Project Title
Iris
Description
Decentralized Social Hyperstructure
Manifesto/Vision
Our founder Martti Malmi aka Sirius was revolutionizing finance with Satoshi from 2009 to 2011 as the first developer to work on Bitcoin in addition to Nakamoto. Decentralizing giant industries is therefore nothing new to this team.
Similar fundamental challenges are now glaringly obvious in big tech and social media. Censorship has gotten out of hand. Control over what we see, hear and read has consolidated to a small group of powerful entities.
We as a team value freedom of speech as a fundamental human right and a tool to the rapid evolution of humanity. A more user centric approach will replace the current data greedy centralized social media and digital communications services.
For the past two years Martti has worked diligently in creating the Iris protocol, which operates as serverless, permissionless and developer friendly infrastructure to solve these giant issues by being truly decentralized and infinitely scalable. It will change how we view the ownership of our data, tracking, security, privacy and free digital social interaction in the future.
The same way that Bitcoin was a cambrian explosion in decentralization technologies, utilising the blockchain, to disrupt finance - Iris will be for social media.
Problem
Thousands upon thousands of DAOs rely on Discord. A centralized community tool provider that has a history of banning unwanted entities e.g. Tornado Cash. We’re one corporate decision away from having those DAOs lose their comms, community and coordination.
Cancel culture is getting worse every day. “It’s a private company, they can do whatever they want.” mentality does not fit a free and open society that evolves through true freedom of speech. A society where “the opposite sides” can’t even debate anymore, becomes stagnant and eventually succumbs to totalitarianism, authoritarianism, fascism - all the good stuff Moloch revels in. Banning political speech is a mistake and only possible because of powerful business interests and centralized, close sourced tech stack.
Privacy, security, tracking, data ownership - need we even talk about those? We don’t believe that those alone will be enough to draw the masses into “Web3 Social”, nor do we believe that copying the existing Web2 applications and platforms into the decentralized stack will bring about any meaningful change, thus our solution:
Solution
Iris is a fully decentralized protocol that works on people’s own devices. We can’t ban you. We can’t track you. We don’t own your data. We don’t control what you say. Anyone can create on top of Iris. Our current plan is to create a Nouns style NFT DAO to fund, facilitate and govern the Iris ecosystem. The more external teams we draw in to experiment with front end client solutions built on top of Iris, the more chances there are for that “Web3 social killer app” to appear.
Nobody knows yet, what Web3 social will look like. Let’s face it, there are no users yet. And for a good reason: the infrastructure sucks, the apps suck (mainly UX) and the current ideas suck (except for e.g. LENS itself). That is why we will focus on creating the best public goods infrastructure. We want to enable Ethereum based login and messaging, create a fast group chat and ultimately a Discord alternative in house, everything else - we’ll leave to external teams.
Product Features
- Nounish NFT DAO
- Fully decentralized digital communications protocol and social hyperstructure
- Reference clients and prototypes for front end experimentation
Validation
Bitcoin seems to work pretty well. We think Martti is able to make this one work pretty well too.
Progress
Over two years of development on the core protocol. Since joining the team the other anon crypto veteran has grown the team to six people, grown the community and Twitter following organically, a bunch of parternship meetings lined up, professional product management (DAO style), etc etc etc. Lots of progress, happy to provide access to a task tool with hundreds of things to do 
Differentiation (from other projects)
Fully decentralized, governed by a DAO, founded by Sirius.
Team
2 core team developers
2 community developers
1 growth marketing, partnerships and collabs person
1 overview, strategy, coordination and community person
2 artists / UX / concept / visual design people
Grant Request $
10,000 $USDC (or e.g. $ETH equivalent)
What the Funds Are For
- DAO contract deployments
- Office rent (we love to work co-located)
- Software licenses
Help Requested
Devs, lots of devs
Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio
Landing page: iris.cx
Prototype: iris.to
Twitter: @iris_dot_to
Martti’s Twitter: @marttimalmi
Discord: Iris Messengers DAO
Contact email: irisdao@proton.me