Interest in the space has been rekindled in recent weeks after mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter took decisions to shut down US president Donald Trump’s access to their megaphones - a demonstration of private power that other political leaders have described as problematic. Extant examples include ActivityPub, Diaspora, Mastodon, p2p Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Solid and Urbit, to name a few. The list of decentralized/p2p/federated protocols and standards already out there is very long - even while usage remains low. Completely insane.”Ĭapsule is just the latest contender for retooling Internet power structures by building infrastructure that radically decentralizes social platforms to make speech more resilient to corporate censorship and control.

“But by the end of the day - last Sunday, eight days ago - I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10M with $100k in pre-seed funding, which is insane. I’ve been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services,” he continues. Instead the tweet “just completely exploded” and he found himself raising $100k “in a single day” - with $50k paid in there and then. “I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I’ll set up a Kickstarter,” he tells us.

But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept. The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10M, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype - hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1M-$1.5M) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps.įor now there’s nothing to see beyond Capsule’s landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). Are you interested in funding its development?

Cryptocat social gets backing to build