Through the new funding, the platform said it will “develop a new web3-native social media experience, expand the Yup community, and empower curators across the web”.
Yup, a social network for rewarding content curators has raised the sum of $3.5 million in seed funding which was led by Distributed Global, an early investor in crypto unicorns Dapper Labs, Audius, and Solana. The funding round was co-led by other key investors in the digital currency ecosystem ranging from Dapper Labs to LD Capital, as well as angel investors including Danny Zuckerman (3box), Patrick Rivera (Mirror), Alex Gausman (NFTX), and Bill Block (Miramax) amongst others.
Yup approaches social network rewarding in a completely different way. While many related outfits are known to focus their reward system on content creators alone, Yup believes curators are part of an ecosystem that makes the entire social network rewarding. Through the platform, valuable opinions across the web are rewarded.
Users can rate anything, earn rewards for accuracy, and gain status in special topics of interest. Yup can be integrated with most social media platforms and helps in providing a basic universal influence metric. It does this by interacting with the Yup Protocol, which is a decentralized semi-autonomous social consensus protocol that determines the rewards and social value of all content based on users’ interactions with it.
Through the new funding, the platform said it will “develop a new web3-native social media experience, expand the Yup community, and empower curators across the web.” The funding will also be used to complement the platform’s growth which has paid a total of $1.6 million in curator rewards. The startup also noted that it has inked a strategic relationship with the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) community, and has paid out a total of $300,000 to NFT curators, with some individuals earning thousands of dollars in YUP tokens.
Yup Seed Funding: Rebranding the Opportunities in Web3
The Yup seed funding stems from investors’ recognition of the potential opportunities inherent in Web3 for both content creators and curators.
“Web3 offers an opportunity to curate with clear financial incentives and social status. Curation will go beyond blogs and newsletters, where you can tip creators, earn money via curation, and create massive economic graphs. For example, Yup is a curation protocol that provides an opportunity for users to curate and build their influence accordingly,” said Kinjal, Blockchain Capital.
The broad backing for Yup was also dependent on the recognition of the platform’s superior business models, which draws from data-driven open and composable social applications design.
“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.”
Yup is powered by the YUP tokens and the digital currency forms a central part of the platform’s operations.
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