We are building dIRC (decentralized internet relay chat), a decentralized messaging platform. It is a shout-out to the mIRC days, but also a v2 upgrade of it - a decentralized version of it. The hope is that dIRC can be as fun as it was back then, in the decentralized world.

Modern life consists in large part of entries in databases. The long short of it is -

1. Most of our modern life exists on a database - money, property deed, shares, social networks

2. These databases are maintained by different keepers - banks, government clerks, stock exchange, Google/Microsoft/Facebook

3. We are trusting these keepers of databases to not rug us

4. If they rug us, there’s not much we can do, since we have no control over those databases - global financial crises, bank freezes, de-platforming from social media

5. Even if they do not rug us, these databases are privately stored, which gives them power and control over us - inflation, price trends, dark pools, social graphs

6. Blockchains created a new paradigm, where now the database can be run by everyone, used by everyone, and transparent to everyone

Bitcoin showed and proved to the world that blockchains work - creating a new financial system that opened up new paradigms of thinking - i.e., if money can be decentralized, what about financial products? Or art? Or gaming? Or social relationships? Or an identity?

Along came Ethereum. This is where things start to get interesting. Ethereum provided the world tools needed to build a decentralized world (besides money). Some people call this world Metaverse, but it is basically a world where everyone is a decentralized person.

In fact, if we frame our progress so far as a journey in building tools that a decentralized person need, things start to make sense:

• Your wallet = your identity: In this decentralized world, a decentralized person is identified by his wallet address.

• ENS and PFPs: The decentralized person now has a human-readable name and a profile image.

• DeFi: The decentralized person can trade and conduct financial transactions.

• Play-to-earn: The decentralized person can work to earn money (admittedly not solved yet).

• Games: The decentralized person can de-stress (not solved as well)

In the context of the decentralized person, dIRC is building the next piece, giving the decentralized person a way to communicate with one another. By building a decentralized messaging platform, the decentralized person have now a communication system that is natively built into the blockchain.

We are not the first to think of this. Several players in the blockchain world are pushing on this idea, including Lens, Farcaster, DeSo… So what makes us unique among these other big boys?

In short, we focus on the ethos of decentralization - censorship-resistant, permissionless, composability…:

• Instead of rebuilding an entire separate blockchain, we are building on top of Ethereum L2 Arbitrum.

• Instead of constructing new smart contracts to manage relationships, we are building on top of the ERC-1155 token standard

• Instead of controlling what contracts are allowed to be deployed on our platform, our platform is open-sourced and fully composable, allowing anyone to build on top of it.

• Instead of building barriers around naming conventions or social graphs (which is how value can be captured), we are building on top of existing decentralized protocols like ENS or TheGraph.

It is true that centralization elements greatly improve the user experience. As our product grows, we can’t say we won’t introduce elements of centralization for the sake of user-friendliness. But the core of our product will remain decentralized - E.g., we might run user searches on a centralized server for ease of search-ability, but the user profile is decentralized and not within our control.

More importantly, our ethos around decentralization will remain - i.e., if something can be decentralized, that would be our first go-to solution.

What most web3 social networks do not mention in detail, and the reason why most web2 messaging/social media apps is free, is because the value comes from the social network data, or social graphs.

Social graphs map out relationships between you and your connections. At the basic level, if you add a person as a friend, your social graph now indicates that both of you are friends. This idea expands out to different interactions, depending on the actions you take on the social media platform.

In fact, what a social media platform is can be broken down into 1) connections, and 2) actions both of you to interact with one another. The more interactions happen within a platform, the more valuable it is, as it contains more information that the platform can use.

What dIRC is doing, then, is “letting users own their social graph”, allowing them to take their network with them when they switch services. We explain further how this is achieved in a decentralized way in “A conceptual explanation”.

As such, messaging is but the first use case we identified that is fundamental to this construct - i.e., before the days of social media, our interactions are basically limited to messaging (remember IRC?). Further use cases can be built from there, whether it is by us, or by the community. By laying the foundational building blocks of a new web3 social network public good, who knows what new paradigms of interaction could be possible in the future?

We are building dIRC (decentralized internet relay chat), a decentralized messaging platform. It is a shout-out to the mIRC days, but also a v2 upgrade of it - a decentralized version of it. The hope is that dIRC can be as fun as it was back then, in the decentralized world.

Modern life consists in large part of entries in databases. The long short of it is -

1. Most of our modern life exists on a database - money, property deed, shares, social networks

2. These databases are maintained by different keepers - banks, government clerks, stock exchange, Google/Microsoft/Facebook

3. We are trusting these keepers of databases to not rug us

4. If they rug us, there’s not much we can do, since we have no control over those databases - global financial crises, bank freezes, de-platforming from social media

5. Even if they do not rug us, these databases are privately stored, which gives them power and control over us - inflation, price trends, dark pools, social graphs

6. Blockchains created a new paradigm, where now the database can be run by everyone, used by everyone, and transparent to everyone

Bitcoin showed and proved to the world that blockchains work - creating a new financial system that opened up new paradigms of thinking - i.e., if money can be decentralized, what about financial products? Or art? Or gaming? Or social relationships? Or an identity?

Along came Ethereum. This is where things start to get interesting. Ethereum provided the world tools needed to build a decentralized world (besides money). Some people call this world Metaverse, but it is basically a world where everyone is a decentralized person.

In fact, if we frame our progress so far as a journey in building tools that a decentralized person need, things start to make sense:

• Your wallet = your identity: In this decentralized world, a decentralized person is identified by his wallet address.

• ENS and PFPs: The decentralized person now has a human-readable name and a profile image.

• DeFi: The decentralized person can trade and conduct financial transactions.

• Play-to-earn: The decentralized person can work to earn money (admittedly not solved yet).

• Games: The decentralized person can de-stress (not solved as well)

In the context of the decentralized person, dIRC is building the next piece, giving the decentralized person a way to communicate with one another. By building a decentralized messaging platform, the decentralized person have now a communication system that is natively built into the blockchain.

We are not the first to think of this. Several players in the blockchain world are pushing on this idea, including Lens, Farcaster, DeSo… So what makes us unique among these other big boys?

In short, we focus on the ethos of decentralization - censorship-resistant, permissionless, composability…:

• Instead of rebuilding an entire separate blockchain, we are building on top of Ethereum L2 Arbitrum.

• Instead of constructing new smart contracts to manage relationships, we are building on top of the ERC-1155 token standard

• Instead of controlling what contracts are allowed to be deployed on our platform, our platform is open-sourced and fully composable, allowing anyone to build on top of it.

• Instead of building barriers around naming conventions or social graphs (which is how value can be captured), we are building on top of existing decentralized protocols like ENS or TheGraph.

It is true that centralization elements greatly improve the user experience. As our product grows, we can’t say we won’t introduce elements of centralization for the sake of user-friendliness. But the core of our product will remain decentralized - E.g., we might run user searches on a centralized server for ease of search-ability, but the user profile is decentralized and not within our control.

More importantly, our ethos around decentralization will remain - i.e., if something can be decentralized, that would be our first go-to solution.

What most web3 social networks do not mention in detail, and the reason why most web2 messaging/social media apps is free, is because the value comes from the social network data, or social graphs.

Social graphs map out relationships between you and your connections. At the basic level, if you add a person as a friend, your social graph now indicates that both of you are friends. This idea expands out to different interactions, depending on the actions you take on the social media platform.

In fact, what a social media platform is can be broken down into 1) connections, and 2) actions both of you to interact with one another. The more interactions happen within a platform, the more valuable it is, as it contains more information that the platform can use.

What dIRC is doing, then, is “letting users own their social graph”, allowing them to take their network with them when they switch services. We explain further how this is achieved in a decentralized way in “A conceptual explanation”.

As such, messaging is but the first use case we identified that is fundamental to this construct - i.e., before the days of social media, our interactions are basically limited to messaging (remember IRC?). Further use cases can be built from there, whether it is by us, or by the community. By laying the foundational building blocks of a new web3 social network public good, who knows what new paradigms of interaction could be possible in the future?