Joshua

Hello everyone,

2022 was a turbulent year, with many dramatic events happening in the world of Web3, cryptocurrency, and beyond. It has been a challenging time, and I am grateful for those who have been with us.

Despite the challenges of the larger environment, RSS3 achieved many milestones in 2022. Our network received over 1.4 billion requests, with over 400 million requests in December alone, a 20,000% increase compared to December of the previous year. As a result, RSS3 has become the de facto leading Web3 social data provider.

We are still in the early stages of the Open Web3, especially when it comes to social and content. While the value provided to social users by the entire ecosystem is still limited, the persistence, censorship resistance, monetization, and trust brought by decentralized technologies will bring immense benefits to users of the next generation of the internet.

The way humans create information in the digital world has been gradually changing, giving us the opportunity to become an information distribution protocol to facilitate its flow. Different types of information created through various protocols will flourish in the near future, and our goal is to standardize and distribute them through fully decentralized technologies to balance coverage, efficiency, and privacy. While there are risks, actively exploring more distribution channels will enable us to create more significant value propositions that previous generations of information distributors like Google and ByteDance could not achieve.

Heading towards the Open Web#

While many still refer to the next generation of the internet as "Web3," I believe "Open Web" more accurately describes what we are building. The internet started with open protocols, but as it gained widespread adoption, it lost some of its openness and freedom. Now that we have seen its negative aspects, we are striving to build something better.

This new network is fundamentally different from previous networks, which means the methods for achieving mass adoption must also be different. For ordinary users, it is more challenging to feel the "underlying decentralized technology" than to feel "lower costs," "higher efficiency," or "better interactions." This revolution is more like a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy rather than a transition from Web1 to Web2. While builders can create incentives for users to join, understanding and believing in the benefits of this new technology are crucial for its long-term success for the entire society.

At RSS3, we believe that our value will ultimately depend on our contribution to the new open network. This will depend on how we help information flow throughout the ecosystem and ultimately serve more users and benefit them. The more users we directly or indirectly serve through the RSS3 network, the higher its efficiency in terms of coverage, speed, accuracy, and cost.

This belief will guide most of the decisions made by the foundation and core contributors. It also sets us apart in terms of the technology, community, and culture we aim to build. As the development of the Open Web is still in its early stages, focusing on our core values may lead us to make decisions that are radically different from most projects:

• Instead of speculating for short-term gains, we will continue to focus on acquiring genuine developers and users at the right time.
• We will continue to focus on information distribution and not engage in unrelated applications seeking short-term user numbers.
• We will take bigger bets on technologies that can significantly improve the efficiency of information flow when the time is right.
• We will be more proactive in building user-facing applications, which will help us gain firsthand user feedback.
• In rare cases where serving users conflicts with serving the Open Web, we will prioritize the latter because we believe they will ultimately converge in the long term.
• We will continue to seek more contributors to the project, especially those who share our vision of the open network, and achieve this through foundation hiring, community incentives, hackathons, and future bounties.

We recognize that the path to building a successful open network is not smooth and will encounter challenges and setbacks along the way. However, we are committed to staying focused on our vision and making the maximum contribution to the bright future of the network.

Evolution of Information Distribution#

Information distribution involves the creation, storage, transmission, and consumption of information. Transmission refers to the process of delivering information to the consumer. From the user's perspective, it helps them find the information they are looking for, and from the information's perspective, it helps guide the information to where it can be consumed most effectively by users.

While many projects in the crypto industry leverage on-chain data to provide financial and transaction insights, RSS3 has a much broader scope, offering more informational and social use cases. Although still immature compared to its financial origins, social and content-related protocols and applications have taken a significant step forward in recent years. As the first and best propagation protocol, RSS3 has had the privilege of achieving multiple accomplishments in 2022, including but not limited to:

• A 20,000% increase in monthly API usage (approximately 400 million requests in December 2022 compared to 2 million requests in December 2021), with a total of over 1.4 billion requests throughout the year.
• The launch of $RSS3 through the Copper LBP in February.
• Network evolution from PreNode to PreGod, significantly improving network efficiency.
• Support, adaptation, and collaboration with projects such as ZKSync, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Fantom, Lens, Farcaster, and unstoppable domains.
• The launch of rss3.io as a direct user entry point.

With these milestones, we are excited to enter the next stage, and our goal is to see RSS3 continue to develop in the following areas:

• Information coverage: In 2022, RSS3 expanded beyond unstructured information and began supporting structured information with the introduction of PreGod. Currently, it supports most EVM-compatible chains and major decentralized storage networks. In the future, we will explore the possibility of supporting non-EVM chains and other open social protocols.
• Distribution channels: A chronologically arranged human-readable information flow is a good start. RSS3 has always been the best provider for this channel, but we need more advanced channels to continuously improve the efficiency of information flow. This includes verified channels such as search and privacy-preserving algorithms, as well as new and unique channels specific to the open network.
• Decentralization: RSS3 is also evolving towards decentralization, starting with the indexer SN to establish a relatively stable circulation before moving on to the next steps.

While nothing is set in stone, these directions will be the long-term goals for RSS3's development, and each of them will contribute to the values mentioned above.

Hello, 2023#

We operate in a fast-paced ecosystem, making it difficult to make precise plans. However, we have set goals for the upcoming year, 2023, which will help us get closer to our ultimate goal:

1. RSS3 brand upgrade: As RSS3 becomes more powerful, we realize the need to update the overall brand to better support future project updates.
2. Launch the first comprehensive search engine for the open network: The new open network has never had a comprehensive search engine. While most "search engines" work well within specific domains (such as NFTs, tokens, or single social protocols), we need to provide a more convenient and unified entry point for Open Web users. This is a bold move that will take information dissemination to the next level.
3. Introduce a separate cross-network scan: As part of the brand upgrade, we will position rss3.io as the entry point for the entire RSS3 ecosystem, so the current scan will be upgraded and renamed.
4. API upgrade for address statistics and token-gated access: Balancing decentralization, anonymity (privacy), and efficiency is challenging. During the phase when the foundation has been operating nodes, we have kept the API completely free and without any gating. In the new year, we plan to implement a new API logic that results in "we know how much you used, we know how much you paid, we don't know who you are" (similar to how Bitcoin processes transactions).
5. Reform of the current token economy: As the project progresses, we believe we need a more active token economy to drive the project's development. While all of these are subject to governance proposals, if approved, API usage will lead to token deflation. We also expect different levels of token integration for the new search engine and scan, as well as improved staking logic and more proactive governance proposals.
6. Integrated long-term partnerships: For the flourishing of RSS3, we need strong partnerships that go beyond Twitter announcements or joint activities and involve a significant number of product integrations, either as part of the information we cover or as applications that leverage such information. We will actively seek and establish such partnerships to help RSS3 grow.

We have never seen so much unauthorized information being created in the digital world in history. Although still small compared to walled garden information, the quantity is growing rapidly, and without a doubt, the next era belongs to the Open Web.

2022 was challenging, but RSS3 is stronger than ever.

Joshua with the RSS3 Foundation