The chain produces blocks and carries a median 177 posts from 85 distinct authors per day as of August 2026. It is running and small. This report does not render a verdict.

How many people still use DeSo?

Q: How many daily active users does DeSo have?

A median of 85 distinct authors posted per day over the 14 days to 5 August 2026, with 291 distinct authors posting at least once across the window.

Q: What happened to BitClout?

BitClout launched March 2021 and was renamed DeSo later that year. Activity peaked April 2021 near 338,000 human transactions per day and fell 94% by mid-2022. Charges against the founder were dismissed, the criminal complaint in February 2025 and the SEC civil case with prejudice in March 2026, with no penalty.

Q: Is the DESO token still trading?

Yes. The chain reported $1.29 on 5 August 2026 against a protocol reserve rate of $5.00. Third-party data showed 24-hour volume near $730, an all-time low of $0.9283 on 22 July 2026, and a decline of roughly 99.4% from the 2021 high.

A census of an on-chain social graph — August 2026

Measured 5 August 2026 · all chain figures taken directly from a DeSo node · every source listed at the end

DeSo is a blockchain built for social media. It launched in March 2021 as BitClout, and was renamed later that year. Unlike Farcaster, Lens or Bluesky, it stores the content itself on-chain — every post, follow, like and tip is a transaction in a public ledger. That design decision is why this report is possible at all: the entire history of the network can be counted by anyone, without permission and without the operator's help.

It raised roughly $257 million [1]. This is a count of what is running on it now.

The chain is alive, and it is small

Block production was tested directly rather than taken from a status page — polling the tip height over two minutes of wall clock:

Blocks produced: 79 in ~120 seconds (≈1.5 s cadence)
Tip height: 37,177,032
Tip age: 3 seconds behind wall clock
Node queried: node.deso.org [2]

The chain is producing blocks normally. Everything below sits on top of that fact.

What people did, per day, over five years

Transactions were sampled from blocks across the chain's history and counted by type. BLOCK_REWARD is excluded — one is emitted automatically per block, so counting it turns an idle chain into tens of thousands of daily transactions. What remains is activity a person or a program initiated.

Date	Human txns / day	Most common types in sample
2021-04-15	337,746	LIKE, FOLLOW, SUBMIT_POST
2021-07-01	280,013	LIKE, SUBMIT_POST, FOLLOW
2021-10-01	168,020	LIKE, FOLLOW, SUBMIT_POST
2022-01-01	75,355	LIKE, BASIC_TRANSFER, FOLLOW
2022-07-01	20,347	LIKE, BASIC_TRANSFER, SUBMIT_POST
2023-01-01	25,579	BASIC_TRANSFER, LIKE, SUBMIT_POST
2023-07-01	21,853	FOLLOW, LIKE, BASIC_TRANSFER
2024-01-01	35,846	BASIC_TRANSFER, LIKE, SUBMIT_POST

Peak measured activity is April 2021, the month after launch. By January 2022 it had fallen by 78%; by mid-2022, by 94%. The curve then flattens rather than recovering — the 2023 and early-2024 figures sit in the same band as mid-2022.

Why the table stops at January 2024. On 9 July 2024 DeSo moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake [3], and block cadence changed by two orders of magnitude — three years of proof-of-work produced 316,228 blocks; proof-of-stake produced over 36 million in the two years after. Sampling 150 blocks out of ~45,000 per day is a 0.3% sample, and scaling it by 373 turns one busy block into a five-figure daily estimate. Those extrapolations were computed and are not reported here, because their error bars are wider than the quantity being measured. The post-fork period is measured directly instead.

Who is left: measured, not extrapolated

Rather than infer activity from block samples, the global feed was paged backwards and each post counted by UTC day, along with the number of distinct authors:

Date	Posts	Distinct authors
2026-08-04	180	86
2026-08-03	152	80
2026-08-02	123	63
2026-08-01	173	79
2026-07-31	177	83
2026-07-30	200	88
2026-07-29	176	82
2026-07-28	220	89
2026-07-27	231	86
2026-07-26	170	89
2026-07-25	152	82
2026-07-24	524	104
2026-07-23	242	105

Median posts / day: 177
Median distinct authors / day: 85
Distinct authors across 14 days: 291

These are real posts by real accounts — a serialised novel, photography, a devotional and a morning round-up bot. It is a small village, and it is not a ghost town. For scale, published figures put Bluesky at roughly 3.5 million daily actives, Farcaster around 21,000 and Lens around 20,000 [4].

The token, and a number the protocol still quotes

Market rate (from the chain): $1.29 [5]
Protocol reserve rate (from the chain): $5.00 — 3.9× the market rate
All-time low: $0.9283, 22 July 2026 [6]
Decline from 2021 high: ≈99.4% [6]
24h volume: ≈$730, concentrated on a single venue [6]
Issued via bonding curve: 8,532,254 DESO [5]

The two rates are worth putting side by side because both are served by the same endpoint on the same request. USDCentsPerDeSoReserveExchangeRate — the protocol's own floor price — still reads 500, or $5.00, while the market rate it reports in the adjacent field reads 129. Coinbase delisted DESO in November 2024 [7].

Maintenance

The core repository was still receiving commits on 26–27 July 2026, from a small, concentrated group of committers. No tagged release has been cut since v4.0.7 in February 2025. The oldest open issue dates from May 2022. The documentation page giving node hardware requirements states its figures are current "as at 21 July 2021" and gives a database growth rate of ~50 GB/month, which has not been revised since [8].

Civil and criminal proceedings against the founder concluded without penalty: the criminal complaint was withdrawn on 28 February 2025, and the SEC's civil case was dismissed with prejudice on 12 March 2026 [9].

What this report cannot see

Whether the feed is complete. Post counts come from one node's global feed, which may filter, moderate or rank. A post that exists on-chain but is not served by that node is invisible here. Counts are a floor, not a total.
Validator count. No public endpoint on the queried node exposes how many validators are active or staked, so the security and decentralisation of consensus are not assessed here at all.
Post-fork transaction rates. Computed, then discarded as too noisy to publish. The proof-of-stake era is represented by direct feed measurement only.
Whether authors are people. Distinct usernames are counted. At least one is self-described as a bot. No attempt was made to judge which accounts are automated.
Where the money went. This report counts on-chain activity. It makes no claim about how funds raised were used, and the legal proceedings that examined that question closed without any finding.
Storage economics. DeSo's widely-repeated per-post storage cost could not be confirmed on a primary documentation page; the page describing on-chain data contains no cost figures.

Questions this report answers

Is DeSo dead?

No, on the two measures that can be checked. The chain produces blocks — 79 in a two-minute test, tip three seconds behind wall clock — and the network carries a median 177 posts from 85 distinct authors per day. It is running and it is small. Whether that constitutes dead is a judgement this report does not make.

How many daily active users does DeSo have?

Measured over 14 days to 5 August 2026, a median of 85 distinct authors posted per day, and 291 distinct authors posted at least once across the whole window. Those are posting accounts on one node's global feed, which is a floor rather than a total — readers who never post are not counted.

What happened to BitClout?

BitClout launched in March 2021 and was renamed DeSo later that year. Measured activity peaked in April 2021 at roughly 338,000 human transactions per day and fell 78% by January 2022 and 94% by mid-2022. In July 2024 the founder was charged by the SEC and DOJ; the criminal complaint was withdrawn in February 2025 and the civil case was dismissed with prejudice in March 2026, with no penalty and no admission.

Is the DESO token still trading?

Yes. The chain's own endpoint reported $1.29 on 5 August 2026, against a protocol reserve rate still hard-coded at $5.00. Third-party data put 24-hour volume near $730 concentrated on a single venue, an all-time low of $0.9283 on 22 July 2026, and a decline of roughly 99.4% from the 2021 high. Coinbase delisted DESO in November 2024.

How does DeSo compare to Farcaster, Lens and Bluesky?

Published third-party figures put Bluesky near 3.5 million daily actives, Farcaster near 21,000 and Lens near 20,000. DeSo's 85 daily posting authors were measured here directly and on a different date, so the comparison is order-of-magnitude only.

Method

All chain figures were read from node.deso.org over its public HTTP API on 5 August 2026. Height-to-timestamp mapping used 60 log-spaced probes so that the proof-of-work era was not swallowed by the far denser proof-of-stake era. Transaction sampling used api/v1/block with full blocks; the feed census paged api/v0/get-posts-stateless. Raw CSV outputs are published alongside this report.

A note on an earlier error in this measurement. The first pass requested blocks with FullBlock:false and recorded zero transactions in every block across five years. That was a property of the request, not the chain. It is mentioned because a reader is entitled to know that the obvious way to run this count returns a confident, uniform, completely wrong answer.

Sources

Amount raised: SEC Litigation Release / press release 2024-91, 30 July 2024, sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024-91, which states $257 million raised through unregistered sales. Reported contemporaneously by CoinDesk, Axios and Blockworks, 30 July 2024.
Liveness test: POST node.deso.org/api/v0/get-app-state polled 7 times at 20-second intervals, and POST node.deso.org/api/v1/block for the tip timestamp. 5 August 2026, ~13:00 UTC.
Proof-of-stake transition ("Revolution", Fast HotStuff) dated 9 July 2024; announced by the project and reported by CryptoBriefing, Finbold and AlexaBlockchain. The fork is independently visible in the data here: height 421,697 carries a 2024-07-11 timestamp and height 562,341 carries 2024-07-14.
Comparative daily actives: Bluesky ~3.5M DAU (November 2025); Farcaster ~21,000 DAU; Lens ~20,000 DAU. Third-party published figures, not measured by this report, and not collected on the same date as the DeSo figures — treat as order-of-magnitude only.
GET node.deso.org/api/v0/get-exchange-rate, 5 August 2026. Fields USDCentsPerDeSoExchangeRate (129), USDCentsPerDeSoReserveExchangeRate (500), NanosSold (8,532,253,885,390,055).
CoinGecko, retrieved 5 August 2026: all-time low $0.9283 on 22 July 2026; ≈99.4% below the June 2021 all-time high; 24h volume ≈$730 concentrated on one venue. Note that several price aggregators returned materially different figures for DESO on the same day; the chain's own reported rate ($1.29) agrees with CoinGecko and was preferred.
Coinbase delisting of DESO, effective 8 November 2024, per Coinbase's own delisting notice and contemporaneous coverage.
GitHub deso-protocol/core commit history, and docs.deso.org node requirements page, both retrieved early August 2026. The documentation page states its hardware figures are current as at 21 July 2021.
Criminal complaint withdrawn without prejudice 28 February 2025 (Decrypt, decrypt.co/310495). SEC civil case dismissed with prejudice 12 March 2026, reported by The Block, CoinDesk (16 March 2026), Crowdfund Insider and CryptoTimes. No financial penalty and no admission.

Vane reports observables, not intent. Nothing here asserts what anyone meant to do. A raise figure, a decay curve and a daily headcount are facts about a public ledger; what they add up to is the reader's call.