2026-07-07 · Raiden Team
We didn't start with a mission statement. We started with a smaller, uncomfortable observation: every time we opened a feed and scrolled, we were generating money. Not much, per minute, but not zero either. And every bit of it went somewhere that wasn't us and wasn't anything we'd chosen. It just evaporated into an ad platform's quarterly numbers, the same way it does for billions of people, every day, all over the world.
That felt like a strange thing to just accept.
We weren't trying to invent a new behavior or convince anyone to spend more time online. People were already scrolling — checking in on friends, killing ten minutes in a waiting room, following a conversation in a group chat. That time was already being spent, and the value it generated was already being captured. The only question was who it went to.
Once you see it that way, the fix isn't "get people to do something new." It's "redirect something that's already happening toward somewhere better." That's a much smaller ask, and a much more honest one.
Beyond the money question, there was a simpler feeling underneath all of this: most of us didn't love how it felt to use social media. Not because the people on it were bad, but because the incentives underneath it — more engagement, more time on app, more reaction — kept nudging every feed toward something a little more anxious, a little more performative, a little less like actually being with people you like.
We wanted to build something we'd want to use ourselves. A feed where the underlying incentive wasn't "keep them scrolling at any cost," where strangers didn't land in your main inbox, where the money your attention generated pointed at a cause instead of a shareholder. Not because that's a better slogan, but because that's the version of this we'd actually want open on our own phones.
Raiden is in preview. We're not going to pretend it's already moved large sums to charities or claim an impact we can't back up — that would be the same dishonesty we built this to get away from. What exists right now is the plumbing: a double-entry ledger that tracks every dollar from an advertiser's payment to a donation, a transparency page that shows the running totals, and a product that routes revenue into a transparent weekly giving pot instead of into your pocket or ours.
The amounts involved, for any one person, are small. We'd rather say that plainly than dress it up.
Success isn't a viral moment or a headline number. It's something much quieter: a permanent, ordinary stream of giving that exists as a byproduct of people living their normal online lives — checking a feed, catching up with friends, being part of a group — without anyone having to think about it as an act of charity every time. Giving that doesn't require a special occasion, a guilt trip, or a fundraiser email. Giving that just happens because the platform underneath the scrolling is built to make it happen.
That's a smaller goal than "changing the world," and we mean it that way. We'd rather build something that quietly does one honest thing well than something that promises everything and delivers a press release. If we get this right, in a few years the interesting thing about Raiden won't be a number we report once — it'll be that the giving never stopped, because it was never separate from just being here.
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