The Story of RSS3
Contents and links make up the foundation of one’s online life: the most popular apps like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok all levarage links to distribute content or vice versa. Their system worked well until they turn into data monopolies who later all that is evil.
The companies behind all these products are not the problem: they are generally companies that were built to profit from user data from day one. Even though founding teams might have the intention to do something different, there will be great financial, political, and technical challenges forcing them to go back to the old track. Developers all around the world have realized that to build a better future, systematic changes are needed. Over the past years, decentralized file storage has been explored by brilliant projects like IPFS and Arweave. App developers have been working with these new infrastructures to build new apps such as blogs and NFT platforms. However, though contents and indexes can be stored in a decentralized network, indexers are kept centralized. This way, we are still facing a situation where most of the downsides of a centralized system persist. And that was the reason why we built RSS3 in the first place.
We believe that a decentralized asset, content and social indexer is the final piece for the world to build massive dApps that might overthrow the centralized system with massive user adoption. With the new RSS3 standard and its decentralized hosting, developers and users will build and experience social and content apps the way they do with Ethereum dApps: everyone controls their own data and public data is truly open to everyone.
To this day, we have successfully closed the seed round fundraising, delivered a LightPaper (https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmPYZWZeKJt2b6CrmPcEPfUtAzUW44mD16vUK6fVfM1pvS) and a stable version of the RSS3 standard, making it lighter, simpler, more efficient, extensible, and powerful. With more and more people getting to know about the project and the ideas behind it, we are seeing more users, developers, and content creators joining the journey: the developers at RSS3Scan (https://rss3scan.io/, deprecated) have made a gorgeous website for users to check out RSS3 with a given public address just like Etherscan for Ethereum; Re: ID, a browser extension which will sync your contents and relationships from your social media to your RSS3 files, is released; blog frameworks like Ghost and Hexo have already supported RSS3; the brilliant decentralized microblogging platform joined the RSS3 ecosystem; other apps like blog and NFT platforms from our brilliant community developers are also on the way. Also, over 10,000 RSS3 files have been created since launch, with more than 60,000 items. As RSS3 grows, we believe it should gradually become an asset to the public. The success of RSS3 depends on the whole community's collective contribution and dedication. If we are to make sure that RSS3 keeps evolving and grows into continuous prosperity, we need a sophisticated democratic system for its governing.
The development of cryptocurrency and related fields have empowered a lot of amazing projects to adapt a truly trustless democratic governing. A distributed autonomous organization or DAO can be formed with the foundation of a token which is designated to have certain governing power with specific rules such as quadratic voting. The involvement of a token with high financial liquidity is a brilliant design as an instance of a radical market. However, it also creates a lot of challenges for the team and community as the financial drive from public investors often surpasses the intention to properly execute the governance. This can easily result in massive short-term manipulations, and stakeholders with true expertise and involvement might be excluded due to their different financial statuses. Therefore, before we can come up with a well-designed fungible-token-based DAO model, we decided to enable democratic governing with something different: an NFT called the “RSS3 Fruit Token”.
RSS3 Fruit Token
RSS3 Fruit Tokens (RFTs) are demon fruits designed to be the native governing assets for the RSS3 Standard. Every RFT will have attributes for direction, life cycle, left fruit, and right fruit. There will only be 294 RFTs and each one of them is unique. One will not know which RFT to get until one actually receives it. There is also an approximately 1/7 chance for one to get a “rare” RFT, which is an RFT with the same fruit on the left and right. And every RFT has its own "couple", that is the RFT that only differs in direction. Note: This is not supposed to be a tradable DAO token and please do not take it as an investment.
RFT, unlike a typical governing token, is special in its own way, which further makes its rules very different from other DAO tokens. The basic allocation for RFTs is as following:
Within the community portion, a detailed breakdown is as following:
Vesting
There will only be 6 RFTs unlocked at "genesis", all to the team. Starting from there, RFTs will be unlocked to the team and backers proportionally to the unlock progress of the community RFTs. Until the unlock of the 41st RFT, (number of team unlocked RFTs) / (number of total unlocked RFTs) will be more than 50%. After that, the ratio will gradually drop to around 20%.
Team (60, ~20.4%)
RSS3 is designed and developed by one of the most experienced, resourceful, and ambitious Web 3.0 teams. The team is consisted of members from various backgrounds including engineering, designing, community management, and business development. The team will be directing the project at the beginning to ensure its success and will be working on and governing the ecosystem for as long as it is needed.
Backers (17, ~5.8%)
RSS3 is backed by some of the top individual and institutional investors. We thank them for supporting us when we were starting with basically nothing. They will be getting a small portion of the RFTs which will be unlocking together with the team. This will grant them the small governing power they deserve.
Developers (80, ~27.2%)
It goes without doubt that developers should have the biggest governing power for the RSS3 Standard. RSS3 is built by developers for developers. If RSS3 succeeds in the future, the fundamental reason will always be the brilliant contributions from developers. Developers will get their RFTs through events like DevCups and RSS3thons, and daily contributions toward the RSS3 ecosystem.
Community Leaders (42, ~14.3%)
For RSS3 to succeed, we need community supports from all around the world. Therefore, the RSS3DAO will be giving out RFTs to those who contributed greatly to promotions and community influence. We expect to see them emerge from community managers in different languages and cultures and also top content creators who are enthusiastic about adopting and popularizing RSS3.
Advisors (40, ~18.4%)
Advisors are also an important part of RSS3. We will need experts from different fields and experience to form a strong advising power which will help RSS3 to be better governed. We will be giving RFTs to top-notch advisors including entrepreneurs, developers, researchers, investors, and journalists. Their contribution will further make sure RSS3 is on the right track.
Partnerships (20, ~6.8%)
We are and will not be alone in the Web 3.0 revolution, and we will need allies. A small portion of RFTs will be given to those who are passionate about either merging RSS3 into their project, contributing significantly to the RSS3 ecosystem, or other types of long-term partnership. This will also include our supports to organizations for the LGBT+ community, colored community, female coders, and communities from developing countries.
Public Sale (1, ~0.3%)
One RFT will be sold to the public. We understand that lots of members of our community want to contribute to the project in ways other than those mentioned above. And that funding the project is one of the most direct ways to do so. However, as we discussed above, a DAO with a low financial incentive is the purpose of this system. Thus, we decided to have only one RFT will be sold, and details will be released later this quarter. Though RFTs will be converted into some future DAO tokens (if exists), please do not take it as an investment.
Reserved (34, 11.6%)
It is impossible to come up with a perfect design from the beginning, so we have a part of RFTs reserved for the RSS3DAO. This allocation of these RFTs will be decided later by the RSS3DAO, which might include rewards for special contributions.
From Here...
We are at the beginning of the Web 3.0 era. What Ethereum has done to the finance system, we are dedicated to making it happen for content and links. The introduction of RFTs provides a way for the RSS3 Ecosystem to be temporarily autonomously organized without involving significant financial incentives that could possibly harm the project. And we are really excited to see how this will align all stakeholders together in building a stronger ecosystem.
We will be releasing information about the public sale and governance details soon.
Stay tuned!
— Joshua and the RSS3 Team