Welcome to Dappnet Update #1. This is going to be short, we don't have much time in life.

In September 22, I announced Dappnet to critical acclaim. We raised 25eth from the NFT sale, hit 14M impressions across the web, and got published in The Block (side-note: go follow Tim he's pretty funny), and talked about on Sassano’s The Daily Gwei. Everyone loved it - which was nuts to me after just coming out of goblin mode and hacking for 5 weeks straight.

I want to thank everyone, this was genuinely the best moment out of all of last year and brought me out of a long depression into having some sense of meaning and purpose. And seriously I mean that. Thank you to the supporters, retweeters, NFT holders, thank you to the people making memes, they’re freaking hilarious. Thanks to Izzy from Lido who independently reached out and gifted me some $LDO as a sort of PGF. Thank you to the Nascent folks (brock&Dan) for our early chats around legal and design. And thanks so much to Sylve for organising me into the ETHLisbon hacker house.

My goal is to build what I think should exist (and you can quote me on that, it’s on Farcaster) - DeFi as the permissionless, global access for anyone to transact and own their own money.

But what use is sovereign money when you can't even access it? Seriously. And access - means accessibility. It should be technically accessible (meaning, always available from a censorship-resistant P2P network) as well as humanely accessible - as simple to use as your iPhone.

I apologise for the wait.

My life is chaos. And not chaos in the typical way - literally I have diabetes, so every day I am managing a portfolio which has more volatility than bitcoin and the same pernicious fragility as a bored ape owner managing their private keys. I got two full-time jobs - Dappnet and then replicating a pancreas. If I skip a meal or sleep in past 9am, my metabolic rhythm becomes harder to control and that’s challenging 24/7. (okay I digress)

For the first 3mo after Dappnet’s release, I grappled with what to do with all this newfound opportunity and interest. To be honest, I am not motivated by raising VC money without a good plan, I was pretty isolated from crypto in AU, and half of that is because idk where I was in life (got to love your 20’s). I just need security and stability. Though I also have high standards for myself and what I’d like to work on - things which aren’t BS, they’re not ponzis (unless it’s satire), things which really make a good impact for people.

And so, talking with investors a lot I was grappling with this question - what is Dappnet? Should it be a business? Do I hire employees? To be honest, no. It’s a public good, first and foremost.

Now I’ve figured that out, and after a short meditation retreat to really process my stupid life, I’m back and I’m ready to deploy in prod. In the next couple of months, I’m going to get legal clarity on Dappnet, deploy and open-source this thing, onboard some big DeFi dapps, and integrate some of the best UX you’ve ever seen for web3. That and we’re going to look for some more funding from grants and bring more people into the project.

What’s been happening?

This post is going to be basically summarising everything of the past 3mo. I probably share too much on Twitter, so future shares will probably be posted on the Dappnet account here and contained in these updates and shared to the Discord.

So without further ado, what’s been happening in these past 3mo? This is organised into Product, Engineering and R&D.

Project.

• Figuring out the project. Dappnet is a public good. It’s going to be fully open-source. We intend to find funding through public goods funding routes (grants, Optimism PGF, Prop House).

• Getting legal clarity. Dappnet is risky and I want to visit the US one day without getting randomly detained. So we’re getting some legal advice. Once this is done, then we launch. Thank you to Caitlin from Paradigm, Liam from the Aus buildooors, and Greg for helping with this so far.

• Organising funding. This takes place after we sort the legal - but basically we will be looking to raise some funds. This has been out-of-pocket for me so far (aside from the NFT sale) and I’d like to commit my time to this.

Engineering.

Building an uncensorable RPC.

Did you know that Infura blocks/censors .eth domains? We built something to fix that. It’s called verifiable RPC. (thread)

While your .eth domain can never be taken away from you, RPC providers censor some domains like tornadocash.eth from being looked up. Not just that, they can censor any part of the Ethereum database, and you won’t ever know you’re being lied to.

So, I designed and built a solution - a verifiable RPC library for Ethereum. It’s open-source and we’re working on integrating it into Dappnet.

This is big - we haven’t had technology like this until now. It stemmed originally from my work trying to integrate an Ethereum node into the Dappnet package itself! Unfortunately, Helios at the time didn’t yet support this feature (we were too early). It appears it does now and we will look at using either Helios or this library. In either case, it’s very useful for the ecosystem - and we might propose adding it to Metamask.

Turning the proof-of-concept into a product.

• Automatic updates. we built out automatic updates for dappnet in December. Users won't have to redownload to get the upgraded software. Future updates will be completely trustless - and delivered over IPFS/BitTorrent (see #2) - meaning not even Dappnet itself can be censored.

• Performance. Dappnet PoC used a very hacky implementation of a proxy server, which was leaking memory. We rewrote this as a Rust-based SOCKS5 proxy which didn't do that.

• Fixing things. Uniswap’s IPFS deployment has broken in the New Year. This is something we gotta work out and fix.

R&D - research and development.

See dappnet-features for current progress.

• developing a way to open dapps inside Dappnet, instead of installing a Chrome/Firefox extension (which is much more brittle, UX-wise).

• developing a PoC wallet that's integrated into Dappnet.

• integrating a full Ethereum light node (Helios) into Dappnet, so you don’t have to rely on Infura. (#4)

• developing a private RPC marketplace for Ethereum nodes, so Dappnet users have full privacy while using DeFi.

• uncensorable file sharing that's built into the browser - ipfs:// link support. So you can access datasets like the Twitter crypto social graph, with one click.

• uncensorable update mechanism for the Dappnet client, via IPFS itself (#2)

How can I get involved?

Up until now, it’s just been me and my weaponized ADHD deploying to twitter.

Well, not anymore. An awesome community member has stepped in, @m2k, and set us up with a Discord.

Come join. If you’re a dev looking to hack/build, designer, anyone looking to collaborate, mememaker, curious and have questions, or just want to hang out, then you are welcome here.

(There may or may not be early access to Dappnet prototypes here FYI. Obviously for research purposes only.)

The end goals.

The most important thing is to deliver something meaningful into the world. For that, I keep track of a lot of the threads that this project is going to touch.

• Uncensorable dapps. Privacy is a human right. Crypto is free speech.

  • Tornado Cash

• Secure access to DeFi.

  • No more DNS attacks on Curve.fi.

  • No more RPC censorship from Infura.

• You can always access your money

  • accessing previous versions of dapps

  • redeploying dapps and removing the frequently incorrect TPM/Chainanalysis code

• A platform for free speech, controversial ideas, experiments, politics aside.

  • prediction markets on .eth

  • distributing datasets on .eth

  • distributing new AI models that aren't censored or sanitized on .eth

• Robust infrastructure, credible, open without bias

  • eg. teleportr

  • eg. Signal

All of the above are real examples. That speaks louder than anything.

Late last year, I got booted out of my house in Sydney while I was overseas in Lisbon. It was a bit uncomfortable but I landed on my feet, as I always do (wrote about it here). And while I was moving into my new house, I had a chat with my removalist in the van. He asked me about what I did, I mentioned Dappnet in nondescript words, thinking he wouldn’t understand. He not only knew about crypto, he’d heard about Tornado Cash being censored, and he’d lost money in FTX. We had a long yarn and I offered to send him a Dappnet NFT as thanks, and he said he didn’t really have a wallet. It just hit me - we are still so early. We haven’t got an alternative to FTX that is remotely as accessible, nor based on the sound financial constructions as DeFi. But people hold crypto, and based on this conversation - they understand. We had a massive discussion about the banks here in Australia. People understand what crypto is about, it’s just abhorrent UX for the most part. We have the tech, it’s just about having the empathy to design it better. Accessibility for all.

Summary.

This has been a chaotic announcement post but I promised myself I’d show up and get it out today. (So I think in dotpoints, sue me :P.)

My aim is to get legal clarity by end of February. Then we release/open-source.

Please join the Discord, reach out to me there.

Let’s deploy

Last thing - ✨ collect this post. ✨

I’m an artist. By collecting this post, you support me, as a patron of what I do. The money will go towards creating more useful things for the world and staying genuine without outside influence.

Why collect this NFT?

NFT utility in 2022 feels like making tweets in 2005. "just eating pizza”. It feels like we don’t really know how to use them.

So I want to give you the opportunity to participate in an experiment.

Become a patron. Make your mark in a codebase used by millions.

By buying this, you’ll have the opportunity to etch your own message in the Dappnet codebase. It can be anything you want - a quote, a joke, a link, something stupid, something interesting. I don’t care what it is (so long as it’s not hateful), but I’d like to see what you do with it.

Your message be displayed front-and-centre in a patrons.txt file alongside with the readme until the end of time. Let’s see what you can come up with.