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.

The current world, or where we are today

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?

The idea of a decentralized person, or the vision

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.

So how should we built it, or the mission

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.

Why is all these so important, or the end-goal

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?

dIRC implements the ERC-1155 Multi Token Standard to establish relationships between a user and his followers. Using the Multi Token Standard, each user is able to establish a one-to-many relationship with his followers. Since the User and Followers tokens are inextricably linked (same token type), users can bring their followers across various dApps, allowing them to "own their followers".

Soulbound

Every token is a soulbound token. Our definition of soulbound = non-transferable but can be burned. The tokens need to be soulbound as:

• Relationships are established at the wallet address level, an immutable construct.

• Each relationship needs to be a user driven choice - i.e., a user chooses to mint a Follow Token, or a Channel Token.

• The ability to allow transferability will lead to spam. While the receiving party can burn them, the hassle to do so defeats the entire purpose of what we are trying to do here.

• In the case of channels, admins have the ability to burn a members’ Channel Token, akin to kicking someone out of a group chat/discord channel.

Individual-level tokens

User Token

When a user first enters the dApp, he mints a User Token, soulbound to his connected wallet address.

The User Token functions as an extension of his wallet address, allowing us to add more functionalities to it that is compatible within dIRC (and beyond).

This does not mean a real-life person can only have 1 on-chain identity. Remember, a seed phrase holds multiple private/public keys, with in turn holds a public address each. As such, a person in real-life can hold multiple private keys, each with multiple wallet addresses that holds a User Token each.

An important note. Unlike other protocols, we are not allowing users to pick their profile name and picture. That problem is already solved. We are integrating ENS domains as the only way to view a human-readable profile name, and ENS-registered NFTs as the only way to showcase a profile picture. See here on how to set them up.

Follow Token

Once a User Token is minted to existence, Follow Tokens can be permissionlessly minted by other users.

Followers that want to receive messages from a user will need to mint his Follow Token. Follow Tokens can be burned anytime (to unfollow a user). There is no limit to the number of mints of Follow Token- i.e., you can mint, and burn, and mint, and burn a user's Follow Token if you wish.

Channel-level tokens

Channel Token

Anyone can create a channel permissionlessly.

When a user creates a channel, he is minting into existence a Channel Token, and is the owner of the channel. Once a Channel Token is created, other users can join the channel (and access the content) by minting the Channel Token as well.

Channels can have token-gated conditions set on it. The way it works is: The Channel Token can only be minted if a user holds a certain amount of ERC-20, ERC-721, or ERC-1155 tokens. The contract checks for this condition before allowing the user to mint.

The owner can set the list of admins of a channel. This list of wallet addresses (and the owner) are given special rights, which includes:

• Talk in read-only channels

• Kick members out of the channel

Chat Token

The ability to chat in a channel is a separate token - Chat Token. For read-only (announcement) channels, the owner disabled the minting of Chat Token, apart from him and the admins. For read-and-write (discussion) channels, the mint is enabled for all.

Channel settings

In summary, the owner of a channel is able to set a few parameters:

• List of admins: By wallet addresses. E.g., A DAO setting their admin team that will help manage their channel.

• Token-gated: E.g. The Pengus creates a channel for other Pengus to join the huddle and chill.

• Read-only vs. read-and-write: Read-only settings keep the channel clean and are useful for announcements. Read-and-write settings drive discussions among channel participants, but would crowd out the channel.

A short note on token-gating

Token-gated channels are a new paradigm in web3 messaging. NFTs showed us that people like being within a community. What that community represents might not be clear for everyone, but the idea holds. The idea of token-gating as a way to find your own communities could be an interesting idea, with a few experiments taking place right now.

Unlike other solutions out there that rely on centralized servers/bots to check for eligibility, our conditions are written on the smart contract itself.

Post-MVP, we plan to implement keepers that will continuously check members for their eligibility, and to flag to the admins those members that are no longer eligible - e.g., they sold their NFT. It is then up to the admin to decide whether to kick them out or not.

To send message via the blockchain today, the sender sends a transaction (with zero value) to the receiver’s wallet address. The message is written on the “input data” field of the transaction. This method is permissionless, immutable and verifiable on-chain, and is how we communicate with hackers.

How is dIRC different

We are building on top of the existing method.

Using the User/Follower Token relationship, we are able to direct the sender’s message only to those who want to receive the message. This means no spam, scams and distractions - re-creating the way Twitter or Discord should work in the web3 world.

But wait. Everyone can read my messages since they are all on the blockchain

That is true. While there are methods that allow for encrypted messages on the blockchain, we are still figuring out the best solution that is censorship-resistant. (We hear that zkEVM could be helpful). Let us know if you have a good solution.

But fully transparent messages has their place in this world. For example, if you think about it, isn’t that exactly what Twitter is? People on Twitter want their message to be heard. The more people hear their message, the more followers they will gain, which increases their legitimacy. This in turn attracts more people to hear their message, which increases their followers…

OK so this is web3 Twitter

Yes and No.

Yes, because it kind of is.

No, because it is more than that. By using User/Follower Tokens to first establish relationships (at the blockchain level), we are flipping the equation, putting the peer-to-peer relationships before the platform features:

Unlike web2 platforms where communities live and die on separate platforms, what web3/blockchain allow us to do is to establish the relationship first. Every user own their connections/followers/network. The platforms then offer just a service for you to interact with your network.

So what are you trying to be

Like how composable everything in crypto is, we are laying down the building blocks for other use cases to be built on it.

So far, we managed to build out a web3 version of:

1. Twitter - using the User/Follower Token relationship

2. Discord - using Channel Tokens

3. WhatsApp/Telegram - using the direct message feature (coming soon)

There could be more. Messaging is just the first step. We envision new and different web3-enabled relationships to be built on top of dIRC. Speak to us if you have cool ideas.

So you are recreating existing web2 platforms? But this time, you have to pay to send messages? Why would anyone use it

We are living in a transitional period, where people’s idea of what is worth paying for is changing over time:

• With Pirate Bay, people didn’t think it’s worth it to pay for music, until Spotify came along. Same thing with Netflix.

• With social media, people thought everything should be free, until they realize their information is being traded to marketers.

• With blockchain, people couldn’t understand why they had to pay to get their transaction included in a block, until they realize the immutability nature of the transaction.

With dIRC, people will likely reject the idea of paying to send messages at first, until they see some of the benefits of doing so:

1. Thoughtful discussions: Since each message is a transaction and entails paying a small fee, this should significantly reduce the amount of spam a user would receive when trying to have a public discussion. Perhaps now, Vitalik can finally have a thoughtful discussion with the online world.

2. Community management: For once, Web3 project owners can actually set token-gated channels that checks for members’ validity before and after entry

3. Anti-phishing: Community/DAO members of a project have more confidence in whom they are speaking to, since messages are sent from a wallet address.

   The trust assumption of a private key is arguably higher than web2 logins - unless the hacker managed to get hold of private keys, it is unlikely that you are getting phished.

There’s more. As the product continues to evolve, we think future use cases could include:

1. Pay-to-speak: Channels could be created where members actually have to pay a fee (on top of gas fee) to speak. The paid fee can go towards a pre-determined wallet address, be it the channel admin, or a DAO, or a charitable cause.

2. Pay-to-read: Today, marketers/advertisers pay platforms like Facebook or Google to find their target audience. With the User/Follower Token relationship firmed established and users have full control over what they choose to read, marketers got to go directly to users, incentivizing them to read their marketing message.

3. Smart contracts verification: Wallet addresses are already the online identity in the blockchain world. Users can interact directly with wallet addresses that are deployer address of a certain smart contract, increasing users’ confidence that they are dealing with the right owners of a project.

This still feels like a solution looking for a problem

Maybe it is.

Our objective is not to build the best product in terms of features and benefits, but to build the best decentralized product. We do not jump the gun. We focus first on decentralizing the core attributes, before adding more features later on.

We work with what we have, and we welcome all to contribute to the solution. After all, who knows which decentralized product the world would value next. This cycle was NFTs. Next cycle could be GameFi. Or Metaverse. Or messaging.