Title
Fractopus: A complex organism evolving from the single cells of the internet
Team member names
Handuo & Chao
Short Summary of Your Improvement Idea
Fractopus is an on-chain protocol enabling URIs to create interconnections through percentage allocations. It aims to form an internet-scale graph established by each URI owner in a peer-to-peer way. Such interconnections appear when the owner of a URI addresses other URIs as its sources and allocates a share percentage for each of them. (For example, URIa shares 30% with URIb and 20% with URIc with the rest kept to itself.)
Fractopus protocol contains the following three fields:
“p": “fractopus”
“uri”: “URI”
“src”:[{“uri”:“URI”,“shr”:“Percentage”}]
What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance?
To make content on the internet interconnected, there were attempts since 70 years ago such as Ted Nelson’s “Project Xanadu”, “Webring”, “Wikipedia”, and most recently “Notion”.
What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
We believe the previous attempts were like blockchain without cryptocurrency. We aim to improve by implementing an incentive layer for people to not only interconnect their content but also monetize these interconnections to lead to mass adoption.
What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol?
We first see that interconnecting content is a common behavior through the use of hyperlinks. Content interconnection is not a foreign idea, but monetizing it is.
To examine it further, we created a publishing platform called “Copus” where people can branch from each other’s work. The branches can share a percentage of their future revenue with their sources in exchange for exposure from the sources. We found that many interconnections as such are made after initial tests with around 500 people. People often interconnect their content when they are inspired and want to address their inspirations. We saw an “aha moment” in many user testing sessions when people received revenue streams from their branches.
In what form will you prototype your improvement idea?
For SoP, we plan to make the core functions of Fractopus into a browser extension. This will allow content published anywhere else on the internet to join the Fractopus network.
We’ll also provide an SDK so other apps can build on Fractopus as the network is stored on-chain with open-source indexers.
Here is a diagram to showcase the data flow structure:
How will you field-test your improvement idea?
We have done the initial field-testing with Cascad3 users to prove the concept. Next, we will expand the protocol to other platforms and personal websites by building and marketing the Fracotopus browser extension.
Who will be able to judge the quality of your output?
Ted Nelson; Any content creator.
How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea?
We’ll publish the browser extension together with an SDK for professionals on https://www.fractopus.net/ (a domain we own).
To evangelize the protocol is to evangelize the browser extension.
The browser extension allows users to connect any URI to the revenue-sharing network as long as they have access to a text input field on a URI. We can imagine a tweet, a YouTube video, or a personal website page connecting to our protocol through the browser extension so others can address them as sources for their posts.
This feature makes it best to be promoted through influencer marketing. An influencer’s post can trigger many posts and comments from others. Now they are all revenue-sharing branches of the original post.
