Thoughts on What it Means to Own Your Digital Kingdom
As we transition from Web2 to Web3 and begin to integrate digital assets into almost everything, organization and utility will become ever more important. Today, most of of our digital kingdoms are held by central authorities. If we want to create a truly decentralized system where people can have a meaningful presence that’s owned by the, we need new ways to make it simple and easy to create, hold and transact around digital assets. The benefits are endless.
One way we have lost control in Web2 is the algorithms. By and large we don’t control what information we see. The algorithms at Facebook, Google and Twitter do. We want to make Cortex algorithm-free, essentially. It’s your data, so why not hire an algorithm that works best for you? That’s the future we are shooting towards.
To start down this path, one of the many things Cortex does is to provide you with a means to control what you see and those who see what you post. On most social platforms today, users can post a wide range of things and access content as they desire. But there’s little control on how to decide on the content in your space. You can’t adequately filter your timeline.
Then, it becomes hard to discern fact from fiction. From a media perspective, even with fact-checkers, this issue is still not yet completely addressed since there’s a wide variety of editorial control. But with Cortex, you can make your content accessible to only those you trust. In the same manner, you can decide the content you see and also create a system of trusted friends and users. You own the data, you own the relationships (even if you can’t own facts, so they say.)
When everything has crypto built in, you can start to see a history of everything and anything and our hope is that will bring us closer to an objective truth. To this end, Cortex seeks to marry blockchain and the internet in a fundamental way. Wallet browser extensions cannot be the end state of blockchain and web integration. So, think about Cortex as a place where each user has a human-readable address that doubles as their wallets for sending and receiving digital assets as well as producing and visualizing content.
In addition, our digital kingdoms must be accessible both technically and financially. We must build a future where all our normie friends don’t need technical expertise to feel they are a part of the ecosystem, they can use normal addresses like twitter handles and email addresses. Leveraging the butterfly protocol, Cortex creates a system where users can access multiple resources, meaning irrespective of what you do — blog, crypto, NFTs, and more — all will be tied into one single domain with easy linking.
Cortex is being built on Polygon, so this means you don’t incur high costs as Polygon’s fees are generally pennies. Executing transactions here comes at a low cost, which is targeted at ensuring that access to web3 is thoroughly democratized and as many users as possible can own their narrative, their coins, their relationships, their data, and a bit more of their future.
Finally, digital kingdoms need effective transportation between them so that collaboration is easier, and access is wider. The second generation of Cortex will feature Git-like features that leverage forking and time-stamp to ensure users can seamlessly collaborate.
This infrastructure Cortex is building will represent a new way to interact. Cortex will serve as an all-in-one place for you to maximize web3. From note-taking to token transfers, content control to collaboration, Cortex wants to help users co-build the future of web3 with low costs to open up new uses. Join us!
