We are excited to announce that our upcoming on-chain financial gateway, designed to facilitate a borderless and permissionless virtual economy within our dua communities, will be built on the Avalanche Network — the industry leader and fastest smart contract platform out there.
Introduction to dua.com
dua is a global social platform born out of the necessity to bridge connections between people from various nations, ethnicities, and beliefs around the world.
dua.com was founded with the goal of building a platform where diverse communities could connect and form meaningful relationships. To bring this vision to life, we launched our app on iOS and Android in June 2020, which initially supported only one mode. While in stealth mode, at first, we focused on onboarding a single ethnic group (Albanians) to test the idea behind our vision. It was a success.
After 2.5 years of operation, dua.com has been downloaded over 1.4 million times and has attracted more than 500,000 registered users from the Albanian community worldwide. Based on conservative estimates of the global Albanian population, this means that the app has been installed by approximately 20% of this specific ethnic group.
Through our focus on serving the Albanian community, we have established a strong competitive advantage over global competitors in the initial markets. Our mission for the years to come is to build a global platform that facilitates relationships within diverse communities worldwide. To support this mission, Dua AG, the Swiss-based company behind dua.com, recently raised $4 million in a Series A funding round and acquired Spotted.de, a location-based social network with millions of users in German and French-speaking countries.
Pivot From Social to SocialFi
We are preparing to launch in Turkey, Poland, and Romania, targeting people living in these countries and their large diasporas living abroad. These communities often lack a single platform where they can reconnect with their sub-communities based on specific languages, cultures, or religions.
Diasporas, communities of people living outside their home countries, play a vital role in financially supporting their families and loved ones. In 2022, it is estimated that 281 million migrants directly sent $630 billion to low- and middle-income countries to support their families and relatives. In addition to seeking social connections within their groups, these communities often face other challenges, such as high fees for money transfers and difficulties accessing financial services.
Our platform aims to address these issues and provide a convenient and affordable way for diaspora communities to connect with each other and support their loved ones back home. That’s why we are morphing from a classic Social app to a SocialFi app, whose finance part is completely on-chain and powered by our utility token $DUA, an ERC20 token deployed on Avalanche.
Why Avalanche?
Avalanche is an open-source protocol that allows the creation and deployment of decentralized applications (DApps) and enterprise blockchain systems in a single, interoperable environment. It is designed to handle the large scale of global finance and offers fast transaction speeds.
The Avalanche protocol utilizes a unique consensus method to provide strong security, rapid transaction finalization, and high capacity without sacrificing decentralization. It has built an incredible infrastructure to power the next generations of applications and on-chain services with diverse use cases, from finance to gaming.
In the world of social apps, the ability to scale is crucial for reaching a large customer base without incurring high costs. As we move towards the decentralized web (Web3), security and decentralization are important considerations, but scalability should be non-negotiable. We believe that Avalanche is the best platform for deploying our decentralized application (dApp) due to its high transaction processing and confirmation speed, as well as its expanding community and reach beyond the cryptocurrency industry.
Avalanche now supports our partner, Boba Network
Last week, we announced a partnership with Boba Network, a Layer 2 chain that utilizes Optimistic rollups and is now available on Avalanche. As builders on Avalanche, this partnership will allow us to utilize Boba’s Turing Hybride Compute and incorporate features into our decentralized application (dApp) that require connections to off-chain APIs.
What’s next?
As we near the end of our private sale on Fundrs, we prepare to go public. In the upcoming weeks, we will launch a liquidity campaign on Trader Joe, one of the largest decentralized exchanges on the Avalanche Network.
Stay tuned for more.
- Website: https://www.dua.com/token/
- Whitepaper: https://whitepaper.duatoken.io/docs/
- Telegram: https://t.me/duacomchat
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/duadotcom
About dua Foundation & dua AG
dua Foundation is a Dutch-based non-profit organization central to promoting, growing, and developing globally fragmented communities.
Its strategic and blockchain advisors include AllianceBlock Co-Founders Rachid Ajaja (CEO) and Matthijs De Vries (CTO), SEBA Crypto AG and IBM Former Executive Christen Oesterbye, dua AG Founder and CEO Valon Asani, and Entrepreneur and DeFi specialist Dite Gashi.
dua AG is a Swiss-based company in the business of online matchmaking. The company owns and manages dua.com — a community matchmaking platform for reconnecting globally fragmented communities. It also owns Spotted — a dating app that provides users to make new connections based on real-life interactions.
