Alexandria’s pre-alpha launch is happening tomorrow, January 1st, 12AM UCT.
Following over 2 years of continuous development, we now initialize the Alexandria token mechanism and suite of pilot apps.
There’s already a fair bit of resources on the project(e.g., whitepaper, codebase, launch article) so we’ll limit this showcase to the technical aspects and how best to utilize them.
Vision
In one sense, Alexandria is the ultimate library: A place to permanently and publically store all the meaningful content you want, much like a drive/dropbox crossed with social media. In another sense, it’s a protocol for app development that taps into this content layer.
The ‘Web3 magic’ side of things is that every piece of content, and content interaction (like/share/retweet), yields a NFT that’s tapped into a nanopayment system for rewarding curators and creators.
Practical Use Case
Let’s look at an example. Suppose you want to share an photo online (or book/podcast/blog/etc.). You can do that in any number of places, but as soon as you do, anyone can copy that photo and use it for their own purposes. Even if someone references you with the original photo (e.g., with a retweet), you and the sharing party are not rewarded if it goes viral after the fact (or maybe you’d be lucky to get 10% of the revenue it generates).
If you post that photo on Alexandria (via and Arweave upload), you automatically mint it as an NFT. If someone else shares that photo, they pay to mint a Soul-Bound Token (SBT) references the original. If someone else stumbles on an SBT, they pay the SBT to mint a new SBT that references the original. And so on.
This ‘pay-to-mint’ is done in Library Credits (LBRY) which cost a fixed $0.01 to mint, and the protocol token ALEX, which is mined like Bitcoin, always mints to 1 NFT and one SBT. Note: These payments are paid to the NFT/SBT tokens themselves, whereby the owner can later withdraw the funds to their wallet.
This chain of custody is designed to be practically eternal. The asset locations cannot change, and NFT trading could occur without interrupting the token mechanics. Therefore, in the most granular and meritocratic way possible, creators and curators on Alexandria keep 100% of generated revenue.
Common Question: Can’t someone just copy the photo and mint it as their own NFT?
Yes they can. This dilemma is baked into the nature of public networks. But our incentives are balanced such that the social consensus around profiles is what brings value to NFTs, e.g., if all your content is about cats, people will find their cat NFTs through your profile. If I copy all your cat photos and mint them as my own, it’d probably be a waste of money because all the cat people already have yours, and won’t try to find or redistribute duplicates.
Our Apps
We have availible for use right now:
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Permasearch - Search Arweave for content, save what you find as NFTs.
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Alexandria - View and save the NFT collections of others.
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Emporium - Marketplace for Alexandria NFTs.
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Syllogos - An ereader with custom search engines (still mostly under development).
All tokenomics can be managed internally from lbry.app/swap, and the dashboard for librarian storage and uploads will open shortly on lbry.app/manager.
The Stack
All content is stored on Arweave, a permanent storage layer agnostic to data type. All logic runs on the Internet Computer.
There are no other dependencies, Alexandria apps do however retain access to Web2 services (AI, Vector Databases, etc.) in a decentralized manner via our vetkey sharing scheme.
Web2 Services (AI, Vector Databases, Eth Wallets, etc.)
All our apps should be able to access state of the art Web2 services in a decentralized manner, so we created a key sharing scheme whereby users’ can pay to use one anothers api and private keys without revealing the underlying keys.
This feature is still experimental and I use it to provide the private keys for uploading to Arweave so user’s don’t have to interact with ETH. We also use it internally for search engines and AI services. These will be availible for free to users until it’s been battle-tested whereby users can provide their own keys and be paid in LBRY for their usage.
The purpose here is to not rely on our dev team for apps to be able to access the services they want. Librarians can always extend this functionality with Web2 APIs to their own apps without the need for permission.
A Call to App Developers
Our pilot apps build on internal modules that haven’t yet been extened to the public as APIs. Nonetheless, everything is open source and we’d love help building. If you have an app idea, please reach out to us. Otherwise, try it out and let us know what you think.
Synergies with AO Computer
AO, being the other actor model blockchain, has been a hot topic on this forum. For those familiar, the goals of Alexandria might feel much the same as AO’s and this is no accident.
The unique element retained by both the ICP/Arweave and AO/Arweave stack is hyper-efficient smart contracts stacked on ‘forever content.’ This is the core of AO’s mission and branding. Meanwhile, ICP can do the same thing with ease but scarcely frames itself this way.
Alexandria’s design is made with cross-compatibility in mind. We intend to bridge with full compatibility across AO and ICP, establishing multi-chain incentive mechanism for bridged NFTs that merges both communities.
Moving Forward
The ‘protocol’ layer of this app has become relatively stable and is only likely to undergo changes that extend scalability. The ‘app’ layer though has just started being built and will be undergoing constant development and iteration in the years to come.
If we are to equate Alexandrias’ goal to Web2, we hope to re-imagine the Netflix, Spotify, Kindle, and Google alternatives as Alexandria Apps where hyperlinks are immutable and enforceably owned by individuals. The vision is for a humble fork of the existing Internet that absorbs the more timeless parts of Web2. A place for those looking to doge the current news cycle and curate their content through friends instead of algorithms. It’s a smaller, quieter space for digital content, but it’s yours and always will be.
We’re all open source. Come build with us: GitHub - AlexandriaDAO/core