Imagine you’ve read one too many Alice and Bob scenarios keeping up with all the latest LLM papers. This time, Alice is a visionary, building a decentralized social media platform. Alice could be you. She’s concerned about dwindling recognition for human accomplishment in an era of large language models, and wants to make sure that creators are recognized and rewarded for their work.
Now Bob, on the other hand, is a creator… a would be end user of Alice’s platform. He shares Alice’s sneaking stress about human creativity being displaced, humanity being replaced, and is skeptical a place exists where creative work is honestly valued and personal autonomy respected.
Autonomy over automation. Alice and Bob. Me and you. We’re all looking for threshold crossing moments that are interactive, programmatic, exist within a variety of channels, from mobile apps to websites and physical displays, and are made up of their own rules, characters and environments. It’s an all too rare approach, still, to how we handle the wide variety of screens we use to connect, trade, and coordinate with each other through increasingly autonomous worlds.
In these worlds, unique, irrevocable and valuable personal assets can be earned through the completion of a series of challenging tasks and puzzle-like actions. Assets can have cultural value, they can be machines made of metal or software that produce new goods, carry and build status-value, and/or be almost entirely traditional in their extrinsic and intrinsic relevance. If traditional includes being entirely networked and verifiably autonomous. Here, specific types of cryptographic mechanisms are essential, too — both for validating which challengers of tasks, social media market activity, and other autonomous actions are authenticated to unlock access to conditional experiences or rewards, and for storing more dynamic and persistent decentralized records of personal accomplishment and social proof.
With that perspective in mind, this Spring ’23 Ecosystem Update is all about crossing thresholds, cryptographic and otherwise.
Fashion in particular, as the most directly commercial and all encompassing creative medium, has always reached markets through social content. Influenced by cultural trends, political movements, and advancing tech. Long before the internet, media has always been crucial to propagating fashion trends, reshaping public perception and driving demand for whatever is in style at the moment. From print to film, inspirational looks and influencer marketing, to storytelling and editorial coverage showcasing the next original must haves. We take a deeper look at how social media changes creative markets when more fully decentralized.
Entering an era of media hyper-saturation, where creation, authentication, and access to your message is the market, the question we’re all asking is: what sets you (and what you make) apart from all the confusion and noise?
That’s why, for the past five months+ we’ve built with focused intention on Lens Protocol, Lit Protocol and Stable Diffusion.
What’s been built?
Chromadin and the Creator Dispatch
Released only a few weeks ago, Chromadin is a 24/7 microcontent collection site, meant for casual channel surfing with integrated Lens features and a multiscreen display for dashboard analytics, streaming videos, curated creator social feeds and exclusive generative AI NFT drops. All in a retro-futuristic synthwave style that stands its ground in a sea of generative carbon copy designs.
It was built to stoke anticipation for the beta release of The Dial, and serve as a funnel for niche micro-influencers, micro-brands, designers & creative collectors from outdated social networks to new, Lens based, decentralized social media — seeding the community we want to see throughout the ecosystem.
Rolled out alongside Chromadin is the Creator Dispatch, a comprehensive Drop Management System for minting and overseeing collections on the ‘din. New features set to go live include token gated posts with on-chain encrypted content management. Here, designers can specify unique conditions for their drop collectors and holders to unlock and interact with private Lens publications and content. If you are a $MONA, PODE, Genesis or other DIGITALAX ecosystem token holder, stay tuned for exclusive content drops available to you through the DIGITALAX Lens account.
Decentralized Fulfillment Network
Since the early days of the protocol, creative computation through local microfactory co-ops for textile manufacturing has been a core focus, and a guiding thread for the direction of the ecosystem as a whole. Bringing greater decentralization to physical print and apparel production is essential for unbundling the traditional fashion industry. Likewise, ensuring that the current supply of GPUs aren’t able to be chokepointed by monolithic and anti-competitive platforms, is required for decentralized product fulfillment to meet its market potential .
The first instance of the Decentralized Fulfillment Network will be live within the Chromadin storefront, and soon after within The Dial, on beta release. Designers can build direct relationships and repeat business with local fulfillers over the long term, with greater choice and autonomy for quality control, material use, unique customisations, and sustainable production options.
One of the more interestingly technical aspects of the network is the inclusion of Lit Protocol’s autonomous functions for threshold cryptographic features being enabled within the storefront architecture. Private address and fulfillment records can be shared on-chain between buyers, creators and those within the fulfillment network directly, without the need for a custodial intermediary.
This fulfillment tooling will also be released as an open source SDK so that other ecosystems and protocols within the web3 fashion and manufacturing community can also directly offer decentralized fulfillment with the guarantee of secure and private transaction data.
The Dial + All In One Creative Editor
The Dial has been in production since late 2022. The dAPP is built on Lens Protocol as an AI social canvas, fashion editor and discovery platform for creators with fully decentralized content publishing and social messaging. Maybe you’ve seen some of our sneak peeks?
It incorporates all features on Lens, XMTP private messaging, decentralized fulfillment storefront and purchase functionality, local and web API based Stable Diffusion integrations, AI image and prompt search functionality and a connected Blender plugin templating design system.
Although development has been finalized, Beta release is set to roll out once a threshold level of curated creators and activity has been established on Chromadin. All DIGITALAX ecosystem holders will be granted early access to The Dial whitelist beta.
What’s being built?
Event Listener SDK
DIGITALAX is collaborating with Lit Protocol to build out an open source Event Listener SDK, with development commencing shortly. This SDK enables developers with an easy interface to integrate the Lit Event Listener into their dApp, subscribe to on-chain actions and automate the responses through triggered callback functions and the use of PKPs (Programmable Key Pairs).
In simpler terms, currently users must sign every on-chain interaction within a dAPP. This has been essential for maintaining personal wallet autonomy and asset ownership, however, it has also often caused major UX pitfalls for onboarding and familiarizing new users with products and tooling within web3 and in many cases preventable wallet drainings through accidental signing.
Until recently, there has been no secure and intuitive alternatives for comprehensible account abstraction that still maintains individual determination and governance — essential within the era of AI generated content, deep fakes and misinformation, where signed messages are one of, if not the only, secure mechanisms for preserving and authenticating truthful account interactions. The need for conditional cryptographic signing and novel approaches to social coordination is paramount for building scalable self-sovereign web3 fashion, creator, AI and local production driven industries.
With this SDK and Lit’s framework, cryptographic thresholds can be set with predefined conditions and strategies that automate the signing of transactions on-chain within scoped contracts and environments.
With support for both browser and nodejs, here is a diagrammatic overview for a deeper perspective into the initial architecture:
Labyrinth SDK
The Labyrinth SDK extends on and makes use of the Event Listener SDK to translate threshold cryptography into conditions based on-chain quests and social graphs.
Here, clusters of on and off chain interactions can be specified as sub-milestones and checkpoints that when completed unlock personal on-chain assets. Conditions based cryptography ensures that quest-challengers only access information or assets if they meet specific conditions, whether earned or pre-defined.
Labyrinth serves as a platform for micro brands, designers and creative consumers to develop and showcase their own content, products and messages within dynamic experiences, where loyalty and personal stake is made more engaging through game-like mechanisms, and rewarded both intrinsically and extrinsically over time. It also directly supports designers who choose to build their own autonomous worlds and to reward user interactions.
The first demo of Labyrinth’s capabilities will be shown through Chromadin, and extended on through The Dial, combining decentralized social media interactions and financial transactions from apparel and print NFT storefronts into questified data with relevant value for creators, developers, LLM compute grant givers, and consumers alike.
Legend
To be released mid next month at the completion of the Chainlink Spring hackathon is Legend. Legend builds on Lens Protocol and uses Chainlink’s dynamic NFT architecture and Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to offer a P2P grant framework for promoting more effective, informed, instant and reliable allocations of grants and resources within web3.
Here, builders, projects, creators and designers can make posts to Lens Protocol detailing their proposed grant along with the individual contributor allotment, mirror based referral % and evolving gen AI NFT metadata. When these posts are collected for their specified amount, and proliferated through mirrors, a referral fee % of the final grant amount is awarded. The interlinked dynamic NFT evolves (random or pre-sequenced) to include specific data from the profiles of collectors and mirrorers creating a unique and shared narrative of the project’s journey. As contributions are translated into public on-chain patronage and visual emblems of support, buy-in to grant seekers ultimate success becomes more of a social coordination effort, expanding the range of how many participants can benefit from grants for web3 public goods.
It’s long past time for us all to rethink the fashion industry, peeling back the tech, manufacturing, business, media, and creative layers that hold it together. By developing and sharing advanced open-source tools, we cross a threshold into something entirely new. In this era, defined by artificial intelligence, many multiplying screens everywhere, and machine-led manufacturing, it’s becoming unavoidable to recognize just how important it is for each of us to have control over our tech, financial freedom, and creative expression.
It’s not just about keeping up with the pace of change or staying ahead of the curve anymore. It’s about reshaping the curve entirely, threading our own path through the fabric of the future.
Have questions or wanna chat more about what’s being built? We’re most active on Lens, Github and Discord :)
