Mem Protocol is Building the Social Graph for web3 with Backing from a16z

Mem Protocol is building human-centric tools for web3 social. Own your friend graph, explore the blockchain, and earn by sharing knowledge. We’ve built a profile explorer and started onboarding new members to their verifiable, on-chain identities. With the power of reputation and smart contracts, people can use their identities to take real-world actions such as asking questions, pooling funds for bounties, and building their own verifiable, context-specific reputations.

About Mem:

Mem has closed a $3.1M funding round led by a16z. Other investors include Nebula, Balaji Srinivasan, Charlie Songhurst, Jude Gomila, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Charlie Cheever, and many more great angel and seed investors.

Founded in May of 2021, Mem is building a decentralized social media protocol with data sovereignty at the center—an on-ramp to the next evolution of the web. Built on Substrate with EVM compatibility, Mem uses social tokens and smart contracts to power an open protocol for applications and communities.

Mem enriches online experiences by creating a standardized data specification and a common set of operations as building blocks. Individuals, empowered with data ownership, regain control over the collection of their personal information. Developers can embed and extend Mem in their applications to give people a more personalized experience across the web. And, by liberating social event history from individual applications, communities can focus on solving their members' unique problems.

Rather than locking users and their data into platform-specific siloes or recreating a social graph for every new application, Mem provides an open environment for application development and personal interaction.

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 platforms that farm and profit from their attention.

"At Mem, we think deeply about how to get the internet to work for you. It’s important to us that you get to define yourself, share the experiences that matter, and connect with others on your terms.” said co-founder and CEO Abhi Vyas. To align motives between applications and individuals, Mem makes social capital a digital primitive. When someone shares content, if you can verify what they know then you can trust what they’ve shared.

Seventy million new wallets were created in the last year for just Bitcoin and Ethereum. As blockchain adoption continues to grow, and people perform more on-chain activities, it’s critical to build a human-readable interface for that information. This interface also needs to give individuals the power to claim their data and set permissions for future web3 products.

We’re grateful to have an investor base of experienced entrepreneurs and operators who are committed to our vision of building a protocol that improves the quality of human interactions online.

“Some of the core attributes of web3 -- 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 web3 social graph,” said Arianna Simpson, General Partner with Andreessen Horowitz.

We’re currently testing with a limited alpha and plan to launch in early 2022. We’ve built an interface to explore on-chain data for wallets on the Ethereum blockchain and have begun designing an open protocol to log the interactions and relationships that claimed wallets and tokens generate.

If you’re a developer who’s excited about what we’re building at Mem and want to build on Mem Protocol, please reach out to us!

To join our closed-alpha as a user, sign up on our landing page at mem.co. If you’re interested in the future of human interaction online, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord.

For press inquiries reach out at press@mem.co