Web3 is being built wrong.

Yes, I said it. The current trajectory of Web3 and blockchain strays further from the original dream of decentralization and sovereignty. Every. Single. Day.

Why? We are in an unstable and still-developing blockchain industry. In the past few years, some of the mightiest blockchain companies have fallen and many others have failed to find lift-off in the first place. Common pitfalls for Web3 focused companies and projects include:

  • Prioritizing shared ledgers as the only approach to Web3
  • Obsessing over single use cases like DeFi instead of focusing on various sovereign solutions
  • Inability to integrate with existing systems such as app stores, payment platforms, and advertising caused by Web3’s decentralized authority paradigms
  • Paralysis caused by the absence of clear laws and governmental rulings leads to sacrificing technology advancements to comply with outdated regulations, stripping their work of the original sovereign intent

So what’s the result of all this? Regression. Companies lean back on Web2 standards and safety nets, resulting in less-than-attractive technological advances. Even many Web3 efforts are pivoting back to centralized control with technologies such as upgradable contracts.

More than ever, it is imperative to build with the original purpose in mind:

Personal digital sovereignty and a Sovereign Internet for the world.

Returning to Web3’s Goals

At XYO, we have experienced the difficulties a Web2 world presents for Web3 development and growth. Never has it deterred us. Our company has been around since 2012, and our blockchain journey began in early 2018. Since then, we’ve launched numerous Web3 products and weathered many a bear market. Recently, we launched our near-term Q4 2023 Roadmap.

Our goals for Q4 continue to chart a path back to what Web3 was meant to be: a widespread, open source ecosystem that brings data providers and data consumers together in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Goals:

  • Strong development efforts on technology
  • Clear and usable developer documentation
  • Smaller, but well-developed solutions that highlight XYO Technology
  • Preparation for the upcoming XYO Builder Bounty Program.

Each of these come together to make Q4 the springboard for an exciting, community-involved 2024. This all starts with large developmental efforts.

Developer Documentation & Tools

We have already begun working on developer documentation. Docusaurus offers a beautiful and well-known layout that is easy for developers to navigate. Additionally, we’ve already made strides in improving the Explore and Node website experiences. These sites are primarily useful for developers who need a visual representation of the modules and data they are working with and the relationships between them.

docs.xyo.network

We’ve fully documented our SDKs, but that is just the beginning. To ensure that everyone can contribute and utilize XYO we’re adding:

  • Introduction & Examples
  • XYO Ecosystem Glossary & Type Documentation
  • XYO Solutions

Introduction & Examples

An introduction to a new code documentation is always useful. While XYO can be added to nearly any project out there, it still presents a new way of coding and thinking about data. To help guide new XYO developers, an introduction, as well as some practice examples, are slated to be added in Q4 2023. This will help new developers start using XYO on day one, and help them feel more comfortable with ideas like: data as XYO payloads, incorporating XYO modules, building custom modules, and contributing to the development of the XYO Platform.

XYO Ecosystem Glossary & Type Documentation

It’s important that new XYO developers can consistently rely on our reference documentation. Glossaries provide clarity, reduce confusion, and can be the difference between adoption and abandonment. The XYO Ecosystem Glossary will serve as a way to increase comprehension of XYO terms and a method of reducing the time needed to learn prior to building with an XYO SDK or plug-in.

Internally, we use Typescript, and it ensures we maintain a clean, accessible, and easy-to-read codebase. Part of this meticulous style of coding means we catch potential type traps early, and we look forward to having this incorporated in our XYO documentation and codebases.

XYO Integrations

Our documentation plans for Q4 and beyond also include details on how to easily integrate XYO features into existing projects. By using XYO’s technology, you can improve the sovereignty, performance and user experience of your website. Future XYO integrations detailed in the documentation will be things like code examples for features like PermaShare — copy and paste a block of code, and suddenly your existing function can turn your page into a PermaShare link!

explore.xyo.network

Explore is a treasure trove for anyone wanting to analyze XYO data. On explore.xyo.network, you can browse payloads on a public or private archivist, view payload schemas, and see how the XYO modules in your code interact with each other. It also serves as a way for developers to easily visualize what they are building.

node.xyo.network

Node is designed as a way to run an XYO Node on your browser or device. With decentralization and sovereignty at the heart of everything we do, we made Node so that anyone can create and interact with XYO. No setup. No gatekeeping. No barriers.

Our Builder Bounty program in 2024 (more on that below) could result in quite a few new XYO dApps and module options. When an XYO contributor, codeless or otherwise, wants to use a new dApp that has been created, they can spin up an XYO Node on their computer with node.xyo.network, and run that dApp in the resulting digital environment.

Through node.xyo.network, users will also be able to occasionally complete Builder Bounties. For example, if a request includes running a module on your personal computer, the module will most likely be run within node.xyo.network. You’d visit node.xyo.network, spin up the correct module on your computer, process data or run the module in some way, and return the result.

Keep reading to learn more about our upcoming XYO solutions and the XYO Builder Bounty Program.

PermaShare & Live Sharing

Simply put, PermaShare lets you share data with a permanent hash.

Let’s break it down.

The Problem

PermaShare solves one of the biggest problems we face today. Not being able to trust what we see on the internet.

You know exactly what I mean. We go on the internet daily. Each time we find something, we do a mental “checklist” to ensure we can trust the source and the data, itself.

“Is it shared by a trusted account?”, we ask ourselves. “Cool, it’s got the check mark. But did they just pay for it? How do I know it’s not trying to trick me?” Next, we question the data itself. “Any weird filters or edits in the image or data itself? Wait, is that closed-caption really what [insert politician here] said, or is that edited?” You do this, subconsciously and consciously, every time you see something new.

It wastes our time, our energy, and our brain power. The tiny bits of frustration build up and affect our outlook on the world. We need something better.

How Audit Trails Affect Our Data Confidence

As stated earlier, PermaShare is a hash-based sharing tool. But before we dive into the details of PermaShare, it’s important to understand the underlying technology and the value that comes along with it.

One of the key differentiators for general blockchain technology is the ability to have an audit trail. With the use of cryptographic signatures and blockchain ledgers, you can track the source, or provenance, of data without fear of it being invalid or altered. Being able to easily trace the source of data means we just have to ask one question about our data:

Can I trust the original creator of this data?

Once you can trust the source of the data, it’s easy to establish data confidence — any time, anywhere.

The PermaShare Solution

PermaShare makes the process of establishing data confidence easier than ever before. It also solves the problem of longevity for shared data — even if a platform goes out of business or you end up shadow-banned, you can always view the data you originally shared.

Social Media platforms present a beautiful example of just how far-reaching the positive effects of PermaShare can be. Let’s start small.

Example #1: Sharing a link on Facebook

When you share a link today, the social media site you use caches the image. Even if the content on the page changes, the social media site will rely on the image they previously saved for that link. Why? It’s useful. Caching can improve performance, visual consistency, and reduce data usage, just to name a few of its perks.

PermaShare (and XYO) offers the same level of usefulness, but with a “few” extra add-ons: transparency, historical recordkeeping, data authentication, manipulation prevention, verified news, improved user control, and data privacy.

Example #2: The Fall of MySpace & Vine

Every year, new social platforms pop up. But in most cases, their core data is the same: text, images, videos, links. But each time a new platform launches, there’s always an underlying test of longevity. The worst part is the data loss. Thousands of accounts, millions of photos and songs, and a huge blip in the digital global history.

Instead of mourning the data losses from a dead platform, imagine transferring your entire profile’s history to a new one.

Transforming social media material to XYO payloads allows users to take control of the data they create on social platforms. Right now, users assume they have ownership over the content they share, but the underlying reliance on Web2's centralized systems equals instability. Permanent links help maintain the integrity of the content that users originally interacted with. Imagine you had a personal, private website to pull up your old MySpace account, or you could laugh again at a bunch of Vines.

Using PermaShare for “live” data

Live Sharing is the corollary to PermaShare. While it maintains the audit trail and blockchain benefits of PermaSharing, it also allows you to share “live” data.

This can be anything from the literal “live” score of a popular sports game, the relative value of a US Dollar to the British Pound, or the top 5 coins on CoinMarketCap. Live Sharing also solves some of the most annoying problems about sharing today. Here’s an example:

Robert wants to share a link to his new online business for custom shoes. He shares the link on Facebook, gets some new customers, and life is great! The website homepage Robert shared showcased one of his most popular shoes, and the demand is so high, he has to take it off the site while he waits for shipments. However, even after updating to a new shoe design on the homepage, the Facebook link doesn’t update the share image! Suddenly, Robert experiences angry potential customers, who clicked the Facebook link and expected the shoe was available.

Now, imagine Robert had used an XYO Live Sharing link instead.

When Robert shares the link to the homepage of his new website, it displays the live products he decides to showcase. When he launches new designs, or has to take some down for shipment delays, the link automatically updates to the new designs he’s trying to sell. Any new customers that end up on Robert’s site from that link have seen a design that is readily available, and they can go ahead and purchase it that day.

Together, PermaShare and Live Sharing improve something people already interact with every day. But the improvements don’t stop here. Having permanent links with easily accessible audit trails is something every industry needs, whether it’s to better track and authenticate blood glucose levels for diabetes monitoring or Olympic race times. PermaShare offers a single, verifiable, isolated record — anonymity, access, and control is all in the user’s hands. And we’re already using PermaShare internally today.

Public & Developer Use

We’re already using PermaShare and Live Sharing in several places across our tech stack internally with excellent results. We’re working on bringing these XYO-backed benefits to the community so that everyone can leverage the power of XYO.

Builder Bounty Program

The XYO Builder Bounty program is slated for early 2024. Bounty programs often focus on bug reports — ethical hackers locate and report issues with software and receive a reward for doing so. With our bounty program, we wanted to primarily promote the contribution to and adoption of XYO technology and still include Bug Bounties only for release code.

A big focus of the XYO Builder Bounty program is for developers to contribute to the XYO technology and open-source community. We are also considering bounties for non-developers. This means you could get bounties for running codeless tasks, such as running a specific module overnight or computing larger sets of data. During the Builder Bounty Program, this is a manual process, but it will later be replaced with automated payment channels for running nodes that contribute to shared data. These channels will be funded by people using the data, resulting in an automated two sided data marketplace.

Here’s a Rate My NFT Builder Bounty Example:

Run an XYO Module to generate 10,000 Rate My NFT scores to improve the speed of Foreventory.

In this example, we are asking the community to run a pre-coded module that uses your CPU to generate Rate My NFT scores. Why? Because of the collection size! It’s over 10,000 NFTs, so it may take some time to scan, rate, and create payloads for that set of data. After you’ve completed the task, you can share the result with the team, and receive your bounty.

It may seem like a simple task, but the benefit is huge. After the NFTs have been rated, they can now be more easily accessed as payloads. It’s faster, more efficient, and available for anyone using Rate My NFTs. And of course, the person providing the data or development is rewarded for their completed task.

Our goal is to have the XYO token serve as a way for the bounty program to start a stable, utility-based economy as we move into 2024.

Final Thoughts

XYO’s Q4 2023 is bound to be exciting. We have new things lined up for release, and we’ve set our sights on a worthwhile list of upgrades to our technology, setting us up for a paradigm-shifting 2024. We are aiming to alter the course of Web3 development, not just provide incremental improvements predicated on the ideas of others. We expect to have our work redefine how Web3 is envisioned and developed. The battle for personal, digital, and shared sovereignty is the most important challenge facing society today, and XYO is at the forefront of that battle.

On a more personal note, I am extremely excited about releasing PermaShare. It not only helps solve ongoing issues that are common on the internet, it also showcases the power of the XYO approach to Web3. Most importantly, it demonstrates that simple tools can drastically improve user security. Security through transparency is the way of the future.

The XYO Protocol, Platform, and Ecosystem is the culmination of years of work by myself and the extraordinary team that are here at XY Labs and XYO.

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Never give up, never surrender!