We haven’t gone anywhere and I apologize for being a bit quiet on Deso.

It’s a one-man band over here and I needed to take a breather from social media for a bit. I’m slowly coming back though!

I don’t want to waste time just talking nonsense, so let’s jump into what we’ve been working on!

Self Publishing NFTs

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

We are very close to wrapping up our full self-publishing NFTs so anyone can purchase one directly from spatiumstories.com!

This will 100% unlock self-publishing to anyone that wants to join in on the fun!

We will have 3 different NFT tiers (yes one is FREE), each with different levels of features. 

Some features for the higher tiers won’t be available immediately, but we’re working on them soon!

Each tier can be purchased for a month or for a year. When you purchase an NFT you will be shown the expiration date in the NFT post body.

Until we have a sophisticated way of creating rolling subscriptions, once your NFT expires, you will need to come manually purchase a new one.

That being said, we are also working on integrating with Stripe so you can easily purchase an author subscription with a credit card too!

Author Associations

Some of you may be wondering how these self-publishing NFTs actually work behind the scenes.

Well, we think we’ve come up with a creative approach.

When you purchase an author NFT you are actually also given an official Spatium Association too. This association will be for whichever tier of NFT you purchased.

This does 2 huge things:

1. It makes it easier to verify you are an author when publishing since the NFTs minted are all unique. Keeping track of thousands of NFTs is an overhead nightmare. Being able to check an Association is quick and easy.

2. We have a simple service that checks once a day for all our author associations and ensures they still have a valid author NFT. If not, then the association is removed. This makes #1 even easier. Otherwise part of the overhead of checking multiple NFTs would also include multiple expired NFTs. This would add up over time and make everything slow.

This will also make it super easy to find all our author’s books for the marketplace by simply gathering all our associated authors.

Book Associations

Speaking of Associations, we are also going to start using Associations to mark every single one of our published books!

This will make identifying whether an NFT is an official Spatium book seamless and secure.

This innovation will also unlock the ability for authors to publish official Spatium books from their own account or project account! A feature we are really excited to release soon!

Life or Death

My personal short story compilation will be published soon!

This is my very first piece of fiction work and the inspiration for me building Spatium in the first place!

If Spatium ever takes off like I hope it does, these books will be historical to the origins of the platform.

Just saying ;) 

R2M2 Revamp

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Some of you have taken part in the super fun R2M2 promotional feature with the Wizard of Oz.

https://spatiumstories.com/#/r2m2

If not, let me explain. R2M2 stands for Random Rares Minting Squared. The name itself is just a fun word-play thing.

But the feature allows a way to mint your book with multiple covers, rarities, and ultimately gamify the release of your books!

For example, right now we have the Wizard of Oz mint on R2M2. There are 10 covers with varying numbers of each cover ranging from 50 all the way to the 1/1 Wizard cover.

When you purchase a Wizard of Oz book, you pay a one-time flat price and get a random cover, it could be the least rare or the most rare.

We think this will be a lot of fun for authors, but we think we can make it better.

In our revamp, we are giving even more control to the authors. Now when you create a promotion, you can select which books go in. They don’t have to be the same book.

You could do a Christmas special where you release special editions of all your books, bundle them into a promotion, and then when someone purchases a book they just get a random copy of any of your books!

Again, we want to supply the tools for you to use in any way you imagine.

As for right now, this promotion tool is not widely available to our authors yet. However, once the full self-publishing is released, the next thing we’ll be doing is allowing our authors access to this really cool tool!

The HG Wells Collection

The revamped R2M2 will debut with a fun promotion of several HG Wells books! We’ll have really cool covers, multiple copies of each, and multiple books from this genius fiction teller.

Or is he really a time traveler? hmm…

Can you collect all his books?

Author Pages

Coming very soon will be author pages! 

Once you have an author NFT, this will be your one-stop shop to manage your titles, start R2M2 promotions, publish new titles, burn books (possibly frowned upon, haha), and even start your own book clubs!

Book Clubs

Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash

I also plan to start up a weekly book club very very soon! 

Probably covering one of our published books! Stay tuned for details!

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have not gone anywhere. Our founder was simply burned out on the social media game. Ugh.

We believe we have some really exciting updates coming very very soon!

To summarize:

• Self Publishing NFTs

• Author Associations

• Book Associations

• Life or Death launch

• R2M2 Revamp

• HG Wells Collection launch

• Author Pages

• Book Clubs

That’s a big list in my humble opinion, haha!

I hope you are all very excited! Once all of this is out and live, we will love to get everyone’s feedback!

In the meantime, we plan to start up our weekly coffee chats again live on Twitter every Friday at 11am EST.

Until next time! Take a pause with us!

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Blockchain technology is driving innovation all over the place.

I see new projects popping up all the time offering new ways to do things in this digital world. Sometimes it’s brand new ideas, other times it’s just improving upon pre-existing technology or ideologies.

One ideology I’ve seen rekindled lately is the idea of collaboration.

What do I define as collaboration and why did it need to be rekindled?

Before we jump into that, though, I just want to make sure you are subscribed :) It helps us out a ton and allows you to get instant access of all our future newsletters directly in your inbox! Win-win!

The Death of Collaboration

To be clear, I don’t think collaboration has died. But it has taken a major hit in recent years.

Why?

Is it cliche to blame covid?

I don’t actually blame a virus, but I think the virus revealed something within our society.

Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you collaborated on a project and it went really really well?

You might actually have some positive experiences, but odds are you can think of at least one time collaboration was a disaster. Especially in academic environments. 

I believe the cause to any collaborative disaster comes to a simple lack of communication.

Without effective communication, teams trying to collaborate will inevitably fail.

Individuals won’t understand their role and responsibility, they won’t effectively or efficiently ask questions, and if a disagreement pops up, all bets are off.

Through the rise of the internet and cloud based technologies, virtual collaboration is not just possible, but it gets easier every year.

Virtual collaboration, however, still doesn’t really solve the communication problem. 

Sometimes it can help. I for one, can communicate way more efficiently and effectively over virtual channels than trying to think on my feet out loud. But it’s not for everyone.

So virtual collaboration doesn’t help the problem, but it isn’t the root issue either.

But if that’s not it, what is?

The Root To Collaboration Disaster

Let’s jump back to the communication issue. I’m going to throw my theory out and then we’ll talk about it briefly.

I don’t think our society knows how to disagree anymore.

Today, it’s not “normal” to be friends with someone you disagree with. Nobody “disagrees” they just “dismiss” and move on with life.

The problem with this is you are now part of a cult. The only people around you are the ones with the same beliefs and morals as you. That’s why we see such extremist behavior in the world, especially on social media. 

It is extremely toxic. 

What I loved most about the book, Bandersnatch, is that it highlights a group of men gathering together every week, who call themselves friends, who collaborate constantly, and who disagree on almost everything.

Without those disagreements the main character in the Lord of the Rings would be named Bingo.

Think about that for a second.

The whole point of all of this is for us to recognize there is a major problem with collaboration in our society. But I believe I’ve seen a rekindling of it on the blockchain.

Rekindled Collaboration

Because of blockchain technology, artists of all kinds can now collaborate on projects in brand new ways. 

Thanks to built in royalties on NFTs, artists can collaborate, mint an NFT, and collect their share of the sale automatically because of the blockchain.

It’s beautiful!

Because of this, I’ve seen all sorts of projects collaborate. 

Poets putting together long collaborative works together, fiction writers getting together to each write a chapter for a book, digital artists teaming up with authors to create amazing rare book covers, popular NFT projects teaming up to release combined NFT works, and the list goes on and on.

It is really powerful, and I’m excited to share how Spatium is preparing to get involved and help facilitate more and more collaboration and community.

Spatium’s Community

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the blockchains we’re built with is DeSo.

Well, DeSo has just released their full version of the Deso Chat Protocol (DCP). This expands upon their already unique on-chain messaging protocol. This is the technology we’ve utilized for the Dragon protocol. But it is also been used for almost 2 years now by Deso users to send private messages to each other fully on-chain.

The new and improved DCP now expands upon this feature to allow private group messages fully on-chain! 

But wait, there is more!

It also is multichain! They must have taken my advice 🙂

You can actually send messages to people on Ethereum using their address or ENS name directly from your Deso account now! Or vice versa. 

This will roll right into our strategy of becoming multichain as we plan to expand books into the Ethereum ecosystem!

This will enable a ton of powerful tools we plan to release. Some of these ideas we are going to implement very very soon. Here are just a few:

For Authors

Every Spatium author will soon be added to a unique Deso group message for just the authors. 

This will be fully on-chain, and a way to communicate, collaborate, and ask questions. 

A unique, fully decentralized, private online community for all of our authors!

We plan to expand this to the context of Vibehut too where authors can get on video calls with each other and form web3 writers groups just like CS Lewis and Tolkien!

For Readers

One feature I’m super stoked for is book clubs!

Every book collector will have the ability to join a book club for the book they just bought. 

This will also be easily facilitated through Deso group chats fully on-chain. 

This means, you don’t have to read a book alone anymore!

You can discuss all the things you love or hate with other fans! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I don’t care how good a book is, it is 10 times better when you can talk about it with other people.

Other Future Plans

Those are our main initial plans, author communities and book clubs.

The really cool thing here is it’s built using Deso and it is multichain.

Why is that cool?

Well, for starters, all the messages being stored securely and encrypted on-chain, means that any app can utilize the technology. 

I know we’ll work hand in hand with an app called Squadz, which is building an awesome version of Discord where you can create and join different Squadz based on criteria like owning an NFT, creator coin, or maybe even an association.

The second reason it’s cool is that the Deso Chat Protocol is heading multichain while we are too. They already support Ethereum and ENS for messages, and soon they plan to add Solana and Near.

This means when we are multichain, if you buy a book through Polygon or Ethereum, then you can join book clubs with that address, no Deso account needed! 

The same will eventually be true for Solana too!

We will do a longer post and video demo once this is implemented and ready to go on Spatium. 

Until then, we’d love to hear your ideas, excitement, questions, or concerns!

Thank you all for reading, and once again, if you aren’t subscribed, it means the world if you would. And if you are, please consider sharing this newsletter with someone else!

Photo by Fré Sonneveld on Unsplash

Do you know what drives me nuts?

Maximalism.

We have maximalists (or extremists) everywhere now and it annoys me to no end.

I don’t know what happened to our society, but it seems like maximalism is the new norm.

In fact, if you have a reasonably balanced opinion, society disregards you as spineless, unable to make a decision, or just complacent.

Really!?

Should you need to have an extreme opinion and be “all in” to be listened to?

Don’t get me wrong; there are times when you should go all in on your beliefs.

But when it comes to things like politics, technology, and today’s conversation: blockchains, I don’t think maximalism is the best.

This leads us to today’s topic: multichain.

But before we jump in, make sure you hit that subscribe button :) It helps us out a ton and ensures you get all these articles directly in your inbox! Win-Win!

What is Multichain

Last time we talked, I explained how different cryptocurrencies power different blockchains.

We talked about how this affects decentralized social media in particular, but the truth is it goes beyond that.

A lot of these blockchains have huge followings. And a lot of them have a weird cultish behavior. The blockchain followers disregard and shame any other blockchain out there.

Don’t get me wrong; this is a new technology and we should all be cautious. There are tons and tons of blockchain projects out there, and they aren’t all legit.

But you shouldn’t just close off to any new project because you believe the one you found is the best.

And every big chain has issue. 

Bitcoin maximalists (or maxis) believe that because Bitcoin was the first decentralized blockchain in the space, it’s the only one that matters. It will be the de facto replacement for currency, and no other blockchain will stand a chance.

I tend to believe Bitcoin will probably be the one to replace gold, dollars, etc, but does that make it the only important and useful blockchain?

Not at all!

The same goes for Ethereum followers too. This was the first blockchain with smart contract functionality, so any other blockchain that has smart contracts like Solana are deemed garbage.

The reverse of that one is true too. Solana followers think that the Solana blockchain is faster, cheaper, and smarter than Ethereum and will ultimately squash Ethereum into the dust.

Here is another example. There is another very popular NFT book marketplace and publisher called Book. They are built on Cardano, which has another huge cult following. 

So much so they believe that what Book is doing is extremely innovative, no one else is doing anything remotely like it, and they have a blind eye to any other NFT book project out there…simply because all they see is Cardano.

The list goes on and on so I’ll stop there.

I want to hone in on the point that we shouldn’t close off on these other blockchains.

What is a Blockchain Really?

Technologists will cringe at my oversimplification, but in reality what is a blockchain?

I would define it as a fully decentralized and open database.

We talked about his last time with decentralized social media.

Anybody in the world can tap into the Deso blockchain and build a social media app with their data. 

Because it’s open. 

You can’t build an app that ports your Facebook friends or Twitter data or any other normal social media. Those databases are closed off.

This concept of open data is true for every single blockchain. Anyone can tap into Bitcoin and see all financial transactions.

Anyone can tap into Ethereum or Solana and view transactions, call other people’s programs, or build an NFT marketplace.

If you sell Solana NFTs on your website, anyone in the world can build an app that showcases or uses your NFTs in some way shape, or form.

Ok, you get the picture.

To summarize: a blockchain is a public database. So what’s the big deal?

How are Databases Used Today?

Here’s the thing. Databases come in a variety of forms depending on your use case. At the end of the day, yes, they have one main function: store data.

But there is a lot of technique, software, and design that goes into storing and retrieving that data as securely and quickly as possible.

The type of data really defines the kind of database you need. Some databases are faster than others, but might not 100% guarantee all the data is stored in real time. 

Others can store the data in real-time guaranteed, but it just might not be immediately.

For instance, financial data needs to be secure and accurate 100% of the time. What if the stock markets had lagging data that wasn’t real-time and people could trade at lower prices than others? That wouldn’t be good. 

However, what about storing the number of likes you have on a YouTube video? If you have tons of followers sending you likes, do you really care if you see the accurate count in real-time? If you see 10,000 likes but in reality, you have 10,100, does it matter as long as all the likes show up eventually?

The list of database uses is quite large: some are for storing large data (like videos), financial data, temporary data that is accessed frequently, data that relates to each other (like social data), data for AI and machine learning, etc etc.

The point of all of this is if you went into Facebook or Google or even small applications and asked what kind of database they use, what would they say?

They’d probably tell you they use at least 3 or more different kinds of databases for different parts of their product.

Because they have a lot of services and each use case needs different database technology.

Back to Blockchains

So if blockchains are databases, then doesn’t it make sense for a decentralized app (dapp) to utilize different blockchains too?

Why build an app that limits itself to just 1 ecosystem?

There are so many different blockchains, each have different users, different apps, and can be tapped into for different use cases.

In the future, this will evolve more and more. For now, we see a lot of apps being built on one blockchain. Especially with NFT projects. But slowly all these apps are supporting different NFTs from different blockchains.

OpenSea started on Ethereum, but now you can sell Ethereum, Polygon, or Solana NFTs. MagicEden started selling Solana NFTs, but now you can sell Ethereum NFTs there too!

The NFTs are stored on a single chain, but the app that utilizes them is not. They tap into all the chains.

In the future, I’d love to see apps utilize the different blockchains for their unique use cases and advantages. 

Solana, for instance, is very fast, and in my opinion ideal for quick financial transactions through things like Solana Pay. Ethereum, however, has a slightly easier, broader, and more standard smart contract ecosystem so perhaps running certain programs there could be beneficial. Deso and Polygon are the biggest chains for decentralized social media right now, so they should be integrated for social interactions.

You get the picture.

We aren’t 100% there yet, but that’s what I think the future will hold.

How Spatium Plans to Become Multichain

Now let’s focus more on Spatium Stories.

As you may or may not know, Deso is the core blockchain Spatium is built on right now. All our books are currently stored on Deso.

However, technically, we store the book cover image and encrypted book file on the Arweave blockchain. Which I guess already makes us multichain :) 

Deso will always remain a social layer for the app. This means to interact with any authors or book clubs, a Deso account will be necessary. For readers, we plan to offer custodial Deso accounts if you don’t want to make one. For our authors, we think it’s important they create their own accounts for publishing. But if enough interest comes in, we may add custodial Deso accounts for them too.

Deso is also the key blockchain for our Dragon Protocol encryption service. We use Deso to securely store all our encryption keys and plan to continue to do so.

However, the actual encryption/decryption processing is still done on a normal AWS server.

On an aside, I believe this still makes us decentralized. 

Here is why: All the data is public. 

Anyone in the world can build their own AWS server to add their own encryption/decryption service too. Anyone in the world can build their own book store or cloud reader and utilize Spatium books. Without our permission! That’s decentralized.

From a security point of view, by the way, the Dragon Protocol shares the keys between our account and the author. So if anyone else wanted to build a cloud reader they would still need the author to agree to share those encryption keys.

Anyways, as we become multichain, however, we do plan to move that encryption/decryption service onto the blockchain through smart contract technology.

Furthermore, as we become multichain one thing we will foster is storing the book NFT on multiple blockchains. This helps with data redundancy because if you publish your book on multiple blockchains and one happens to disappear somehow, then your book would be on other blockchains too.

This also allows our books to be resold on multiple blockchain marketplace apps, thus expanding the reach for our authors.

As other chains like Polygon advance social features, this also allows us to utilize the social features of not just Deso, but Polygon too!

Lastly, becoming more multichain allows our authors to utilize better payment technology and get paid in any cryptocurrency they want.

The use cases can go on and on.

But in reality, here is our current plan in bite-sized chunks:

• Deso will be our base chain for social interactions and the Dragon Protocol

• We plan to add (as soon as possible) Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum books, making the total chains you can buy books on 4.

• Authors minting RARE books (limited edition books) will specify which chain they want to publish on.

• Authors minting MOD books (infinite copies available for purchase) will have a very unique twist. MOD books will be minted on the Deso blockchain at first. But this is just the root copy. Any reader can then buy a MOD copy on whichever chain they want! The author doesn’t have to do anything to set it up and they still get paid. I believe we will be the ONLY NFT bookstore to offer this.

That’s the plan!

We hope and believe that becoming multichain will broaden the reach of our authors, increase the number of unique features we can utilize from these other powerful blockchains, and spark more unity instead of cultish maximalist behavior.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, share it along so others can too!

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

When my grandma was little, a common pain treatment was cocaine.

It wasn’t until later that doctors realized how addictive and dangerous cocaine was and outlawed it.

Today, many people have equated social media to modern-day cocaine.

It is massively addictive, releases dopamine, and destroys your mental health if you aren’t careful.

The reality is, there are many, many problems with social media.

This is probably a very odd intro when you look at the title of this article. But here is where I’m going with this:

Thanks to modern blockchain technology, if we can decentralize social media, many of those problems will come to a halt.

We may not be able to stifle the addictive power or comparison games, but it can certainly solve a lot of other major issues social media has brought to the modern human.

And so the question is: what is decentralized social media, what problems are they solving, and what will the future of these look like in 5-10 years?

Before we answer those questions, would you consider subscribing? It helps us out a ton and you can get these great articles and updates straight to your inbox! Win-win!

Let’s get into it!

Decentralized Socials

I am a huge fan of the DeSo blockchain. When you truly understand what has been built, it is pretty novel.

A blockchain fully designed from the ground up for social interactions (follow, post, like, etc). And they keep adding new primitives.

Having a decentralized social media (whether built on Deso or not) solves a wide range of problems we have with normal centralized social media companies:

1. All data is public: anyone can build an app on top of that data without asking permission or paying for some API key.

2. No censorship: for Deso, at least, censorship (or content curation) is at the node (or app) level. If you want a social app called SportsBall that only shows sports-related content, you can do that! 

   1. When something is blocked on an app, it is not blocked on the blockchain. No one can control what does or doesn’t go on the blockchain.

3. 1 account: you only make one social media account that can be used across 100s of apps.

Let me dig into that last one a little bit more as it’s one of the focuses of today’s article.

What is the problem with modern “web2” social media?

If I want to have a presence, build a following, build an audience, or whatever you want to call it, I have 2 options:

1. Pick 1 social media platform and go all in

2. Pick multiple social media platforms and build separate audiences

The problem with strategy 1 is that oftentimes if you’re starting from scratch, that’s not enough. 

If you are trying to sell books or make videos, being on Facebook alone won’t cut it. With videos, even being on YouTube alone might not cut it.

The problem with strategy number 2 is it takes a ton of time. Valuable time you could be spending on content creation.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Typically, if you’re trying to build some kind of business through social media it’s because you have some kind of content your’e passionate about. It could be your art, books, writings, songs, videos, or educational material.

At the end of the day, you have something you want others to see and/or buy.

Most people don’t build social media audiences for the sake of it.

Odds are, if you are trying to build a content creation business, it’s not your main job either. So your time to work on it is already limited. 

Now try adding in time to navigate building an audience on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube?

I call that inevitable burnout. 

That’s why web3 social media platforms like those built on the DeSo blockchain are so valuable!

When you create an account on Diamondapp and start building followers, they stick with you. 

Your followers are tied to you via the blockchain, not Diamondapp. 

So if you want to start doing a lot of photos on Stori, your followers on Diamondapp will already see them! If you want to start making videos on Videso, your followers on Diamondapp will already see those too!

You don’t need to make separate followings anymore! 

You “own” your followers like you “own” an email list.

This is also extremely powerful when you think of censorship. There are people that have worked for years to build 500K to a million followers on Twitter or Instagram only to be banned. 

All those followers? Poof! Gone! Like dust in the wind!

Photo by Kunj Parekh on Unsplash

On DeSo that can never happen. 

If you were banned from Diamondapp, you could switch to another app, your content would still be on the blockchain, and your followers could still hear from you.

Ok, ok…so we understand the value, right?

Hopefully so. What about the title of the article? Where does this “multichain ecosystem“ concept come into play?

Multiple Blockchain Ecosystems

We all know there are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there, right? 

Some are just coins on already-built blockchains, but many are cryptocurrencies that power unique blockchains. For instance:

$SOL powers the Solana blockchain. 

$ETH powers the Ethereum blockchain.

$MATIC powers the Polygon blockchain.

$DESO powers the Deso blockchain.

You get the picture.

Here is where I got the idea of a multichain ecosystem:

There is another popular decentralized social media protocol called Lens. 

Lens is not a blockchain itself, but rather a protocol for the Polygon blockchain.

Confused? 

Protocol is just a fancy word for a set of standards and rules. 

It says, hey, this Polygon blockchain has these basic functions. If we define rules for how to use these basic functions in a social media context and everyone follows those rules, then we can have a social media application.

For Lens, I believe they use NFTs everywhere. So every post you make is a special Polygon NFT, your follows and likes, all NFTs. That’s the rules they made.

That was your brief introduction to Lens.

Here’s where it gets interesting. If you make an account on Lens using your Polygon wallet, then all the benefits we talked about with Deso still apply. Lens has Twitter-like apps, YouTube-like apps, and Instagram-like apps.

It’s the same idea. No one can block you from the blockchain, your content is all on-chain, and any followers you get on one Lens app carries over to the next one.

Do you see where I’m going yet?

If you want to build an audience on a decentralized social media, you don’t have to pick between apps anymore. 

However, there is a new issue at hand. You may not have to pick between an app, but you do have to pick a blockchain.

Photo by Raquel Martínez on Unsplash

If I build a huge audience on Deso, but decide I want to build an audience on Lens too, there is no carryover.

They aren’t connected. They don’t share data.

And Deso and Lens are not alone, by the way. There is another called Farcaster, and Jack Dorsey is supposedly building one too called BlueSky or something. 

So when it comes to having only 1 follower set and not having to start from 0 anymore, my question is: is this really true?

If in 5-10 years all of these different decentralized social media “ecosystems” are as big as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, is the problem solved, or is the problem just morphed?

I mean, if you pick one ecosystem like Deso, then yes, you have access to multiple different kinds of apps with 1 singular account.

But isn’t Facebook like that too? They have games, a messenger app, the main Facebook app, a marketplace, group messaging tools, etc. 

And when another social media application releases a cool feature or novel concept, all the others add it on too. TikTok came out, it blew up, and now you can do Reels on Facebook and YouTube Shorts. 

Where Does This Leave Us?

So what will the future look like?

First, I think the future will look more decentralized.

I think these ecosystems are not competitors. They are all pioneers and the more pioneers we have, the quicker we can expand to the masses.

I think even if we do have multiple ecosystems to choose from, it still solves the first 2 problems I discussed earlier.

All these ecosystems will be decentralized, censorship-free, and open so anyone can build an app on top of the blockchain.

Ideally, this will help breed a more united culture, not the negative divisive one we’ve seen on social media these past few years.

Second, I think we will see more multichain apps.

I think from a technical perspective it will be a challenge, but as these ecosystems mature, we’ll start to see more and more decentralized apps built in a way that these ecosystems can interoperate. 

So if you have a Lens account, you can still log in to the same app and interact with people who only have a Deso account.

Spatium is already planning it’s way to become multichain, but we’re going to do a deeper dive on that next week :) 

Conclusion

In conclusion, when we look at the broad crypto industry, we already know that multiple blockchains exist with vibrant communities following each one. 

With the rise of decentralized social media, we know that inevitably there will be multiple blockchain ecosystems to join in on. 

Regardless, decentralization will fix a ton of problems with modern social media.

It may not immediately cure people from the addictive powers and negative mental health issues, but I believe it gets us in the right direction.

Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash

Today, we are thrilled to announce 2 very exciting updates to the Spatium Stories platform!

These were both feature requests that came in during our self-publishing beta. Proof that beta testing works 🙂

• Pegged Prices: the ability to peg your book price to USD

• Automatic Payments: if your book sells on another Deso app, you still get your payment automatically

Let’s take them one at a time.

Pegged Prices

To fully appreciate this update, you first need to understand the problem we solved.

Pegging prices solves a pretty big problem not just with Spatium Stories, but with NFTs across the board on any chain.

See, when you mint your book as an NFT on Spatium Stories, it’s minted on the Deso blockchain. When you do that, there are a lot of things set immutably in the book NFT. 

That’s the whole point of NFT’s, right?

The cover, the book file itself, the details you provided about your book (description, author, etc), and the royalties you receive on secondary sales. All of that is baked into the NFT and will NEVER change.

That’s what we want. That’s the definition of “decentralization” in this context.

The only thing that can change is whether your NFT is on sale or not, and at what price it’s set for sale.

However, there is something in that last sentence that catches people. If it’s set for sale, it’s set on the NFT itself, which means it’s set to the blockchain’s cryptocurrency. In this case, $Deso.

So when you set the price of your book, our self-publishing flow has a section where you can set it in USD or Deso.

This is just a pretty UI feature so you don’t have to convert to Deso if you don’t want to. Other NFT platforms do this too. I know NFTz, Diamondapp, and others do this for Deso.

However, when you set that book to $10, on the backend we take that and convert it to Deso for you and set the price of the book in Deso.

Following so far?

Do you see a problem yet?

Deso, like all cryptocurrencies, is pretty volatile.

Now, some NFT projects might not care about volatility. A lot of projects are all about quick sales, sell-outs, increased rarity, etc. However, books can carry a shelf life.

You might not sell out your book immediately, and that’s ok. Especially if you publish a MOD copy of your book, which has infinite supply unless you discontinue it.

But there is an issue when the price of your book is so volatile.

Let’s take an example.

When I first joined Deso, the price of 1 Deso was always floating around $100! I bought a few NFTs back then for like 0.8 Deso. Back then, that was a decent amount of money for me. 

Today, that same amount of Deso is worth $8 instead of almost $100! 

See the problem? 

What if I put out a crazy rare book for $100, and then the price of Deso tanks and someone comes and buys it at $5? That blows.

Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

In one sense, that’s the world of crypto, right?

But if we ever want to mainstream this crypto thing, this is a huge friction that needs to be solved.

That’s why we have introduced Pegged Prices.

Now, after you publish your book, you can go to your author page (coming soon) and select whether you want to peg your book to USD or not.

It’s totally optional, but it’s there if you want it.

When you use the Pegged Price feature, then a few times a day our automated system will adjust the price of your book for you to whatever the current exchange rate is!

Now, if you put your book up for sale at $12, it will stay that way! You don’t need to worry about Deso’s price anymore. 

Of course, your payment still comes in the form of Deso, but maybe that can change one day too ;)

Automatic Payments

The next big feature release is Automatic Payments.

But wait, didn’t automatic payments already exist?

That’s a great question, narrator. They sure did!

Anytime someone buys a book directly through spatiumstories.com the author gets their payment automatically.

Where is the problem, then?

The problem is with our RARE books. 

See, the limited edition books you sell are able to be put for sale on the Deso blockchain. That means people can buy them on ANY Deso app.

First, that’s freaking awesome! 

Can we take a moment to recognize the power of Deso? I mean, I don’t know any other NFT book marketplace that can offer that.

If you publish a brand new limited edition of your book and someone sees it scrolling through Desofy, they can buy it straight through Desofy!

No more clicking on some other link, setting up or logging into Amazon, buying it, etc. It honestly takes 2 clicks and they’ve bought your book without leaving their app.

That’s cool! 

And the link to read our books is always embedded in the NFT so they just click the link and start reading!

Super cool and powerful stuff!

Buuuutttt…it does cause an issue. 

If that person buys that book on Desofy, we are not notified. I mean, we are notified, but it’s not connected to our system so we can’t issue automatic payments to authors.

…until now!

Today we have officially launched our own automatic payment system. Anytime someone publishes a RARE book, we will add those to our own database.

This brings our total database usage to 3 tables: 1 for R2M2 book lists, 1 for Automatic Payment, and 1 for Pegged Prices.

Notice there is no database for anything to do with the data associated with the actual book itself. 

The book URL, the book file, the book encryption keys, the book description, and the cover image? All stored on-chain!

That’s decentralization.

Back to our system.

So every hour we just do a simple check to see if any of the books in our DB have sold and if they have we issue a payment to the author and remove that book from our DB.

This only has to happen for primary sales of the books because secondary royalties are built into the blockchain itself.

So there it is!

Our two latest and greatest features!

We have started with our two RARE books, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Both of these are now set to $10 and that will stay that way instead of fluctuating with Deso.

After a few days if we don’t see any issues, then we will release this for our authors to add to their own books.

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