Bitcoin Cash Powered Social Media Platform Memo Continues to Thrive
By: Darren Lee
Tags: Bitcoin, Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoincash, Network

This past April, news.Bitcoin.com reported on a social media application powered by bitcoin cash transactions called Memo.cash. Since then the platform has grown in many ways with more users, features, and extensions. When the project first launched, a few weeks later a similar platform called Blockpress came out, but about a month ago the Blockpress founder abandoned the project leaving the Twitter-like onchain-powered Memo to take the reins.

Memo Use Continues to Gain Traction with Uncensored Content Sharing Powered by Bitcoin Cash

Over the past few months, bitcoin cash fans have been using an onchain social media application called Memo.cash. The application allows anyone to create a profile, post uncensorable messages, and tip people natively in BCH. Essentially users tether written data, videos, pictures, and animations to the website and all the actions are hashed into the BCH chain using an OP_Return transaction.

Memo.cash feed

Furthermore, Memo users can utilize 217 characters now instead of the original 77 characters the application started out with, and this is due to the increased default data-carrier size to 220 bytes implemented on the Bitcoin Cash network this past May. The added characters have allowed Memo users to do a much wider range of things when posting on the main feed.

Memo users can utilize up to 217 characters now.

Not only can users post 217 characters of uncensorable text, but users can also embed Youtube videos, website URLs, torrent magnets, streaming video links, pictures, and animated gifs. Memo users can also post a poll that allows other Memo members to vote on specific topics like should Ross Ulbricht be pardoned, bitcoin cash pre-consensus, political questions, and more. There’s also a topics page with thousands of bundled posts about things like capitalism, anarchism, scaling, global warming, and Satoshi Nakamoto.

Memo topic threads.

A Slew of Memo.cash Extensions

Memo.cash has seen a few extensions as well that tie other platforms to the main Memo system. For instance Andreas Brekken, the developer who just reviewed the Lightning Network, has launched the Memo Enhancement Suite (MES), a protocol that adds a bunch of customizations to the Memo application. The open source extension allows Memo members to update the main layout and design, auto expands images and gifs, and adds in-line liking. Brekken’s MES also features a protocol that remembers what you have liked, and it can also remember your profile password. “Your password is stored in plain text in the browser’s localStorage. It’s probably safe unless your computer is already broken into,” explains the MES Github repository.

Andreas Brekken’s MES extension.

There’s also the open source Big Earth Memopress extension which provides helper methods for reading/writing to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain per the Memo and Blockpress protocols. Lastly, there’s the great variety of Memo add-ons built by the developer Unwriter like Chainfeed, the Twitter Bot _Opreturn, and read.cash.

Blockpress Development No More?

Another interesting happening that took place last month was the abandoning of the other social media application Blockpress. The creator of Blockpress took to the Reddit forum r/btc and said he was looking for someone to take over the development of the site.

“We wanted to reach out to the community here to see if anyone would like to take over the development and/or ownership of www.Blockpress.com — We have been working on other projects and think that new leadership and development would be good to have to take this app to the next level,” explains the sites creator.

Memo users can create polls.

The Blockpress application is still running, but it’s clear that the platform has not been updated in a while. Meanwhile, many Blockpress users were disappointed to hear the news but migrated over to Memo with ease. We tried reaching out to the Blockpress creator without much success and it’s unconfirmed if someone else will be taking it over.