Yours Network receives angel round financing and is expected to be launched early next year

In the summer of 2014, I met Yishan Huang, then CEO of Reddit, at a restaurant in San Francisco. Yishan shared with me his vision for Reddit, which he saw as a nation-state without physical borders. The only thing missing from the Internet was money, and cryptocurrency seemed to be the right tool because it was native to the Internet, just like Reddit itself. Later, I joined Reddit as the world's first cryptocurrency engineer, hoping to help Yishan realize his vision.

Unfortunately, not long after, Yi Shan announced his resignation. Without his support, I could not continue the project. But I could not give up the idea.

In the summer of 2015, during a turbulent time in the reddit community, I wrote an article called "Fixing reddit with Bitcoin", and a lot of people liked the idea of ​​Internet community + real economy. Not just reddit users, but people from all social media communities and traditional media also found this idea compelling. It makes sense.

With the help of hundreds of community contributors, I began to develop the project full time. In early 2016, I seriously tried to turn this project into a business and started looking for a technical co-founder to help me solve the most difficult challenges. After interviewing many qualified candidates, Clemens Ley showed particularly strong capabilities and he also had a very relevant background.

Clemens Ley (left) and Ryan X. Charles (right)

After completing his PhD in Computer Science at Oxford and postdoc in Switzerland, Clemens had the same idea as me, so he left academia and founded BetTube, a project that earns money by supporting popular YouTube videos, and Hapori, a Reddit-like site with an integrated Bitcoin wallet. He followed me on Reddit, and after I published the article "Fixing Reddit with Bitcoin", he reached out and became the first contributor.

In March 2016, Clemens and I spent two weeks working together in the Bay Area and we realized we would be an ideal match. We later reached an official agreement to develop “Yours” full-time.

Our goal is to integrate micropayment wallets into social media so that users (including content creators, moderators and others) can earn money through their own efforts. If the content belongs to you, the money belongs to you, and the community belongs to you, then what name can be better than "Yours"? Yours, it belongs to your community.

Soon after we completed our first prototype, we realized a problem. If every user has a Bitcoin wallet and they all make on-chain transactions, the current transaction fee is about 5 cents, and the fees will rise rapidly in the future. If each piece of content requires 5 cents of Bitcoin, such transaction fees are still too high. We need to find a way to reduce transaction fees while maintaining the non-custodial nature of Bitcoin transactions so that our product can have value.

Fortunately, the Lightning Network development team theoretically proved that it was feasible to solve this problem through a smart contract network. We read their white paper and other references, and then we started to design and build our own micropayment system. After 6 months of full-time work, we plugged a micropayment wallet into a web browser, which was the first of its kind in the world.

Our current priority is to perfect our micropayment system and integrate it into our social products. We have started to demonstrate our technology to our community members 1:1. Our product is flexible and we are following the community's opinions to guide the final product design. We want to make sure that our product can really be useful to them.

Previously, we developed it out of our own pockets, but after seeing the progress of our project, Digital Currency Group (DCG) contacted us and offered to fund us. As a leading investment company in the field of Bitcoin and blockchain, DCG is excited about the prospects of our company. In this round of financing, we raised a total of US$ 17.75万, of which DCG was the lead investor, and other investors included Boost VC, Huiyin Group, GaiaX, and individual investors in the field of Bitcoin and blockchain.

At the same time, we have been studying business ideas in Silicon Valley and are planning to set up the company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Clemens is a Munich citizen and is currently applying for an O1 visa to immigrate to the United States. Wish us good luck.

We would like to thank our investors for their trust in us. It is a great honor for us to have the best investors in the industry as our allies. We would also like to thank the early members of the community. Without you, we would not have come this far.

We expect to have our product available to the general public sometime in early 2017.