Mem

Mem is a company building tools for the social layer of Web3. The company is developing a human-centric tool to equip social media services with decentralized architectures. For network participants, Mem stores information like social media history and professional experience, in cryptographically secured vaults. The company also provides users with the chance to ask and answer questions on different topics of general interest, allowing them to read vital articles and receive a personalized feed of answers to their questions.

Mem, a company with an objective to develop a Web 3.0 version of Quora, raised $3.1 million in a seed funding round led by a16z in November 2021. Established in May 2021, Mem Protocol is one of the businesses looking to enhance already existing social media services with decentralized architectures. The firm plans to release a question and answer application similar to Quora or the inactive Yahoo! Answers. Mem will, however, store information on network participants — like social media history, on-chain activity, and professional experience — in cryptographically secured "vaults." This data is controlled by the users, instead of Mem Protocol, and can operate as a "social credit score"—or social graph—whenever a user grants a green light.

Mem co-founder and CEO Abhi Vyas outlined in an announcement blog post,

The goal is to weed out spam and users who lack a certain level of expertise on a given topic. With existing centralized Q&A platform's you can't trust that someone claiming to be a professor in math is one... On existing social networks, user identity and content are platform commodities. Data moats and targeted advertising services lead to misaligned incentives between platforms and the people using them. No one owns the information they share, yet users’ data is remixed by algorithms on centralized that farm and profit from their attention.”

Still, the company's ambitions for the protocol stretch beyond question and answer applications. In the long run, the team expects the architecture can be utilized for different applications like product reviews, social media, and job hunting. The company's CTO, Don Walpola, a former machine learning engineer at Comcast, hinted that a potential Web 3.0 version of LinkedIn can be developed on top of Mem in order to analyze the skills of different potential employees. E-commerce sites can introduce the protocols into their product review process, to tailor reviews for every individual user. Mem was developed on Substrate, a custom blockchain builder, with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility and is in the limited testing phase with plans to launch its protocol in early 2022.

Arianna Simpson, general partner with Andreessen Horowitz, stated,

“Some of the core attributes of Web 3 – such as openness, decentralization and user control – are perfectly suited for a new type of social networking platform that’s optimized around the user. That’s the promise we see in Mem, and we’re thrilled to partner with them to help build the Web 3 social graph.”