Finding Peace in Your Digital Kingdom
or Building on Polygon to Bring Crypto Mainstream
Crypto has grown to become a trillion-dollar force. Yet despite achieving a relatively large scale in terms of financial volume, the sector is yet to be adopted on a large scale in terms of users. Even if estimates are correct at about 300 million worldwide users, that’s still a small percentage, less than 5%. These may be significant overestimates as most crypto users have multiple accounts.
Some of the key factors impeding widespread adoption are costs, integrations and accessibility. We are working to improve all of them, and that’s why we’re launching on Polygon. We believe you can own your digital kingdom, in peace. But you won’t pay a fortune.
NFTs have introduced a lot of people to crypto, and we’ll see even more of this. NFTs are just the beginning of combining data (like jpegs) and crypto. Cortex is driving towards a future where the things we now take for granted online, like posting, commenting and liking, are tokenized and crypto-enabled and have full ownership and a full history. But that requires ultra-low costs.
Nobody will pay a $20, much less $100, transaction fee to send a normal message or update a post. To get to deep tokenization of what we do, and the benefits of personalizing and memorializing online activities, we need to bring costs down significantly.
Even Vitalik agrees.
Polygon allows us to start the move into wider use cases for creating and trading new kinds of digital assets. It will keep on-chain transactions near the cost of pennies rather than dollars.
Another factor is integration. Because web3 hasn’t completely integrated crypto into web2 or across chains, it can be a bit challenging to build in ways web2 users are used to. Cortex will leverage Butterfly Protocol to provide account URLs where every domain will be an NFT. Butterfly is currently active on Ethereum, so we’ll be extending to Polygon that will add some nice cross-chain features and keep domain and NFT minting costs low, when needed.
As far as accessibility goes, every URL in Cortex is also a crypto address down to the file level, bringing web2 and web3 together in a more coherent and familiar way. Crypto addresses can work just like familiar URLs. You can own your property (web address), your tokens (crypto address) and your data at that address all in one coherent decentralized bundle. The crypto is built into the Cortex web. And because most things can happen and be authenticated off chain, Cortex builds crypto into everything at low cost. And again, for on chain transactions, we have Polygon transactions for pennies.
Polygon is quickly emerging as a multi-chain system designed to empower developers, like us. Look at the history of the internet and crypto, and you’ll see the industry go where the developers go. They are the ones that open up new use cases and the functionality people crave. Polygon’s compatibility with Ethereum makes for easy bridging and simple integration with Ethereum without high gas fees.
Cortex will be a note-taking application and a new kind of browser that makes web3 accessible for anyone, abstracting away the crypto complexity, providing a platform with an efficient data structure, provable self-sovereign identities at low cost for updates, publishing and more. This will open up all the benefits of decentralization to everyday users. Users will be able to use this data framework to create, search, collaborate, and publish all in one decentralized web without the need for a central authority. A distributed identity, a DID, with data that will allow people to receive incentives for what they create, and what they own. Get paid directly for what you do. Get access for what you’ve collected.
With low costs, security, true ownership, privacy, authenticity, and more — all without the prohibitive costs that hinder accessibility, Cortex on Polygon will open the window to numerous use cases for a web that has crypto at its core. We believe this will finally help bring crypto fully mainstream.
