With the launch of several new protocols, a huge Ark Protocol upgrade and the gleam of tropical beaches on the horizon, Q1 2023 was monumental for decent.land. Let’s review the year so far!

ANS public launch: 1,365 domains, 8 integrations, and a new open framework

In February, ANS came out of private beta and opened minting for everyone. So far:

• 1,365 domains minted

• 756 unique holders

• 4,206 AR in minting volume

• (check more stats on the new ANS Explorer)

More importantly, Handshake, ViewBlock, ArConnect, everPay, Permacast, ar.page, Art By City, and ArCademy have all integrated ANS as an identity layer.

And, since building ANS meant creating a whole new paradigm for name service architecture, we open-sourced the framework (ONSF: The Open Name Service Framework) to make it easy for any chain, dApp or protocol to build their own custom name service, chain-agnostic with EXM and everPay.

The land comes to life: decent.land map art

The Eye itself is a coded deity, driven by a single prophecy: “A Decent Land will be our home. Home will be A Decent Land.”

As it was writ’, so it shall come to pass. At its inception, decent.land was envisioned with digital land to own as representations of spaces for DAOs and web3 communities to settle. After a year in the making, we’re close to realizing this vision.

Early mock-ups of sectors of the Decent Land map’s first continent, Yowunas Maias:

The decent.land Creative Director Lee Tyrrell, working with artist Mikko Lyytinen, has produced a whole world of structures, fauna and biomes which will comprise the ultimate map of Decent Land. Catch up with the lore by starting here at chapter 1.

Ark V3 hovers on the horizon

Ark, the multichain identity linking protocol, saw a rewrite to EXM in the last quarter of 2022 and we also shipped a dashboard page to manage your linked identities.

This quarter, we've been speccing and laying the groundwork for a radically flexible Ark variant, Ark V3, with fewer dependencies and UX barriers for dApps to integrate, and a novel 'identity container' model:

Identity containers (or intergalactic passports as they’ll be known) allow users to link subsets of their identities together for different purposes, and opens up a way to vouch for reputation between containers.

👀 a rough diagram preview of Ark V3…

Aside from containers, the most important change in V3 is that it is no longer necessary to have an Arweave wallet as the master identity.

Any wallet from any supported chain (e.g. those that work with molecule.sh) can be the master ID, and any number of child wallets can be added to that container. This opens up use cases like an Ethereum NFT artist wanting to drop tokens to their fans on Tezos (all while the data is settled back securely to Arweave on our back-end).

molecule.sh added support for EVM and 10 other chain architectures

Beveron was first discovered beneath the oceans of Ūdan-III. Hoarded by the mermaids and their kin, this magnificent substance holds a perpetual liquid state; regardless of its temperature. We use it as a solar lubricant, whenever a star is in our proximity. - Molecule #1: Lee David Tyrrell

Molecule is a developer tooling API for EXM developers that's built on top of the deterministicFetch EXM feature. molecule.sh is composed of multiple reusable EXM components to facilitate writing EXM functions.

Molecule extends the native functionality of EXM to make it possible to sign EXM contract interactions with wallets on (almost) any chain. Pretty much everything we build at decent.land is built on EXM and molecule.sh, and allows us to inherit the security and data storage of Arweave and the flexibility of multichain.

Molecule now supports:

• Arweave (of course)

• All EVM chains (Ethereum, Polygon, BNB, Arbitrum, Tron, Avalanche, Fantom, Optimism, and tons more)

• Solana

• Internet Computer

• Aptos

• Tezos

• Astar

• Fuel

• Stacks

• Ziliqua

• Substrate (Polkadot, Kusama, Celer, Moonriver, Reef, and more)

We also built utilities for EXM to easily access Redstone pricing and everPay payments as part of the ANS minting stack.

The Ark Hackathon spawned sender.gg

The first-prize winner of the Ark Hackathon, 1notif, went on to form the basis for sender.gg, a gasless, out-of-the-box multichain messaging protocol built on Ark and molecule.sh.

Sender Protocol eliminates the need for dApps to build custom solutions for chat and notifications. Whatever the chain, just hook Sender into the right page or destination and set up the trigger conditions.

It can power likes and mentions on your web3 social dapp, sales on your NFT marketplace, or announcements to the whole userbase. This is because Ark Protocol links identity across chains to reach users where they are.

Notifications is just the first use case for Sender Protocol. It can be thought of as a general message relay protocol, so use cases like encrypted messaging are not a big leap at all, and are planned over the remainder of 2023.

PASoM, the permaweb possum, was discovered in the jungles

PASoM is a flexible and composable contract layer designed to store and display essential social metadata such as bios, profile pictures, and cover images, with the security and decentralization of Arweave.

We envision being able to provide Arweave dApps with an out-of-the-box set of profile metadata that doesn’t force users to input the same data afresh on every new profile they create.

Aside from our own ar.page, the first dApp to integrate PASoM will be permacast, who will use the contract layer for creator profiles alongside ANS.

Not to mention the fact that it’s also, of course, an inhabitant of Yowunas Maias, the first-discovered continent of Decent Land.

Join us as we continue to explore lands unknown. Twitter // Discord