Sapien 2020: Year in Review

It can go without saying, but we’ll do it anyways: 2020 was a year unlike any other and we’re glad it’s behind us. We hit some major milestones and added some amazing people to the team as we continue building the leading Web3 social network. Let’s dive into the big moments from 2020 and see what’s in store for the year ahead.

Team

The Sapien team welcomed some excellent humans aboard to join our mission:

• Jonathan Goodwin joined in February as our Marketing Lead, charging ahead on all fronts with creating content, refining the brand, research, and much more
• Oscar Salazar initially joined the team as our QA Lead, but has also proven to a stellar Project Manager, keeping our processes in check on top of the software we’re shipping
• John De Goes came to the team in September as the Senior Product Manager, vastly improving our processes for scoping out new products and features and syncing with the Engineering team
• Dimitar Dzhenkov jumped onboard in November as our Senior Product Designer and he’s brilliantly laying the visual foundations for Sapien’s future
• Salah Kali came to Sapien in December to manage DevSecOps for the company and keep our processes running smoothly, securely, and at full speed

I’m personally grateful to these excellent people for taking a chance and joining Sapien and our world-class team. We’re excited to bring on even more brilliant minds throughout the year.

Product

The Sapien platform has gone through some major changes this year, starting with the launch of Alpha Persei in March, which streamlined the interfaces, introduced tokenized polls & P2P chat, and brought a new version of the Rewards Engine that’s more sustainable and transparent.

Later in 2020, we made some more big moves:

• In May, we launched fully native mobile apps for Android & iOS in a closed beta, which are now the preferred method for accessing Sapien for a majority of our users. The apps went into a public beta a few months later in October.
• In November, months of hard work brought the Sapien Wallet, powered by Torus Labs, a non-custodial Ethereum wallet that’s fully integrated into the platform and can be created automatically in a few clicks.
• Further still, we went live on Matic Network’s Layer 2 infrastructure in December and integrated with Biconomy to deliver gasless transactions on the platform, eliminating one of the biggest hurdles for our members to utilize the token economy on the platform
• We made the SPN token officially available on Uniswap, the #1 decentralized protocol for swapping tokens
• Finally, you may have noticed the SPN token has a slick new logo!

Marketing

The team found several marketing successes in 2020, starting with the launch of Alpha Persei, which drove more than 46 million views across the press outlets covering the release.

Sapien leads the Web3 space with the #1 Ethereum-based social network by active users (excluding protocols), according to Dapp.com and DappRadar.com, ranking in the top tier of the category on these sites.

I was fortunate enough to appear on a couple podcasts this year, discussing the importance of Web3 social with Crypto Current and Crypto & Things.

We launched a handful of initiatives that have drawn great results for the platform:

• We launched a community Discord in June and it’s drawn nearly 2,000 members to connect, give feedback, troubleshoot bugs, and get announcements straight from the source
• Our referral programs, which also started in June, run on KickoffLabs and draw thousands of new platform sign-ups every month
• We also started a Grant Program to smoothly onboard new communities to Sapien Tribes and grow their memberships
• The team established a mostly weekly cadence for publishing blog posts and newsletters, achieving an average open rate of 15%

Industry Outlook

Looking outward, we saw some titanic shifts in the social media “industry.” Some of the biggest items we noticed:

• Discord raised $100 million in December, reaching a valuation of $7 billion built on 140 million monthly active users
• We saw the ascendance of TikTok to the top tier of social platforms, achieving 315 million app downloads in Q1 2020 (the highest recorded by any app, ever)
• We also saw TikTok struggle to cope with its reputation around data privacy, given its affiliations with China, and the tumultuous struggle over whether TikTok would break up or not
• Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit found themselves in the unenviable position of tackling misinformation and hate speech around the simultaneous crises of the global pandemic and the US elections
• Facebook and Alphabet found themselves under the tightest antitrust scrutiny they’ve ever had, with both companies being slapped with antitrust lawsuits from the US government and nearly all US state governments
• We saw numerous raises by and acquisitions of startups addressing some of the fundamental needs and problems that Sapien seeks to address

It’s clear that social media isn’t a dead market and there’s plenty of room for private communities, creator-driven economics, and innovation with audio & video for group interactions.

As 2020 seemed to rip through nearly everyone’s lives, the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies took off like a rocket:

• The pandemic forced governments & central banks around the world to pursue monetary policy that could cause inflation, leading investors to flock to crypto assets, driving the price of Bitcoin from about $7,000 to $31,000 over the span of 2020
• The price of Ether also rose over the course of 2020, from $150 to ~$1,000, with ETH futures trading on CME next month
• Decentralized finance (DeFi) exploded over the course of the year, rising from $680 million in total volume to $17 billion, a 2500% increase
• We also saw Ripple, the organization behind XRP, sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission with selling unregistered securities in late December

The huge gains made by the crypto market demonstrate a bottomless hunger for financial independence and alternative methods for exchanging value with each other online. This rebound is sure to drive greater long-term momentum in the space, but with the caveat that increasing size and value means increasing regulatory guidance. We’ve always valued internal governance so we can ensure Sapien is well-positioned to take advantage of these market trends and more.

Looking Forward to 2021

We have some amazing things in the works here at Sapien and we can’t wait to share them with you in due time. To tease a bit, we are developing a new brand, a host of new features and experiences to power the platform, and even more that we’re slow-cooking to perfection.

We spent much of last year maturing internally, so we’re excited to flex our operational muscles to improve our collaboration and ship more, better, faster in 2021.

It’s going to be a big year for Sapien as we hit our stride and take off running. We anticipate many exciting developments this year as we continue charting the future of Web3 social media and are grateful to have you continue this journey with us.