how the system rewards users directly in stablecoins and Steem tokens for their posts and comments. Users can boost their upvoting power on the network with Steem tokens, or trade them on exchanges for other cryptocurrencies to purchase real goods and services.
Borrowing this concept from Steem, content creators on Voice earn Voice tokens for their content and use them to promote posts and give them more visibility. Furthermore, users with the most Voice can highlight their comments at the top of a discussion on a post.
You can still pre-register for a Voice account by following this link.
In addition to their official updates, you can learn more about the Voice platform by following EOS Nation's EOS Hot Sauce blog and their YouTube channel where they frequently review important Voice-related news and announcements.
