Years of Effort, Experience, and Experimentation
By Joshua Long
June 25, 2020
At the time of writing we are on the cusp of the five-year anniversary of the Ethereum blockchain’s genesis; a lot of things have happened in those five years as the Ethereum ecosystem has grown and ethereans have thought deeply about the many different applications of this world-changing technology:
“man, Ethereum is this decentralized finance platform”
“na na na, Ethereum is a world computer,”
We have all been the scientists touching the Ethereum elephant and giving our own view of what the smaller part of the whole that we hold in our hands is.
Our first ever AKASHA blog post discussed the problem of centralized architecture and the incredibly short life of information on the Internet, looking at the ways that we could work to provide the world with a better home of mind:
We are living in an information-based society that has outsourced its freedom of expression and collective memory to corporations that don’t always have our best interests at heart.
Three weeks later we had combined IPFS, Orbit-DB, and Ethereum smart contract events in order to create the “missing link” between IPFS and Ethereum, opening the path to many interesting things that weren’t possible before.
All the way along this journey we aimed to try and find the best way that we could possibly support ethereans, the best thing that we could build to make sure that our contribution to the ecosystem was creating as much value as possible. We’ve experimented with identity, cryptoeconomics, and colorful essence amongst a wide variety of other exciting things, all the while maintaining that:
AKASHA will not conduct an “ICO” just for the purpose of raising money. We are a self-funded and experiment-driven project.
As we’ve evolved and experimented, the Ethereum ecosystem has done just the same, with a large quantity of amazing and driven organizations and individuals looking into new models of financing, ways of building organizations, and methods for making decisions as well as a whole bundle of other radical experiments, too numerous to mention.
During this period the smoothness of the user experience has improved, but there is still a big gap between where we are now and the shiny nature of the things that we aim to replace. We saw this gap as an opportunity to bring to bear all of the knowledge from our past experiments and all of these amazing experiences in order to create something that could potentiate the efforts of our fellow ethereans: Ethereum World.
Take those great pieces of functionality, tie them together with the ability to post, comment, converse, debate, and you have something truly unique and exciting which matches up very well with the journey that AKASHA has been on through the years.
This process is less intimidating and more accessible. The keywords here are: accessibility, ease of use, and adoption … It helps to imagine maybe something like creating an Aragon DAO; maybe the next post would be linked to this with a proposal the next with a bounty; and the next with an NFT collectible for the people that participated in the DAO or in the proposal. The possibilities are kind of cool looking ahead.
Ethereum dapps all working together, synthesizing with each other and producing heretofore unknown possibilities. This could be very powerful, and as always we invite you to join us in this experimentation, we cannot do this without active co-creation with the community.
There is another big reason to engage with Ethereum World though, and that is because this is the first world of hopefully many that will be built using The AKASHA World Framework:
…kind of like a WordPress for social networks where people and communities can deploy their own customized, purpose-built, purposeful social networks fulfilling whatever needs they have as a community.
This initial period of work on the Framework is crucial as it will affect the possibilities that are available to future world creators and people using it, affecting the ability that it has to radically change the toolset that different communities have to work, communicate, and most crucially effect change within the area that is their focus.
Interactions with the platform aren’t just you yourself deriving some benefit from unlocking new possibilities, you will be actively co-creating just through the act of engaging with the Framework, helping us to ensure that the beautiful, open-source tool that will hopefully be deployed by many intrepid individuals is the best it possibly can be.
Our vision of how we can progress the first World, Ethereum World, into a fully participant-owned and governed social network will be a part of an upcoming blog. We are very excited about this piece of work, and look forward to watching its deployment and growth over the coming months and years.
We are on the cusp of both this important anniversary for Ethereum and an AKASHA release which holds inside of it the product of years of effort, experience, and experimentation. We hope to see you in this new world sometime soon.