TheBitcloutDog.deso

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 SEC approves Nasdaq rule to allow tokenized stocks & securities trading.

Big news! Last Friday the SEC officially dismissed its enforcement action against me and against DeSo. This was the last legal issue I had to deal with and I am now completely and totally free to innovate and build again, unhobbled for the first time in years. Three important points: 1) This dismissal was NOT a settlement. It was "without costs or fees" to me or anyone involved (extremely rare) because there was no wrongdoing and no actual aggrieved parties. 2) This dismissal was "with prejudice" (also rare). This means they can't bring any related action back against me or DeSo in the future. 3) In the SEC's own words, it was based on "a reassessment of the evidentiary record," meaning the actual facts regarding my innocence were heavily scrutinized and drove the decision. Simply put: The government made a mistake in bringing this case in the first place. The government accused me of misleading an investor who I knew I had a great relationship with, as in they backed me two separate times and I literally had breakfast with them at their house not long prior to the charge. As a result, soon after the charge I found out that not only were they not upset with me, but they wanted the government to go away as badly as I did. As I understand it, the government compelled the investor to do an interview and then took their neutral testimony and represented it as adversarial. It was an alleged fraud with no actual misrepresentation nor any actual aggrieved parties. My lawyers said they'd never seen anything like this, and I think it speaks to how dogmatically anti-crypto the prior administration's SEC was. In the coming days and weeks, I will be hopping on some podcasts to tell the whole story, and boy is there a story to tell. Stay tuned, and if you know anyone who'd like to have me on as a guest please reach out. I'm also excited to start sharing more about what my team has been working on soon. We haven't been twiddling our thumbs. For now, though, I just want to explain why DeSo is so important to me. DeSo is still the only platform on the internet where you can post content directly to a blockchain without fear of censorship, and where you can monetize your content directly with crypto (including stablecoins). It's really quite shocking how in 2026 we not only have virtually no viable alternative for this clearly-important category, but also other important efforts are actually shutting down. The world needs more people working on decentralizing social media, not less. I'm excited to finally be able to share our vision directly again, and to start bringing more people who care about freedom and censorship into our community. What we have built with DeSo is something people take for granted until they really need it, but hopefully we can convince them sooner than that. Lastly I want to say how grateful I am to everyone around me. My family, my friends, my backers, and everyone in the DeSo community. For me, this experience showed me just how trusting, loyal and caring everyone around me really is, and reaffirmed my belief that always trying to do the right thing really does pay off. We're just getting started.

🚨 NEW: The SEC has dropped its two-year case against BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji with prejudice, citing a reassessment of the evidentiary record.

Big news! Last Friday the SEC officially dismissed its enforcement action against me and against DeSo. This was the last legal issue I had to deal with and I am now completely and totally free to innovate and build again, unhobbled for the first time in years. Three important points: 1) This dismissal was NOT a settlement. It was "without costs or fees" to me or anyone involved (extremely rare) because there was no wrongdoing and no actual aggrieved parties. 2) This dismissal was "with prejudice" (also rare). This means they can't bring any related action back against me or DeSo in the future. 3) In the SEC's own words, it was based on "a reassessment of the evidentiary record," meaning the actual facts regarding my innocence were heavily scrutinized and drove the decision. Simply put: The government made a mistake in bringing this case in the first place. The government accused me of misleading an investor who I knew I had a great relationship with, as in they backed me two separate times and I literally had breakfast with them at their house not long prior to the charge. As a result, soon after the charge I found out that not only were they not upset with me, but they wanted the government to go away as badly as I did. As I understand it, the government compelled the investor to do an interview and then took their neutral testimony and represented it as adversarial. It was an alleged fraud with no actual misrepresentation nor any actual aggrieved parties. My lawyers said they'd never seen anything like this, and I think it speaks to how dogmatically anti-crypto the prior administration's SEC was. In the coming days and weeks, I will be hopping on some podcasts to tell the whole story, and boy is there a story to tell. Stay tuned, and if you know anyone who'd like to have me on as a guest please reach out. I'm also excited to start sharing more about what my team has been working on soon. We haven't been twiddling our thumbs. For now, though, I just want to explain why DeSo is so important to me. DeSo is still the only platform on the internet where you can post content directly to a blockchain without fear of censorship, and where you can monetize your content directly with crypto (including stablecoins). It's really quite shocking how in 2026 we not only have virtually no viable alternative for this clearly-important category, but also other important efforts are actually shutting down. The world needs more people working on decentralizing social media, not less. I'm excited to finally be able to share our vision directly again, and to start bringing more people who care about freedom and censorship into our community. What we have built with DeSo is something people take for granted until they really need it, but hopefully we can convince them sooner than that. Lastly I want to say how grateful I am to everyone around me. My family, my friends, my backers, and everyone in the DeSo community. For me, this experience showed me just how trusting, loyal and caring everyone around me really is, and reaffirmed my belief that always trying to do the right thing really does pay off. We're just getting started.

Big news! Last Friday the SEC officially dismissed its enforcement action against me and against DeSo. This was the last legal issue I had to deal with and I am now completely and totally free to innovate and build again, unhobbled for the first time in years. Three important points: 1) This dismissal was NOT a settlement. It was "without costs or fees" to me or anyone involved (extremely rare) because there was no wrongdoing and no actual aggrieved parties. 2) This dismissal was "with prejudice" (also rare). This means they can't bring any related action back against me or DeSo in the future. 3) In the SEC's own words, it was based on "a reassessment of the evidentiary record," meaning the actual facts regarding my innocence were heavily scrutinized and drove the decision. Simply put: The government made a mistake in bringing this case in the first place. The government accused me of misleading an investor who I knew I had a great relationship with, as in they backed me two separate times and I literally had breakfast with them at their house not long prior to the charge. As a result, soon after the charge I found out that not only were they not upset with me, but they wanted the government to go away as badly as I did. As I understand it, the government compelled the investor to do an interview and then took their neutral testimony and represented it as adversarial. It was an alleged fraud with no actual misrepresentation nor any actual aggrieved parties. My lawyers said they'd never seen anything like this, and I think it speaks to how dogmatically anti-crypto the prior administration's SEC was. In the coming days and weeks, I will be hopping on some podcasts to tell the whole story, and boy is there a story to tell. Stay tuned, and if you know anyone who'd like to have me on as a guest please reach out. I'm also excited to start sharing more about what my team has been working on soon. We haven't been twiddling our thumbs. For now, though, I just want to explain why DeSo is so important to me. DeSo is still the only platform on the internet where you can post content directly to a blockchain without fear of censorship, and where you can monetize your content directly with crypto (including stablecoins). It's really quite shocking how in 2026 we not only have virtually no viable alternative for this clearly-important category, but also other important efforts are actually shutting down. The world needs more people working on decentralizing social media, not less. I'm excited to finally be able to share our vision directly again, and to start bringing more people who care about freedom and censorship into our community. What we have built with DeSo is something people take for granted until they really need it, but hopefully we can convince them sooner than that. Lastly I want to say how grateful I am to everyone around me. My family, my friends, my backers, and everyone in the DeSo community. For me, this experience showed me just how trusting, loyal and caring everyone around me really is, and reaffirmed my belief that always trying to do the right thing really does pay off. We're just getting started.

It's a good decision! ENS names and records are a form of state that is central to the Ethereum ecosystem, the state is limited in size and there is high value in it being as accessible as possible from anywhere. It's also a semi-financial application, in the sense that buying and holding ENS names has a cost, and ENS names can become very valuable objects. With the expanded scaling roadmap, Ethereum L1 is the ideal place for these applications. More generally, I expect that the optimal architecture for decentralized identity and social (the general space I see ENS being in) is to have this kind of per-user account and profile data on L1, and to have special-purpose L2s, likely much simpler than full EVMs, to handle user actions (eg. actions on social platforms).

As a Farcaster investor, can confirm: money is coming back to investors. Dan and the team built something genuinely amazing, perhaps the best decentralized social protocol. He's independently wealthy from Coinbase, and could have done whatever he wanted, but he decided to spend many years grinding on Internet freedom and decentralization. For that I salute him.

Given some rumors, wanted to post a few clarifications: Farcaster is not shutting down. The protocol works and will continue to work. There were 250,000 MAU in December and over 100,000 funded wallets. The acquirer, Neynar, is a venture-backed startup and plans to shift Farcaster in a more developer-focused direction. As for Merkle, we’re planning to return the full $180M raised back to investors. Over the last 5 years, we tried to be a good steward of investor capital. Finally, I bought my house with Coinbase IPO proceeds.

DeSo is not going anywhere. DeSo is the world's only blockchain for content, it is actually decentralized, and I couldn't shut it down or censor a piece of content even if I wanted to. Today, DeSo is the only place on the entire internet that I'm aware of where your content and your social account cannot be censored by anyone. This is because content is stored natively on a fully-decentralized blockchain, not on a centralized company's servers. It is not possible for a private company to "acquire" DeSo, and in fact no corporate entity owns or controls it. DeSo is for content what Bitcoin is for money, and it is currently the only check we have on the centralized content systems that are dominant today. My team and I have also built the Focus app on DeSo's infrastructure, and today Focus is the only platform I'm aware of where you can sell content for crypto. Focus supports tips, paid content, paid end-to-end encrypted messages, and even subscriptions, all via anonymous crypto payments that can't be censored. It has also been growing over the past few months as creators have begun to find value in monetizing their content via crypto. We built DeSo from the ground up to support absolute free speech. Not "kinda sorta free speech." Not "post whatever you want unless some people don't like it" speech. Free speech means nobody can censor you, not even the people who built the platform. And it includes being able to pay for and monetize your content without censorship as well. You can think of DeSo and Focus as the world's complete anti-censorship stack. DeSo is the infrastructure (the blockchain) and Focus is the app built on top. In addition, I want to be clear that I and my team plan on supporting DeSo and Focus indefinitely. As mentioned, it is not possible for any one individual to shut DeSo down, as many at the highest levels have now realized the hard way. However, continued investment in the underlying infrastructure and on the flagship app ensures that everything will continue to scale as more users adopt DeSo, and ensures that your content will continue to be safe even as post-quantum threats emerge. A reminder that every line of code that powers the DeSo blockchain is fully open-source and public under the deso-protocol/core repo on GitHub. This means anyone can contribute and, furthermore, that any contributions my team makes are immediately a part of the public good that is DeSo. This model of open-source iteration directly mirrors that of Bitcoin and the Linux operating system. In 1991, Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system because he was passionate about an open and free alternative to existing closed-source operating systems. Today, more machines run Linux than any other operating system, albeit in a different form than he originally envisioned (on servers vs on consumer pcs). Nevertheless, for me, the creation of DeSo came from the same kind of passion. It is the Linux of content, and it is currently the only true economically-sustainable alternative we have to a world dominated by centralized, extractive walled-gardens. DeSo is and will remain an open-source public good that I believe will only continue to grow as more and more people realize its value.