All of Your Normie Friends Will Be Able to Control Their Digital Presence — with their Cortex
Web3 will only be mainstream when it is super easy and inexpensive to establish a decentralized online presence. Cortex aims to do this by democratizing access to Web3 with a simple interface, simple domain claims, and inexpensive means to mint, store and transact new kinds of data-oriented assets. To successfully usher in web3, we must build the necessary infrastructure that will make the transition seamless for all our normie friends.
Cortex has various use cases, but a key feature of the platform is that it adds a file system to ENS-like domains. While ENS makes crypto addresses become human-readable and web friendly, Cortex provides these addresses with a full URL context (the part after the “.com/” in web2) such that users can seamlessly create data and even data structures around assets, including pages and asset metadata. Soon anything can become an inexpensive digital asset: a project, a note, a sentiment, even a kiss? That is the future Cortex is building towards.
With Cortex, users will be able to take ownership of their finances, assets, content, identity, projects and more — all within the same platform. It is an ambitious goal that is almost here. Cortex is a platform that can create anything from blog posts, code bases to project plans, to business processes to digital asset inventories, as well as social posts and comments. We are going for extreme flexibility and combined with extreme accessibility.
This is a significant step in achieving true decentralization for anyone and everyone. In web2, most of our digital lives are generally under the control of centralized big tech companies, the GAFAM of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Twitter as well. We aim to make web3 ever more similar and familiar as web2, but with users in control. Crypto and value transfer will be enabled in everything they might want to create or do.
In web2, users don’t have control over their data and can’t completely shape their own narrative or fully determine their identity. They can’t withdraw data and they can easily be locked out. Cortex will empower users to wield true ownership of their digital selves and even hire their own AI to make sense of it — rather than letting a centralized AI do it behind the scenes.
The users will hold the keys to their data. Cortex in that sense is just a wallet and a wiki. What users decide to put in the wiki, they will control with the keys. Cortex doesn’t control the wiki contents of the wallet any more than Metamask controls your coins.
Essentially, this means that users can fully take their businesses online without fear of having their data subject to the authority of a centralized body. You don’t have to conduct your businesses or activities in different parts with some being online, others offline, and some in private or public. You can control the channels and only post publicly what you choose. The channels create a way to do public/private linking in the same environment. This channel grants specific access to the notes you’ve created, and you can determine who to share that access with accordingly.
In the second generation, Cortex will also enable new ways to collaborate seamlessly. The platform is designed with Git-like features that make it convenient to collaborate with timestamps and forking. This way, when users make changes to their notes, people can receive notification updates of those changes. There will also be a track record of all changes without the cost of blockchain transactions and without changing the URL (but the history will still be available).
Cortex has carefully designed its platform for beginners and experts alike. ENS is great, but it still requires fairly advanced tech knowledge to set it up. With Cortex, you will require no special skills to get started with curating your personal space on Cortex and building your digital kingdom. Making ownership and creation of a web3 infrastructure, Cortex aims to make it simple for anyone to fully maximize web3. As we lower the costs of token creation, storage, organization and transaction, we’ll see a number of use cases that are currently not available. This will be the subject of the next post.
