Cryptonite Product Notes

Anthony Perkins

Aug 26, 2023

ntegrate with so you can cross-post to X/LinkedIn, as well as All, connections,

Offer ability to reward and hold CPROs and Dogecoin as an award alternatives.

Substack deal

—Re-sell to Wizards & Members

—Integrate subsstack inbox into daily MyStream and add to the top filter buttons

—Show up on Substack post share screen/choices

—Integrate as a CPRO partner so Substack members can reward each other CPROs including to pay for subscriptions

Twitter deal

—Re-sell to Wizards & Members

—Integrate Twitter feed into daily MyStream and add to the top filter buttons

—Show up on Twitter tweet post share screen/choices

Also offer dogecoin as an award alternative

Can CPRO also have a governing roll?

Change Trash to be more of an up or down

Zuck on Android aIu for member validation

https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/230881/facebook-has-decided-that-paid-user-validation-is-also-the-way-to-go

LinkedIn as Tinder

https://nypost.com/2023/02/21/a-man-asked-me-out-on-linkedin-its-either-a-red-flag-or-romantic/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=pasteboard_app

Instagram paid subscriptions

https://creators.instagram.com/earn-money/subscriptions

Leader board where the more CPROs you hold the higher you show up and are more visible - you get a base to daddy I promise Oscar

Reward people for social sharing

Elon has announced his Twitter Blue subscription plan.

You'll get priority in replies, mentions & search, half as many ads, the ability to post long video and audio, ad-free articles for select publishers, and a blue checkmark.

The total cost will be $8/month.

Some people pay extra on streaming platforms for no ads. This 8/mo comes with fewer ads, priority in search (which lowkey is actually huge for someone’s reach/voice), and I guess the long form video thing is good too

Word clouds

Trending

Pro Tags

Friend Tags

The Churchill Club channel

Cryptonite Live! (Live and archived video platform)

Member I.D and status page

CPRO wallet

Wizard page (the Reddit for the innovation set)

MyStream

content from connections
Content from tribes
Content from subscriptions

Matchmaker

Cryptonite News page

CPRO Shop

Anytime Friday is good this is our highest priority - Our Planet Cryptonite metaverse goals are just coming into focus, and we lol forward to learning from you all. We would like to create the Cryptonite Coliseum first which allows people to gather and watch all our live video productions. Bigger picture we want to create A space ex rocket with a cryptonite bran on the door where people use as a shuttle from earth to planet cryptonite. the planet cryptonite will hav some good of store fronts for any of the top 1000s of venture-backed companies as well as hundreds of top crypto projects. Big tech, VC’s, law firms and other service providers will also be sold store shop space on this new planet for the innovation set. It keeps us focused on building out a world to learn from the best and brightest and about the next innovations and great companies

coming up stream.

Let me know a time and I’m good. I’m on SV time.

Add number if visits on viewers pages of article Kate and video page

Cryptonite Colosseum

Planet Cryptonite

Look at the hirect app for search and chat features that we might adapt

EliXr/Clubhouse focus

Eligma Labs

NFTs for badges

Decentralized CProShop

NFT sales in CProShop

Santa Teresa Fashion and Fitness Festival

Take Back the Power

Clothes line with Street Art/NFTs

EDU ProShop

BSC move

Pre-Sale before launch

Wizards

Santa Teresa Entrepreneurial compound

Spa/eng version

Incorporate CPRO Company in Costa Rica

Warlocks

Sean - ticker on every page as part of signature look

Mike - voice engineer

Earn.com

Get AK involved on reg process, reward system, and ask the expert

Accept ‘sign in with apple and give them ther apple member icon circle

Rate my deck!

Screen Shot 2021-07-22 at 7.51.49 AM.png

NFT & OnlyFans

https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/nfts-to-protect-xxx-content-creators-a-hint-for-onlyfans-2549316

OnlyFans handled more than $2 billion in sales last year. Since the site takes a 20% fee, that means it had over $400 million in revenue.

This year, the London-based company is growing at a rate of over 100%, according to the person familiar with the situation. OnlyFans has said it’s paid out over $3 billion to the more than 1.25 million creators on its platform. It has over 130 million registered users.

Make it so people can do voice that gets translated in their comments on the comments page

Create a Cryptonite car that goes into an Apple wallet like hurts card

Free/stealth members can view Wizard page content, comments, listen to Mixers, and browse member profiles, but can not comment, rate, connect, give or receive CPRO awards, or have a profile.

2. To enjoy full site access, members must fill out a KYC form and pay $9.99 a month ($.099999 in CPROs are donated to the EDU Coin Foundation each month).

3. Members are paid 5 percent commission (in CPROs) on all ProShop/Paid Membership purchases made by other members who signed up with their membership link in perpetuity.

Pre-sale—Eligma Labs Blockchain Development

Create 21 billion CPRO tokens on the BSC platform
Build simple pre-sale website wallet’ so people can buy and store the pre-sale tokens - Allow for easy download of pdf with wallet address
Implement GoCrypto to accept Euro, Etherium, Bitcoin, USDC and USDT to purchase CPRO (The pre-sale website wallet will only be able to hold CPROs)
Build-in Paypal and debit card models to receive USD
Create smart contract to provide additional monthly CPROs rewards (via airdrop) for pre-sale token buyers for holding their pre-sale tokens for up to a year after ICO
Pre-sale CPROs will be locked in website wallet until a 48 hours before the ICO
Decentralized ‘Cryptonite I.D.’ member authentication and registration feature
Pre-sale registration to include necessary KYC information, and be able to roll-over member data into their Cryptonite Wallet after DAPP goes live.
Pre-sale website design (by Cryptonite) and site development (by Eligma)
Implement Eligma Labs ICO Crowd-funding dashboard to help manage the pre-sale.

Current prototype

https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/ZK10XV4KMF8Y#/screens/452021408

Beta—Wizards Home/Comments/Mix page updates

Make it so Cryptonite top bar is sticky when you scroll down like the top bar on the Apple page
Change EliXr page to Wizards page
Complete Header: Cryptonite Wizards MyStream Live! Matchmaker $ProShop
Start a Mix - rather than MiXr
Add by membership NFTs Wizards/rank to comments filter
Consolidate comments page into one bubble -
Personalize ‘Tony get in the Mix’ and ‘What’s your take Tony’
Put comments stream up top in a ticker that should be on every page - and alternate between trending comments and people across all ranks
Rank comments by member rank + the activity it creates
Change ‘Expert Network’ to ‘Ask a Wizard’ in the footer - under ProShop — Search by name/subject tag/Cryptonite rating/Customer rating
Tag Clouds in the form of brain and heart organs

Beta—Profile/Registration Pages

Ratings next to each social media - ‘not recommended’
Separate social media in the member registration page between ’trusted’ networks to not-so-trusted
Wizards are by Cryptonite Invite, fellow Wizards (3 a month for Beta- then down to 1 a month), and application-only.
Put in messaging rules in reg form like the email ones
Meta tags should have a window in the registration box where one you check a meta tag it goes up into a box with an an X by it so you can see what your word cloud is going to look like and can easily delete and add tags - see Medium topics and tags system.
Create a ’Shoutout for Tony’ on a members’s profile - like a LinkedIn recommendation.

https://linktr.ee

https://milkshake.app

https://www.google.com/amp/s/later.com/blog/link-in-bio-tools/amp/
https://ampjar.com/blog/linktree-alternatives/
Create a ‘Design’ button that offers 40 background image choices and font and accent colors - see Apple desktop images section - sees mediums ‘design’ section
Tag Clouds in the form of brain and heart organs
Add Scribe NFT—Create Cryptonite Scribes Post

Beta- Cryptonite Wallet

Wallet is tab is an account statement - buy/sell area + below is a reward, sell, and buy history steam.

Beta—Eligma Labs Blockchain Development

NFT system for member badges
Wallet is compatible with ERC-1155 and/or ERC-721
Decentralized ProShop
Cryptonite wallet browser extensions that includes a data token that allows members to be in control of their own data— compatible with ERC-155
Decentralized cloud storage - Storg -

https://www.storj.io

FileShop - pdf based NFTs -

https://fileshop.soft112.com/

Beta—MyStream Page

Rotate:’Do you know?’ ‘Please meet....’ ‘people like you’ ‘who’s watching’ every 12 posts with 3 related people in people’s my streams—
Have Twitter, telegram, Reddit and Be-reel feeds to the right of the my stream
Add in way to pin an item at top of public MyStream
Create way to post on MyStream (allow all members to do that) and share Be Reels & Shared Outcomes
Add Be Reels/Postcards ratings and comments to streams
Have a check box for filters - people may want to filter out ratings if they get a lot of them.
Pull down menu & Filters: all posts, connection posts, tribal posts, my posts, my comments
Include ‘Search’ box for just MyStream section
Create a way for members to add their Twitter and/or Reddit streams (see Apollo mobile app)
Create a way for members to add their Twitter, Telegram and/or Reddit streams (see Apollo mobile app) on the MyStream page.

V.10—Message Center

Reply - Save for Later - Delete
Send - Send and Save - Send and Delete
Live pop up t if someone’s check circle is glowing means they are on the site now.
Direct mail
Message €ProCoin
Message click ‘Type subject and hit return’ in box then goes to the body after fname
Add In The two-way voice messaging when you bring it to you ear like on IG

V1.0—Cryptonite Live!

Video distribution - D studiosEmergent beta
Kaltura

V1.0 Cryptonite Homepage

Create a way so our editors can move EliXr posts over to the Cryptonite page
Add 1World polls in our designs
Add # of comments on homepage stories
In the headlines-only version of the homepage, have is so views and comments and $ #
Add edit button on comments next to delete. Shadow our own comments.
Add back in Stock/Gold/Bitcoin indexes
Create a moving ticker across all see more public pages that show all Tech 40 and Crypto 40
The above show up across the top of the see more page to divide quick review of top stocks to watch in all 3 categories
Create a automatic company like to a Pitchbook profile
Create company and investor profile pages for links to top company and investor lists.

V1.0—Friends Network

Join our friend network and meet people with common backgrounds
and interests in an open and reference-able professional community.
People who join the friends network will receive a bonus of x tokens.
The personal information provided on your friend profile will only be viewable and searchable by other friend network members.
Your personal meta-tags will only be viewable to people you mutually connect with as friends.

V1.0- Tribes

Entrepreneurs’ exchange
Geeks at work
Churchill Club
Cryptonite Society

Cryptonite Branding:

Take Back the Power
The leader of the revolution is you !!
Meet the Cryptonite Wizards
We are Cryptonite to centralized power.
The Cryptonite PRO is more than a digit currency - it’s part of a new state of spirit.
*trusted networks are designed so members own and control their distributed data, decide who gets cancelled or not, and are rewarded for community contributions.
Championing entrepreneurs on a mission to deliver on the original promise of the Internet and preserve our unalienable rights and freedoms.
Foremost, our design must delight our users. Second, provide an ‘earn rewards and rise up’ environment that inspires our high IQ, over-achieving and competitive demographic. Finally, our brand must represent an idealized version our members—clever, smart, witty, and cool. Be a Cryptonite Original!
99 cents of every sub goes to the plant a tree foundation and 1% of all ProShop sales go to green charity
Student in title provides a person to a 3-year Premium Membership Scholarship
Create a Churchill Club tribe in Cryptonite and Memberships to the Cryptonite Society.

For marketing

Dao decentralized autonomous org.

V1.0—Be Reels/Postcards

+ Add comment and share buttons

Outside Stuff to Review

Security Tokens

https://medium.com/@alexander.mole

Utlility Tokens

https://medium.com/fabric-ventures/an-entrepreneurial-investors-take-on-the-utility-of-tokens-beyond-payment-ccef1d5bb376

All about NFTs from Paul V.

VeradiVerdict

NFT???

Does it seem like every venture capitalist is wondering about NFTs these days? Today, an NFT from Beeple sold for $69m! Did we just see a music album by DJ Justin Blau get tokenized as an NFT and sold for $12m on Origin DShop, all on the blockchain? Lebron James and other NBA players’ highlights producing over $230m in sales…

4 years ago · 7 likes · Paul Veradittakit

Creators’ Royalty Token standard #2571
https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2571
Protomail vs Gmail
FileShop - pdf based NFTs -

https://fileshop.soft112.com/

Create a Cryptonite.crypto tool for members to create their own —Unstoppable domain partner. https://unstoppabledomains.com/apps
But film.com
Democracy.earth
Blochainvoting
Santiago Siri
http://forbesinvest.forbes.com/e/796133/ail-utm-campaign-forbes-crypto/bccl/75431433?h=UXNtQfxZbJ7zdZkbb_ZF7n2div1X2TZafWbottb5N4w

https://flote.app/

Lucidworks search

https://slashdot.org/

https://lobste.rs

https://assetnetwork.com/landing
https://edithlabs.com/introducing-edith/
Student job site:

https://joinhandshake.com

Braintrust.

https://www.usebraintrust.com/

https://ninjaoutreach.comw

https://ninjaoutreach.com/alexisplevit
Equastart
Kickstarter
Securitize
Periscope
Hopin.to
Contentful
https://import.io/login
Doge coin
Jaclyn Graham
Insights mobile app - IG stats
Apollo mobile app - Reddit reader
Do a deal with Qwant for our search

Eligma Blockchain Product notes

1) Create a decentralized, blockchain-secured, 'Universal Cryptonite Identity Authentication' system for Cryptonite, our Network Partners, and $ProShop customers.

When registering, a user does not generate a password but signs a (string within a) transaction with their private blockchain key. The private and public keys are generated independently from the signed transaction and stored on a public blockchain. Members hold their private keys in a safe blockchain data wallet. When the user returns to log-in with their private key, the system verifies the signature is consistent with the stored public key.

Member private keys will also link to their profile, network behavior and transaction data, online privileges, rights, and authorizations. These private and publicly stored identities also allow users to collaborate transparently, exchange or share data, link services, and track actions between them—All on a peer-to-peer basis without central data authority or oversight.

Benefits

This set-up provides more security and user transparency, and independent verification. Members own and control their data, including downloading, sharing, and deleting it at will. Members can also view and read their own smart-contacts and verify that no-one has tampered with their data in any way. Cryptonite is less liable because we can't log-in as a user, delete or change their data.

Questions

Is the authentication system a public network or private immutable distributed data storage where we are the 'master node"?

How much visibility will we have into a member's data? We will need to have access at some level to calculate their PowerPoints, reputation stats, and token rewards.

Will the 'safe blockchain wallet' the members use to store their private key and related data be in the background, or is it a visible wallet that sits along aside your cryptocurrencies wallet" Or can it be a one-in-the-same wallet? I am still getting my head around this part.

You mentioned a Swiss company the does KYC verification? Is that someone we need to partner with?

2) Write the smart contract code and vesting plans for the Cryptonite custom ERC-20 CPRO token and initially deploy the CPRO on a private blockchain.

Use the time to set the final total amount of token mint and the number of the decimal places, the self-regulating rules, and add custom features that make the CPRO unique and enhance its usability.

The smart contracts will lock the total CPRO amount and release a certain percentage at a preset time. After the time has passed, only the owner can claim the released cryptocurrency to personal blockchain wallets.

In this way, stakeholders are provided transparently and gradually gain access to their rewards, preventing the owners from dumping the entire cryptocurrency amount on an online exchange at the end of the Pre-Sale / Dutch Auction period.

Benefits

We can get our members earning tokens and rewarding each other and enjoying basic discounts on memberships at Alpha launch. It also allows us to do a ‘Founding Member’ promotion that includes discounted tokens off the Dutch Auction price.

3) Develop CPRO token analytics dashboard that provides statistical analysis and visualization of our cryptocurrency / token distribution and velocity graphs.

These products are valuable tools for understanding a company's cryptocurrency performance at trading, utilization, and transaction frequency.

Benefits

Allows Cryptonite to optimize out token value and ideally manage some of the price volatility.

4) Automate how we sell and distribute the CPRO, including promotional 'airdrops', and analyze what happens with each CPRO after its initial distribution.

Benefits

Provides the ability to analyze a blockchain and identify potential recipient addresses according to the set of filters and rules determined per our marketing plan.

5) Develop private, immutable, blockchain-protected member ranking and reward database

Members earn 'PowerPoints' and corresponding Cryptonite PRO (CPRO) token rewards for their positive contributions and support within the community. Members will also be assigned an overall percentage rating - e.g., 89%, which means you are more influential than 89% of the registered community based upon your PowerPoints,

We assume that the reputation and PowerPoint system will get more sophisticated over time via more neural-network-driven criteria.

6) Develop a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) manufacturing capability for member reward 'badges' that are automatically rewarded and displayed on member profiles.

NFT badges are rewarded to members who reach different totals of PowerPoints and membership levels as other distinctions within the network. NFT's tremendous inherent value comes from being provably scarce; they cannot be replaced with an identical item and are tradable on public blockchains.

Benefits

PowerPoints, CPRO rewards, and reputation rankings and badges drive more user activity and participation and communicate a revenue-sharing value to our brand image, along with our overall 'trusted network' approach.

Due to high integrity and the synchronization between the private nodes, the increase transaction throughput by shortening the block confirmation time due to fast propagation of data.

Questions

In what ways can we leverage NFTs to develop products and services that are tradable?

7) Develop the $ProShop as a decentralized, member-to-vendor e-commerce platform.

The $ProShop is 'a decentralized eBay of all things professional,' allowing members to offer a variety goods and services, including paid memberships, subscriptions, research reports, books, podcasts, event tickets, webinars, and expert advice by voice and video connection.

Although the $ProShop is a private blockchain system developed and operated by Cryptonite, transactions will also be saved to a public blockchain so people can verify their transactions without revealing the identity to anyone.

Cryptonite will receive a TBD percentage on every sale to curate the product and services and maintain the $ProShop.

Much like Apple does for its App Store, a Cryptonite product review team screen, approve, and write reviews on all products and services offered in the $ProShop to ensure initial quality control. Once a member has purchased the product or service, they will receive awareds for anonymous or on-the-record critiques and ratings to encourage ongoing input and quality control.

Benefits

This approach provides for more security, independent verification, and transaction transparency. Cryptonite is also less-liable because the transactions are buyer-to-vendor, so we never hold anyone else's payment information, tokens, or fiat.

8) Develop a blockchain payment gateway - the GoCrypto POS platform- so the $ProShop.

Cryptonite offers a gateway to GoCrypto, a POS platform designed to support crypto balances, deposits, withdrawals, payments, internal transactions, and transaction costs on mainstream blockchain networks (Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash ABC).

Benefits

Our users can buy and pay in CPRO, Fiat, or any crypto we designate (BTC, ETH, XRP). Cryptonite does not touch any of the money, credit card/payment information and is not responsible for any transactions.

9) Develop a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) manufacturing capability for digital assets sold in our $ProShop.

Benefits

NFT's on a decentralized exchange enables IP and content creators and Cryptonite to get a fee whenever the token is transferred or sold

Future of Social Networks (1 of 3)

VeradiVerdict - Issue #259

In 2017, a group of MIT Media Lab researchers claimed in Wired that decentralized social networks “will never work” [1]. In their piece, they cited three impossible challenges: (1) the question of onboarding (and retaining) users from scratch, (2) the (mis)handling of personal information of users, and (3) lucrative user-targeted user advertisements. In all three cases, they argued, incumbent tech giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, simply had too far-reaching economies of scale to make room for any significant competition.

Fast forward half a decade later, what was once hailed as “impossible” seems no longer so far-fetched, and we seem to be on the dawn of a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualize social media networks. In this three-part series, we will examine how new ideas in decentralized social (DeSo) seem to address these “age-old” questions, specifically, (1) the use of open social graphs in solving the cold start problem, (2) using proof-of-personhood and cryptographic techniques to solve the userhood problem, and (3) leveraging tokenomics models and incentive structures to solve the revenue problem.

Social Graphs and the Cold Start Problem

Social media platforms invariably face the cold-start problem: attracting and engaging users from scratch without an existing user base or network effects. Traditionally, nascent social media startups such as Snapchat, Clubhouse, or recently Threads have sought to overcome this through brute force and sheer marketing prowess. By capturing everyone’s attention at just the right moment, whether that is through a novel UX design, media headlines, or FOMO, they launch a huge blitz of signups to almost instantaneously build up a moat of users on the platform. For example, in a matter of 5 days, Threads was able to onboard a mind-whopping 100 million users [2].

But more often than not, these successful marketing campaigns are met with an existential crisis: how do you retain all of these users, and continuously generate new content (and profit)? This is the problem that Clubhouse previously faced, and Threads is currently facing. And as these applications die out, the lucrative user social graphs and profiles that these platforms build die out with it, so that future aspiring social media networks need to repeat the difficult marketing stunt all over again to bootstrap their network.

An example of a social graph [3]

The fundamental problem behind all of this is that in web2 social networks, the social graph layer (which annotates the relationships between users) is inseparably wound-up with the social application itself, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The two layers are symbiotic: the novelty of the application bootstraps the social graph, which in turn acts as the primary moat of the social media application. Despite all their problems, the reason why users don’t leave Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is simple: all our friends are on it.

But what if we decouple the social graph and the social application? What if, even after Clubhouse (or Threads) dies out, we can still make use of the social graph created in their glory-days to easily bootstrap another social application? This is web3’s response to the cold start problem.

Using Public Blockchains as an Open Social Graph

vitalik.eth on Etherscan

In a certain sense, a public blockchain like Ethereum is itself a social graph. If I look up an ENS domain or a person’s wallet address on Etherscan, I’m able to inspect that person’s on-chain social profile: what assets they are holding, who they are transacting with, and infer what communities they are a part of.

This on-chain social profile seems to be a natural jumping off point for a new decentralized social network, and indeed, is a path which several companies seem to be exploring.

a16z profile on Debank. Data as of July 29, 2023.

Debank, for example, transforms the hexadecimal dump on Etherscan into a human-readable portfolio or “profile,” and offers the functionality to send direct messages to these different portfolios, thus using this on-chain data as a way to bootstrap a direct-message style social network. A similar route is taken by 0xPPL, which seeks to also use on-chain user profiles to build a Twitter-style social network. This general strategy of making raw transaction data readable and interpretable to “layman” users has been accelerated with the maturity of sophisticated Large Language Models such as GPT-4. Cymbal, for example, purportedly uses GPT to generate conversational summaries of transactions and trends to create a hybrid between a data-resource, news feed, and future social network [4].

Building Native Social Graph Protocols

A problem with simply relying on public blockchain data, such as on Ethereum, is that the data is simply not rich enough for social applications. Because public blockchains were built first and foremost with financial applications in mind, rather than social applications, most of the natively collected data on-chain, such as transaction history, account balances, and token data, are not necessarily the most useful to a social network.

Overview of Lens [5]

Instead of simply using the native on-chain data as a social graph, one idea is to build a new, dedicated social graph protocol on top of a public blockchain. Lens Protocol, for example, makes use of the key observation that across social applications, there are common denominators for social interactions, which they then abstract into different on-chain actions such as “posting,” “commenting,” and “mirroring” (i.e., sharing or re-posting) [5].

Farcaster has similar abstractions on its social graphs, such as a “cast” (post), “reactions” (likes), and an “amp” function in which users recommend other users that they believe are worth paying attention to [6]. The primary difference between Farcaster and Lens is in their technical implementation – whereas Lens places everything on the Polygon blockchain, Farcaster places its ID registry on Ethereum itself and runs its social graph on an L2 as a delta graph.

A third notable social graph protocol is Cyberconnect, which has a greater emphasis on link aggregation (of both on-chain and off-chain sources) through its link3 mechanism, as well as focusing on Events and FanClubs as initial use cases.

Crucially, for these social graph protocols, they are not necessarily building the top-layer social applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Rather, they provide the open social graph layer (essentially an SDK) necessary to quickly build and scale these top-layer applications. As mentioned previously, the core advantage of this is that even if a once-successful social app dies out (Clubhouse-style), the social graph generated can still be used by other developers. Thus, only one marketing blitz, or one successful app is necessary to bootstrap the entire ecosystem.

Designing Decentralized Social Media from the Ground Up

A third strategy in onboarding is to build a decentralized solution from the ground up. The premise for this is that social media applications are such a cornerstone of our digital experience that there needs to be a dedicated blockchain (or other decentralized) solution that puts the primitive actions of a social media application natively, rather than channel it through a protocol built on top of an infrastructure originally designed to support finance use-cases. In short, we need some sort of a social-media “appchain.”

DeSo Home Page

One of the most notable projects following this strategy is the DeSo, which is building a L1 blockchain dedicated to social applications. Instead of focusing on “transactions per second” like other mainstream public blockchains, DeSo seeks to optimize for “posts per second,” as well as social applications’ need to handle both communication and storage, which general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum are not necessarily optimizing for (think about all the images and videos stored on something like Twitter and Instagram). On top of this L1 blockchain, DeSo plans to build a wide selection of social applications, including long-form content (like Substack), short-form content (like Twitter), and Reddit-like applications [7].

Other decentralized social media platforms, like Bluesky and Mastodon, can also roughly be following this strategy of designing decentralized social media from the ground up. Strictly speaking, they are not blockchain based solutions, and instead rely on a federated server system to ensure that posts are sufficiently decentralized. Mastodon, for example, uses a system similar to email, where users can choose between different service providers (like Gmail, Hotmail, or iCloud). In the same way that an organization is able to set up and customize its own mail server, each “instance” on Mastodon will be a self-regulated and customizable community [8]. Bluesky, on the other hand, is an application developed on the open source AT Protocol, which is essentially an open social graph with APIs such as “follow,” “like,” and “post” that is optimized for a Twitter-style social-media platform [9].

The commonality between DeSo and projects such as Mastodon and Bluesky is that they reject the notion that the existing public blockchain designs (epitomized by the EVM) are suitable for a social network. Although this approach undoubtedly gives these projects more fine-grained control design decisions and user experience, in doing so this strategy severs the potential connections and cross-pollination with DeFi, existing NFT communities, and other mature elements of the web3 ecosystem. Moreover, it remains to be seen just how “decentralized” these solutions are, especially in an environment where their decentralization is not guaranteed by a public blockchain. Will these solutions, in the end, once again bundle up the social graph with the social application, just like in existing social networks, or will they sufficiently decentralize the social graph layer and attract a wide range of applications and developer teams? This is a key question for the future of web3 social.

References

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/decentralized-social-networks-sound-great-too-bad-theyll-never-work/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/10/23787453/meta-instagram-threads-100-million-users-milestone

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/explainer-what-exactly-is-the-social-graph-2012-3

[4] https://decrypt.co/149202/cymbal-human-readable-ethereum-blockchain-explorer-etherscan

[5] https://docs.lens.xyz/docs/overview

[6] https://hackmd.io/IP-8snyMQfOGxV3LUjlJbA

[7] https://docs.deso.org/deso-roadmap

[8] https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/24/what-is-mastodon/

[9] https://atproto.com/guides/applications

Future of Social Networks (2 of 3)

VeradiVerdict - Issue #260

PAUL VERADITTAKIT

AUG 10

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Social Media’s Userhood Problem

Modern social media suffers uniquely from a bot problem. Although social media platforms have a mandate to uphold freedom of expression, this issue becomes thorny when the “users” in question are not in fact real users, but bots. And, as it turns out bots can have a significant impact on public discourse, from alleged tampering with US presidential elections to influencing the public opinion on COVID [1]. Especially with its emphasis on anonymity, security, and privacy, any decentralized social media platform inherits the “bot problem” – essentially, how do you convince people that the accounts on your platform are real and not bots, especially in an era of advanced AI?

The naive approach is simply just a traditional know-your-customer protocol, but this approach immediately runs into a privacy problem – the flip side of the coin. How (and why) should you trust any social media platform to hold a treasure trove of our sensitive data (from government IDs to private messages and financial transactions) that is able to recreate someone’s entire personal, social, and professional life?

Thus, the “userhood” problem is a tension between confirming that users are actually human versus making privacy guarantees on personal data. Within this writing, we will explore two distinct approaches to tackling this problem, a biometric approach (with zero-knowledge proofs) and a social-vouching approach.

Worldcoin and Biometric Authentication

Within the “proof-of-personhood” problem space, Worldcoin stands out as one of the most notable and controversial projects. In addition to having Sam Altman, the famed CEO of OpenAI as one of its proponents, Worldcoin’s solution to the “proof-of-personhood” question is very straightforward: use a retina scan to create biometric proof that you are a human (since bots don’t have retinas yet), and receive an authentication token from this. As for data privacy, Worldcoin claims to use Zero Knowledge Proofs to ensure that the biometric data obtained is stored securely [2].

I Looked Into Sam Altman's Orb and All I Got Was This Lousy Crypto | WIRED

Worldcoin Orb. Image Source: https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-orb-worldcoin-tools-for-humanity/ [3]

The thesis behind Worldcoin is that with the increasing role that AI plays in society, there needs to be a way of telling humans and bots apart, crucially in a privacy-preserving and decentralized way. Through using the Worldcoin orbs’ retina scans, one can obtain a “digital-passport-like” World ID, which enables recipients to potentially be eligible for a crypto-based Universal Basic Income mechanism and participate in novel mechanisms of global democratic governance [3]. In essence, this World ID is intended as a social primitive to bootstrap the digital social networks of the future.

Throughout its documentation, Worldcoin emphasizes how it has a privacy-first solution. For example, it states that it deletes images collected by the Orb, storing only a hash of the user’s iris, and runs Zero Knowledge Proofs (zk-SNARKs) in order to share proof of personhood information without disclosing any personal data. And although in the current phase of rolling out, these hashes are stored in a centralized database, the team is dedicated in the long-run to store these iris hash data on-chain after the hashing algorithm is fully mature [4].

But despite these privacy-preserving claims, there are still numerous controversies about the true privacy, security, and fairness guarantees. For example, there have been claims of Worldcoin operators having their credentials stolen, and World IDs being sold on digital black markets, such that users could attain Worldcoin tokens without going through the iris scan themselves [5] [6]. There also have been overall equity concerns, with the MIT Technology Review publishing a scathing article in April 2022 on deception, manipulation, and exploitation of nearly half a million users (primarily in developing countries) during its test phase, going so far as to call it a form of “crypto-colonialism” [7]. Indeed, as of August 2, 2023, Kenya, formerly one of Worldcoin’s largest collection venues, had banned Worldcoin scans over security, privacy, and financial concerns [8].

Apart from these project-specific controversies though, there also exist broader concerns about Worldcoin’s overall approach of biometric authentication through dedicated hardware. Because the Orb is fundamentally a hardware device, even if Worldcoin’s software was all perfect, there is no way to guarantee that there is a hardware backdoor that allows Worldcoin (or another third-party manufacturer) to secretly collect users’ actual biometric data, or insert fake profiles into the system [9]. To skeptics, it can appear that all of Worldcoin’s privacy assurances (ZKPs, iris hashes, decentralization on-chain) seem to be no more than an ironic statement of “trust me bro, we’re a trustless solution.”

Proof of Humanity and Social Vouching

A different approach to the proof-of-personhood problem is to use a social-vouching approach. Essentially, if verified humans Alice, Bob, Charlie, David all “vouch” that Emily is a verified human, then chances are that Emily is probably also a human. The core question here is therefore a question of game theory design – how do we engineer incentives in a way that maximizes our ability to “verify humans.”

From Proof of Humanity Website

Proof of Humanity is one of the oldest and most important projects within this space. In order to “prove your humanity,” you need to (1) submit your personal information, photos and a video, as well as a 0.125 ETH deposit, (2) have humans already existing in the registry vouching for you, and (3) pass before a “3-challenge period.” If anyone challenges you during this period, this case is brought to the Kleros decentralized court, with this deposit at stake [9].

Within the vouching process, the user is first paired with a voucher through a spreadsheet of vouchers. After the user pairs with their voucher, they then do a video call in order to validate that the profile matches with the real person [10]. Like the thesis of Worldcoin, the Proof of Humanity community has in the long run an idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in mind, available to those verified within the Proof of Humanity registry [11]

Some other projects following a similar path of leveraging social graphs to authenticate personhood include BrightID’s video call verification, where everyone verifies each other, Idena’s continuous captcha creation and solving games, and Circles’ trust-based cliques.

Perhaps the biggest appeal of these social-vouching based platforms is that they don’t seem to be as intrusive as Worldcoin, which literally requires you to scan your iris at a metal orb. Some of these approaches, such as Idena’s captcha “checkpoint rituals,” even seem to preserve some degree of anonymity, not requiring large amounts of personal data sharing or needing a third-party identification center [12].

The Future for Proof-of-Personhood

As AI continues to advance and exhibit increasingly human-like behavior, it is increasingly important to devise novel mechanisms for proof-of-personhood, not only for Universal Basic Income and other incentives that many of these proof-of-personhood projects discuss, but more importantly as a way to better sanitize and regulate the social networks of the future.

Yet, from data privacy to invasiveness of process to effectiveness at determining personhood, this process is one that involves numerous tradeoffs, being one of the famed “hard problems in cryptocurrency” [13]. As Vitalik himself notes, there does not seem to be a single most ideal form of proof-of-personhood, and puts forward a possible hybrid path as a suggestion: one that bootstraps using biometric-based approaches, but in the long-run transitions to more social graph-based approach.

Biometric-Social Graph Hybrid Path [9].

Nonetheless, going forward, this is a space that requires much more transparency of process, code, and data. In short, there cannot be an ironic paradox where users need to “trust that it’s a trustless solution”. It is only through this way that we can truly create a social network primitive that stands true to crypto’s original vision of decentralization and privacy.

References

[1] https://stanfordrewired.com/post/bots-free-speech

[2] https://worldcoin.org/blog/announcements/worldcoin-project-launches

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-orb-worldcoin-tools-for-humanity/

[4] https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/solving-for-privacy-worldcoin-approach-keeping-information-safe

[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-01/altman-s-worldcoin-wld-still-safe-despite-controversy-coinfund-s-perkins-says#xj4y7vzkg

[6] WorldIDs being sold on the black market

https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia/status/1659060950748782594?s=20

[7] MIT Technology Review’s critique of Worldcoin, April 2022: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-biometrics-web3/

[8] Kenya suspending Worldcoin scans: https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/02/kenya-suspends-worldcoin-scans-over-security-privacy-and-financial-concerns/

[9] https://vitalik.ca/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

[10] https://maxirosson.medium.com/how-to-create-a-profile-on-proof-of-humanity-42f6c179d8cb

[11] https://time.com/6142810/proof-of-humanity/

[12] https://medium.com/idena/proof-of-identity-how-idena-works-4da7e9891926

[13] https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/11/22/progress.html#numberfifteensic

- Paul Veradittakit

Future of Social Networks (3 of 3)

VeradiVerdict - Issue #261

PAUL VERADITTAKIT

AUG 17

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In 2017, a group of MIT Media Lab researchers claimed in Wired that decentralized social networks “will never work”. In their piece, they cited three impossible challenges: (1) the question of onboarding (and retaining) users from scratch, (2) the (mis)handling of personal information of users, and (3) lucrative user-targeted user advertisements. In all three cases, they argued, incumbent tech giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, simply had too far-reaching economies of scale to make room for any significant competition.

Creating the “Killer App”

The ultimate question of whether web3 social as a vertical will succeed or not is if it can produce a new “killer app,” one like TikTok or Instagram before it, providing a truly novel social experience that onboards users on a mass scale. Without this “killer app,” all the development in the underlying infrastructure (such as decentralized social graphs and proof-of-humanhood identity protocols) lose much of their intended purpose.

However, the problem with these “new social experiences” is that they are almost impossible to predict. Although people repeat the mantra of “building a killer app” over and over again, no one quite knows in what form this app will take place – after all, you are quite literally trying to predict the course of human behavior. In this article, instead of trying to do the impossible and concretely predict what the next “killer app” in social will be, I will try and explore two high level strategies – augmenting existing social experiences with web3 features and the creation of a web3-first social community – and describe some of projects following these potential routes of innovation.

Augmenting Existing Social Experiences with Tokenization

The low-hanging fruit approach in building a web3 “killer app” is simply to add some new features to an already existing “killer app,” a mainstream social platform which users are already familiar with. Most commonly, this “additional web3 feature” is an element of tokenization in the form of an X-to-Earn project.

From Reddit Community Points Program: https://www.reddit.com/community-points/

One of the most interesting projects following this path is Reddit’s Moons program, launched in May 2020, rewarding users on the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit for posting and curating content. Reddit Moons are an ERC-20 token launched on Arbitrum Nova, whose issuance is based on a user’s Reddit “karma,” calculated from the upvotes and downvotes a user has received [1]. Moons allow users to vote in community polls to decide on the future distribution of Moons and overall direction of the community [2].

The overall tokenomics strategy of Reddit Moons has also been praised by the community, with the supply dropping by 2.5% every monthly issue and asymptoting the yearly inflation of the token to 1%. As such, over time, the “karma to Moons ratio,” or the amount of Moons earned for a user’s “karma,” is believed to steadily decrease, thus making Moons more scarce in hopes of increasing its value in the long run [3].

Reddit Moon Tokenomics [3]

Reddit is a particularly interesting case when it comes to integrating web3 functionalities (Moons tokenization in this case) into an already-existing “killer app”. Out of all of the mainstream social media platforms, Reddit is arguably the most decentralized and community driven, owing to its unique “subreddit” structure that permits a large degree of autonomy and self-moderation on these platform enclaves, rather than enforcing that traditional top-down approach to content moderation. Arguably these design decisions could make Reddit one of the most suitable platforms for experimenting with web3 mechanisms. Indeed, Moons are just one example of Reddit’s innovative community points program, which allows subreddits to launch their own ERC-20 tokens, and even provides an Ethereum-based wallet called the Reddit Vault to store these tokens. Apart from Moons, r/FortniteBR’s Brick tokens are another notable example of this program [4].

As of August 2023, Reddit Moons have gained traction following its listing on several major centralized exchanges, including Kraken [5]. Yet, despite the immediate euphoria of these tokens “mooning,” the long term success for such a simple “post-to-earn” mechanism remains unclear. According to the above data and August 12 price data, the Reddit “Maxers” Moons income would be around $4200 USD, and the median income would be just around $0.9 USD [6]. This is a sobering statistic that underlies one of the fundamental problems of the X-to-Earn model: you simply ain’t earning much, or at the very least, far less than the “live-changing money” that such projects may sometimes advertise. Moreover, the income is often skewed and concentrated to just a few users, and so the average user may not be able to enjoy much of the “to-earn” part, even as they participate in the “X” activity. Eventually users may get disillusioned with these meager earnings, and in cases such as StepN, set the project towards a road of collapse [7].

Thus, the emphasis on the “earning” for a simple “social-to-earn” project may not be sustainable in the long run. Instead, there has to be the creation of a novel social experience for the end user, a process that a user would gladly pay for, rather than getting paid to do. The recent buzz of the friend.tech project on the Base network highlights this point. Friends.tech is essentially “a stock market for X (fka. Twitter) profiles,” where you can buy and sell “shares” of an X (fka. Twitter) influencer’s profile [8]. Through owning “shares” of an influencer, the user is promised increased access (such as through private chats and other exclusive benefits) and the user can freely trade these shares.

Data and prices as of August 12, 2023. Source: Dune Analytics [9]

This novel social experience and the ability to monetize one’s X following has generated over 6000 ETH in volume (or 11 million USD at time of writing) with 230k+ transactions over just the past few days since its invite-only beta launch [9]. There are, however, some lingering doubts about whether friends.tech is able to sustain this early momentum, and truly pave the way for a new form of social experience through tokenizing influencer profiles, or if it will devolve into another “rug-pull” project. Coindesk especially notes the project’s lack of a functioning privacy policy and documentation on data collection practices, as well as the lack of a roadmap or whitepaper [8]. Moreover, it is unclear how the platform and the influencers on it will uphold the promised “access” to its “shareholders” and thus truly create a new form of social experience. Nonetheless, friends.tech is still an impressive experiment in transforming tokenization itself into a new form of a social experience.

Building a Web3 First Social Community

Instead of trying append web3 features such as tokenization to existing web2 social platforms, built to a very different revenue model, another approach to creating a “killer social app” in web3 is to build it from the ground up, bootstrapping from a unique crypto-native community and culture.

Phaver is a prime example of a “web3-first” social community. Built on top of the Lens’ social graph (and more recently integrated with Cyberconnect’s social graph), Phaver appeals to a web3 native community through its integration with other web3 social identity tech, such as NFT communities and soul-bound tokens. This is a platform with a unique dual-token model, using a novel scoring system consisting of “cred” and “points” that allows users to level-up to earn rewards and perks on the platform [10].

Phaver Cred System [10]

“Cred” is essentially the user’s credibility on the platform. Users can increase their credit through linking soul-bound tokens or NFTs to their account, as well as through daily engagement on the platform. “Points” are rewarded to users based on the quality and engagement of their posts themselves, and will be eventually redeemable for Phaver tokens. Importantly, the higher the user’s “cred,” the more points they are able to get for a post [11].

Because users have to link soul-bound tokens and specific NFT collections(eg. Cryptopunks and Bored Apes) to get “cred,” this provides a useful way of discriminating between users and bots on the platform. In fact, it is almost like a “proof of stake,” but for social identity; think about how mindblowingly expensive it would be for a bot-farm to buy a Bored Ape for every single bot in order to get high Phaver cred! Thus, Phaver proposes that projects can use its “cred system” to prevent airdrop bot-farming and guarantee that users are humans, rather than bots – all without scanning any retinas too [11].

From above, we can see that Phaver creates a novel tokenomics system to create a web3-first social community. But for Phaver, as with many web3-first social apps, the primary challenge is to expand beyond just this native web3 audience, towards a crowd of users that don’t have any experience with web3, and not knowing what a Bored Ape or a soul-bound token is, all while giving these users a clear rationale for using the platform. Even though Phaver states that it follows a “web2.5” model [12], allowing users to register without a Lens profile, much of the “unique experience” of Phaver is heavily reliant on web3 industry knowledge, bearing an educational cost which may act as a significant barrier to widespread adoption.

Another notable project inspired by web3's community subculture is POAP, or “Proof of Attendance Protocol,” derived from the crypto space’s unique “conference culture” and annual global event series, such as ETHGlobal. Essentially a POAP is an NFT, or ERC-721 token, minted through the POAP smart contracts, digitally representing a user’s attendance at an event or conference and stored immutably on-chain. Since 2021, POAP has issued over 6 million of these NFTs, in collaboration with internationally well-known brands such as Adidas, Vogue, Github, and the US Open [13]. Perhaps the most interesting part of POAP, however, is how it can be used as a social primitive, as a way to bootstrap social networks and find others that have similar interests and networks.

Moreover, events, conferences, and conventions are things that don't require web3-specific knowledge to understand – it is easy to imagine anime conventions, world expos, and national galleries implementing similar POAP-style mechanisms for various communities and subcultures. The core question here, however, is how to sustain these POAPs’ utilities, whether it be rewarding attendees with loyalty programs, trading opportunities or exclusive events, in order to ultimately bootstrap novel social communities and thus create a new form of digital social experience.

Conclusion

So, how shall we create that “killer app” after all?

In the end, web3 social’s long-run success has to be in the creation of a new form of social experience, rather than in the replication of some web2 mechanism and say that it’s special just because it is “on-chain” and “tokenized.” Rather, there needs to be a qualitatively new experience, particularly one that is culturally rooted and inspired by web3 – whether that is NFT communities, asset tokenization, or crypto conference cultures.

More importantly, while tokenization and other web3 mechanisms allow for many new application designs, for a “killer app” to be scalable to audiences beyond the crypto-native, there must be an easy to understand use case (such as event attendance), rather than being filled with web3 jargon and concepts. In essence, going forth web3 social must leverage the distribution and abstraction techniques of traditional social media, such as TikTok or Instagram to “go viral.”

With social media ultimately being a way for users to express individuality and personal preference, any successful web3 social media needs to have an open-ended design space, one where users have a sufficient “blank canvas” to create their own use cases. Oftentimes, the reason for the “viralness” of a social application is something wholly different from what it set out to be. TikTok as a company, for example, could not possibly have predicted all the different fads and challenges that have appeared on the platform. The strength of such a platform lies precisely in the open creativity platform that such an app unleashes. It is only once web3 embraces this design decision, rather than being focused on financialization and on-chain copycats, that we can truly begin to build a wholly new “killer app” that scales web3 social to the point where it becomes the only “social.”