In April 2021 Esteroids (Ethereum Asteroids) was born.
We did a lot (but, a lot) in the first 9 months of our existence. Some people even say we confuse them with how much we did.
Our grand vision was, and still is, to build a new, democratic Internet. An Internet that belongs to the users, who govern it together.
Let’s summarize all the projects we have right now, on the road to fulfilling our vision.
Esteroids - our flagship project
Esteroids (=Ethereum Asteroids), or esteroids.eth, is a decentralized search engine for the dWeb. It has already a library of over 2K .eth websites, with dozens of new ones created every day.
What we DON’T PLAN: for esteroids.eth to become the new Google. Blachs. Not our plan at all.
What we DO PLAN: for esteroids.eth to become a community website.
This means, on the one hand, that we intend for esteroids.eth to be owned by a DAO eventually. The DAO will control everything in esteroids.eth, from managing the index and, through ordering the search results, to adding features or even changing the design.
But it also means that we actually want people from the community to own parts of esteroids.eth website. People will have a token associated with some space in the website, and using this token they could set the content in this space.
The technology to do that is called WNFT — see next section.
WNFT — our flagship innovative technology
WNFT is a technology that Esteroids develops to allow people to own a space on a website. The ownership is marked with an NFT token, hence the name — Website NFT.
We are planning to integrate WNFTs into esteroids.eth in 2022 and let people own space in search result pages. We wrote more about it here.
If you’re a developer, please check the WNFT smart contract we recently released. If you’re a user who wants to try it out, you could do it soon in our Citadef experiment (see below).
dWeb services - the platform the dWeb needs
Soon after esteroids.eth was launched we realized the dWeb cannot be pure peer-to-peer. The dWeb needs gateways, tools, and services — both for builders and for users.
The dWeb Services is our project for creating a community-service dWeb services platform.
We launched the dWeb Services for our community at the end of 2021, in the form of a closed beta for those who specifically requested. There are only a few dozen users now, which is very quick for such a word-of-mouth product.
Currently, we offer only IPNS service for .eth website owners, and we do it, still, in a centralized way.
But our plan is to extend to more service, offer gateways for members, and decentralized the platform. We’re investigating the best ways to do that.
There are a few last invites left for the dWeb Services in the closed beta stage. Drop an email to contact@esteroids.xyz if you want to participate.
dWebsites bot - our latest release
We recently released a dWebsites bot that tweets new .eth websites. It is a service powered by esteroids.eth.
If you want to track new websites, follow the dWebsites bot.
But if you want to explore the dWeb, visit esteroids.eth.
Citadef — a wacky WNFT experiment
Citadef is a wacky WNFT experiment we are working on. Why wacky? because if we already do an experiment, why not have fun on the way?
In Citadef, short for Citadel of Fishes (wacky name, right?) you first get an algorithmically generated fish. The fish symbolizes your membership on the website. Each fish owner gets a personal space, where they can create mini-blogs in markdown. All the fish owners govern the Citadef website together.
If that’s not wacky enough for you, you should know that this is how the fishes look like. It is generated by an algorithm we wrote ourselves.
Citadef will be launched at the end of Q1, or the beginning of Q2 2022.
dWeb of the week competition
During the second half of 2021, we run a dWeb of the week competition. It was a huge success really, great participation, lots of votes, and exposure to the public of the best dWebsites.
Here’s an example of one such competition.
The dWeb of the week competition is currently on hold because it took too many resources to organize it.
We’re looking for ways to bring it back. If you’d like to help in organizing the competition, please please (please!) contact us on Twitter, our Discord, or contact@esteroids.xyz.
The space needs this competition to grow.
