New York City, October 12th 2021 – Yup, the web3 social platform that rewards curators, has announced a $3.5 million funding round led by Distributed Global, an early investor in crypto unicorns Dapper Labs, Audius and Solana. The funding will be used to further develop a new web3-native social media experience and empower curators across the web.
The funding round was also joined by major players in the blockchain and tech space, including Dapper Labs, LD Capital, and various founder angels.
Yup is a social network that rewards and recognizes tastemakers for curating content across web2 and web3 platforms like Twitter, Youtube, Opensea, Mirror, and others. The protocol aims to monetize the value generated by influencers and social media users who surface quality content. Most social media platforms today focus on content creators first, with curators and tastemakers often getting overlooked despite providing massive value to their platforms and following.
Since launch, Yup has distributed over $1.6 million in curator rewards. They’ve built a particularly strong relationship with the NFT community, rewarding over $300,000 to NFT curators, with some individuals earning thousands of dollars in $YUP.
“We’re incredibly excited to partner with industry leaders to build the next generation of Web3 social,” says Nir Kabessa, Co-founder of Yup. “Our mission is to unlock the social capital tied to individuals’ tastes and curation. Curators are largely undervalued on web2 social media platforms and Yup plans to empower and reward them.”
“In our view, Web3 social is one of the most exciting categories and we believe Yup is positioning itself to be a leader”, said Johnny Steindorff of Distributed Global.
“We’re big believers in bringing blockchain to everyday users,” adds Anuke Ganegoda, Business Lead of Dapper Labs. “Coupled with the exciting growth of the NFT space, social media and NFT curation might push web3 to the mainstream.”
“Traditional social networks thrive on privileged and minimally accessible user data silos. Their business models depend on them. Yup, as a fully open and composable Web3 social network has the opportunity to empower builders and visionaries of the next great social applications,” says Alex Price, who pre-seeded Yup and is currently a Special Advisor at A16z Crypto. “I’m excited to see what kind of feeds, interfaces and more are built on top of Yup’s fully open social graph.”
About Yup
Yup is a social network for curators that rewards users for liking and sharing content across the web. Yup was originally conceived in 2019 when its co-founders Nir Kabessa and Vernon Johnson saw an opportunity to use blockchain to fix a long-standing issue in social media — consensus around social capital and value. The Yup Protocol provides new opportunities for curators to get paid for sourcing quality content, while rewarding creators for producing it.
