Project Overview
Asteroid is an offline-first decentralized CMS powered by a reward distribution protocol to build sustainable DAOs. We have been running a social media blogging platform HiÐΞ (hide.ac), primarily targeting the Japanese communities on Polygon PoS, but we would like to bring a global version of this social media platform to Shiden/Astar with total decentralization while rebranding it as Asteroid (Astar + HiÐΞ).
Team
We are a team of 2 engineers and 1 biz dev at the moment, but we have globally raised 3 funding rounds (angel, seed, pre-A), so our team is expected to begin scaling soon.
-
Tomoya Nagasawa @ocrybit - Lead Programmrer
15+ years of engineering, ambassador for multiple blockchain projects, built many Dapps, smart contract protocols, and frameworks -
Haruka @harukatarotaro - Engineer / Researcher
smart contract engineer, crypto researcher running multiple popular crypto media, blockchain award nominee -
Hideaki Imoto @0xhideaki_sushi - BizDev
ambassador for multiple blockchain projects
Website
- hide.ac (mostly Japanese content)
What is Asteroid in details
Asteroid mainly redistributes Astar dapp staking rewards to DAOs, and rewards content creators who contribute to communities via decentralized publishing platforms.
HiÐΞ basically is a blogging platform that consists of an offline-first decentralized CMS and a sustainable reward distribution smart contract protocol. It also has an auto-swap social tipping feature with any token including JPYC.
An Offline-first Decentralized CMS
The CMS allows you to manage your data offline at lightning speed as well as lets you save and back up encrypted data on IPFS (Textile). You can publish your articles to the Ceramic decentralized data network using DID or to Mirror decentralized publishing platform which permanently saves your data on Arweave blockchain.
HiÐΞ Sustainable Reward Distribution Protocol
The smart contract protocol (currently on Polygon) generates a sustainable treasury through yield farming on DeFi, and the treasury will be allocated to communities through governance voting. You can tokenize communities as NFTs, and community members will be able to distribute budgets through community tokens (CT) to tokenized articles (NFTs). CTs are ERC-20 freigeld(free money) which depreciates as time goes by. This is to prevent stagnant tokens and urge rapid spending of CTs to fire up the community economy.
The protocol also utilizes quadratic share, reputation-based community voting, and community DEX aiming to design a better democratic architecture, but the details are explained here.
What Asteroid is Solving
#1 Bringing in All DAOs to the Astar Ecosystem
There is no doubt that the epicenter of DAOs has now become Mirror, and we already have a direct integration with Mirror. Asteroid editor works as a middleware writing app to convert and bridge articles between platforms and lets you publish to Mirror, which could easily absorb in the decentralized ecosystem of DAOs as well as many existing Web2.0 platforms (Let’s take back your data!).
#2 Sustainable Treasury Funding for DAOs
It’s not so clear how DAOs can raise funds and sustain themselves in the long run. We are making DAOs sustainable by continuously redistributing Astar dapp staking as well as other profits from potential yield farming strategies on outer DeFi protocols.
#3 Lowering the Hurdle for anyone to Work for DAOs
Contributing to a DAO and getting a reward for it is still a challenging task for most people as it requires highly specialized skills (such as design, programming, and community managing).
We are lowering the hurdle for working for DAOs by rewarding content creators and writers. Content creation and writing is a central part of DAO/project marketing but it doesn’t require highly specialized skills. So by autonomously rewarding writers and creators via our protocol, anyone can start contributing to any DAO of their choice and interest.
Stats/Past Performance
- Registered Users: 1900 (mostly Japanese language)
- Social Tipping: 3.2 million JPYC, 15500 times in 6 months
- Published Articles: 4500 in 6 - 8 months
- ATH Staking Support: 1.5 million USD (using Dev Protocol)
Track Record
- HiÐΞ was the most staked project when the Dev token hit ATH (meaning we bring tokens up).
- HiÐΞ played a great role to push JPYC adoption in Japan.
- Many people used Polygon for the first time through our platform (social dapps bring many new users to the chain). Check what happened when Polygon JP asked how people came to use Polygon for the first time.
https://twitter.com/0xPolygonJapan/status/1465255479127384069 - HiÐΞ is becoming the go-to media platform for crypto communities in Japan.
What benefits can Astar expect if we are to migrate
- We will onboard a great number of new users to Astar chain through our social media platform
- Astr token will be used far more than it is now through social tipping and reward distribution protocol
- Asteroid can bring in many DAOs from Mirror and elsewhere to the Astar ecosystem by becoming the go-to publishing platform for worldwide DAOs
- We have a plan to bring in millions of non-crypto users to our platform and ecosystem (We can’t underestimate the power of social media dapps!)
- Our blogging platform is said to be the best gateway for non-crypto users to learn crypto and blockchain by doing (such as setting up Metamask, sending tokens, minting NFTs) without any risk at all. We have created a popular workshop to assist crypto mass adoption, and we are going to fair-launch a proof of learning token to accelerate it further.
Github
Builders Program Roadmap
Total Estimated Duration: 6 months
Milestone1: Asteroid CMS
Estimated End Date: 2021 12/31
- launch Asteroid CMS by porting a simplified version of HiÐΞ without any central DB (already working)
Milestone2: Social Tipping
Estimated End Date: 2022 1/31
- add social tipping with any token, including Astar and JPYC, our tipping contract auto-swaps from any token to any token by integrating DEX behind the scene
- the amount of social tipping sent and received may be used as part of voting power for budget allocations to communities
Milestone3: HiÐΞ Protocol on Shibuya Testnet
Estimated End Date: 2022 2/28
- deploy an upgraded version of HiÐΞ protocol on Shibuya Testnet
- the smart contracts will be rapidly upgradable during the test period
Milestone4: HiÐΞ Protocol on Astar Mainnet
Estimated End Date: 2022 3/31
- deploy fully tested HiÐΞ protocol on the Astar Mainnet
- issuance of a governance token may be planned for protocol decentralization
Milestone5: Full Decentralization with Dfinity and GUN
Estimated End Date: 2022 5/31
- fully decentralize the platform with Dfinity (for indexing) and GUN (WebRTC Graph DB for real-time encrypted data sharing/messaging)
- Asteroid is built on top of our own dapp development framework called NextDapp and it already integrates Dfinity
- we have been testing a decentralized encrypted messaging protocol between Ethereum addresses using GUN
- to fully disrupt web2.0 platforms, we believe dapps need these technologies alongside the Astar Blockchain
Future plan
-
HiÐΞ Protocol can distribute rewards not only to articles but also to any NFT. We would like to tokenize other works, activities, and tasks, then reward them for their contributions by building a crowdsourcing protocol / a community-building platform for all DAOs and startups.
-
We are launching the global version (Asteroid) first, but if it successfully forms a solid-sized ecosystem, we might, later on, decide to also migrate the Japanese version (hide.ac) to Astar. In collaboration with our beloved partner JPYC, we believe the crypto mass adoption with tens of millions of people in Japan can begin on Astar as early as the second half of next year (wishful thinking).
