Introducing HiÐΞ - an Offline-first Decentralized CMS
Hi, ÐΞcentralization!
We have been under the radar, but we are excited to reveal what we have been working on for the past year.
HiÐΞ is an offline-first decentralized CMS that is powered by a sustainable reward distribution protocol on the Ethereum blockchain. It is also a Web3 social media DApp(s) as well as a DAO building platform.
What We are Building
The goal of our project is to create a completely decentralized censorship-resistant CMS that is self-sustainable,
so we can
- have total control of our own contents/creation/data without platform lock-in.
- be independent of media platforms and app stores owned by authorities such as Google and Apple as well as any infrastructures to host the frontend and store the data.
- sustainably reward content creators/developers/projects while effectively building autonomous communities around them - no more ad-dependent scammy contents whose business model is also controlled by Google and the like.
- fairly and efficiently govern communities without concentrating power on selected few entities.
Where We are Now
We have been working on it somewhat for a long time and built a lot of stuff, so it might be a bit overwhelming at first sight to grasp the whole picture. We started off by building a DApp development framework on top of React, and built the whole frontend CMS, then invented a smart contract protocol to autonomously and sustainably generate rewards for content creators.
So far, we have been running it among the Japanese communities, and we have more than 1300 users. At one point, we raised 1.5 million USD in staking support which generates sustainable rewards for the protocol. We have distributed more than 20,000 USD worth of rewards in the form of a JPY-pegged stable token JPYC and our test-purpose token DOGGOD. We have a $50,000 reward pool for content creators right now, and it's only growing.
Our frontend Dapp has been heavily developed from the ground up, and our smart contract protocol has been battle-tested in production on Polygon. We are getting ready for the beta launch of the whole system. And now we are on the Ceramic Mainnet!
Architechture of HiÐΞ CMS
Content Creators
As a content creator, you should be free to post your articles anywhere you like, but the problem is sometimes your data gets locked in by platforms, and they make it hard for you to export your own data. HiÐΞ CMS allows you to truly own your data by utilizing the web3 technology stack and enabling interoperability of your articles everywhere.
Offline PWA Nodes
PWA (Progressive Web App) works as a regular web app as well as a mobile app that you can install onto your mobile home screen and use offline. HiÐΞ PWA lets you edit and manage your articles without the internet. PWA is perfect because it works both on Android and iOS but is free from the app store listing. HiÐΞ CMS is open-source, so you can install it on your local machine and run your own node without ever connecting to the internet.
Backup Storages
You can store the entire data on your local machine while offline, but HiÐΞ also lets you backup your data in IPFS with Textile and also in cloud storage such as Google Drive and Dropbox. When using a Textile bucket, your data will be encrypted with a signature from your crypto wallet, and you are the only one to have access to your data.
Decentralized Data Web
You can upload your articles onto Ceramic decentralized data web on IPFS. IDX will create a list of your articles associated with your DID. The frontend DApp and offline node deployments will be decentralized, but identity and content data will be persistent via Ceramic and IDX.
NFTs
Tokenizing your articles as NFTs to anchor on the Ethereum blockchain lets you receive rewards for your articles via HiÐΞ protocol. Tokenized articles are also indexed by subgraph (The Graph Protocol) in a decentralized fashion and easily integrated with other online HiÐΞ DApps.
Online Frontend DApps
Online DApps are managed by us and any third party who deploys our OSS codebase. They work as social media platforms where you can log in with your DID or social account and showcase your articles.
The DApp can index tokenized articles from offline nodes by using subgraphs or directly connecting to an Ethereum node. Content creators can also create and manage articles directly online, just like you do with an offline node. You can move your articles freely between online and offline nodes in various ways, including direct uploading and downloading. The codebase for the offline nodes and online nodes are identical, but online nodes connect with Firestore in the background to manage identities and indexed data. So each online node is managed by a central entity and not decentralized by itself, but the cluster of online nodes will be decentralized, connecting with each other and a myriad of offline nodes over the Ceramic/IDX decentralized data web.
External Blogging Platforms
Online DApps also have integrations with existing blogging platforms such as WordPress, Qiita and ALIS. You can post your articles to external platforms as well as export your articles from those platforms. Having control over your own data and having freedom for how and where you manage your data is one of the goals of HiÐΞ. We have built our editors from scratch and integrated markdown and coding editor (not just code block highlighting), then made it interchangeable with a rich text editor (HTML) and unique formats of many other existing blogging platforms. Direct integrations with other platforms can be achieved with OAuth and APIs, whereas indirect integrations can be implemented as data conversion and browser extensions. One way or another, HiÐΞ is determined to get all your data back in your hands.
HiÐΞ Protocol
HiÐΞ Protocol is what makes this whole system sustainable by generating continuous rewards for the content creators and developers. This will be explained later in the article.
DeFi Yields
HiÐΞ Protocol is sustainable because it connects to outer DeFi protocols to generate sustainable treasury. For example, we utilize Dev Protocol for our patrons to support us by staking to receive 20 - 50 % APY for both the treasury and the patrons. At one point, we had around $1.5 million TVL in our staking pool, which has generated a $50,000 reward pool to date.
HiÐΞ Protocol
HiÐΞ Protocol is a permissionless reward protocol that generates sustainable treasury from DeFi and distributes it with community governance. The protocol can deal with any ERC20 token, and VP (voting power) for the budget allocation is programmable. It issues community tokens as ERC20 Freigeld (elastic money that automatically decreases its amount as time goes by) and rewards NFTs by burning them. The members of a certain community get community share and kudos score for their activities and contributions. They can further exchange the share with the community token using the community DEX. The kudos score will be used for various kinds of off-chain community voting for programmable democracy.
So overall, HiÐΞ Protocol functions as a sustainable community-building tool for DAO.
The diagram below is not too accurate in terms of the smart contract architecture but rather simplified for clarity.
State Manager
We have invented a new way of rapidly and flexibly upgrading smart contracts in combination with eternal storage. This has allowed us to rapidly test our contracts in production.
Fee Collector
To use the protocol, most of your actions require a tiny amount of a fee (1 cent) with $JPYC or $WP. WP (Warashibe Point) is a utility token for HiÐΞ Protocol since the team behind HiÐΞ is called Warashibe. The fee should adjust the difficulty and quality of the contents circulating in the protocol and will be configurable in the future.
Treasury
A treasury contract is a combination of voting power calculation and reward pool with an arbitrary token. Treasury contracts can permissionlessly connect to the governance contract to vote and distribute the pooled token to communities.
For instance, we defined VP for $DEV token as the amount of reward you have received from Dev Protocol for staking for HiÐΞ, and the reward pool comes from our staking pool itself.
Another example is that we defined VP for $JPYC as the amount of social tipping you have done on our online node (hide.ac), and the reward pool of 1 Million JPYC came from the grant we received from JPYC Inc.
The same token can have multiple treasury contracts with different VP strategies.
Governance
Treasury owners can set up a voting period, and VP holders vote for the communities to allocate budgets from the treasury.
Factory
Topics / Communities (NFT)
Factory can create Topics / Communities as NFTs for which people can vote through Governance.
Community Tokens (ERC20 Freigeld)
The budget allocated for a community through voting will be converted into a community token (CT). CTs are ERC20 Freigeld (free money) which is elastic money that automatically decreases its holder's amount as blocks go by. This prevents the hoarding of CTs and activates the circulation of budgets for good use. A CT is also a pair token of the treasury token and the community, so each combination of a token and a community issues a different pair token.
NFT Market for contents
HiÐΞ tokenizes articles as NFTs and anchors them to the protocol, but any outer NFT can be registered to the Market contract and get rewarded.
Rewards
You can burn CT for an NFT, and the same amount of the treasury token will be paid out in the ratio of 80% to the NFT owner and 20% to you the CT burner (these numbers should be configurable in the future).
When burning CT, you will get the same amount of contribution score (kudos) and the square root amount of community share. The community share is quadratic to prevent the long-term power concentration, and it is also a decreasing elastic value, but unlike CT, it's not transferable.
Community Voting
The kudos doesn't decrease, but it only gets accumulated as you make more contributions in the community. Kudos will be used for a variety of on-chain/off-chain community voting such as quadratic voting and linear voting, as well as for things the community can come up with in the future.
Community DEX
When a budget is allocated through governance voting, the community DEX will get a certain portion of it as a dividend. The ratio will be determined by the total amount of the share the community has and the community share of the voter in a quadratic calculation. The CT will be continuously pooled to the DEX as it decreases the holder's amount. Community share can be converted to CT at any time.
Community building for DAO
As [Vitalik keeps mentioning in his talks, social media is the next frontier of blockchain, and coin voting sucks. We are indeed addressing both issues in our project. With the combination of the decentralized CMS and the smart contract protocol, we believe HiÐΞ will be one of the best community-building tools for DAO.
- Social Media and Blogging platform is the best place to spread the word and bond community.
- HiÐΞ protocol automagically generates sustainable community fund and distribute it fairly by the governance. Communities usually get burned out and disappear unless you have a decent budget to reward contributions.
- For instance, if you are a project owner, staking for us with Dev Protocol will get you 30% APY to you and 30% APY as a budget for your community. You won't lose anything. You indeed gain both the reward and community growth for your staking. This is only one of the many examples of how you can utilize HiÐΞ for your community.
- As a community member and a content creator, you will simply get rewarded by the protocol and your community if you create good content or report your contributions in your articles.
- HiÐΞ makes sure that your community is active with elastic community tokens and prevents power concentration with the quadratic share calculations.
- Social media has billions of potential users beyond the crypto space.
We are determined to build a fully decentralized censorship-resistant ecosystem!
Roadmap
The good news is everything is already functioning in production, and our userbase and reward pool are growing. The bad news is most resources are in Japanese, so we need English documentation.
Our next objectives are to
- onboard the global community
- fully decentralize the frontend Dapps
- improve the UI/UX everywhere!
- onboard crypto communities
- onboard crypto projects for token distribution
- opensource our entire codebase and achieve autonomous development by DAO (we have another product to decentralize task management for teams, which will be integrated with the HiÐΞ ecosystem.)
The next article will explain how to actually use HiÐΞ.
Links
