What Makes Cortex Unique?

Everything you create can now have a unique home in crypto space.

Cortex app is a decentralized note-taking and publishing app that’s built on a crypto wallet. For starters, this allows you to publish to web3 for very little cost, organize tokens and digital assets easily, and prove what’s yours in new situations.

This is a nice start, but there is so much more. Cortex is an app that allows for endless new ways to mix: a) location (like a web address) on a decentralized web (and DNS), with b) value as in digital assets and tokens, and with c) content and data with a decentralized back end. There is a massive amount of power to unpack in how location, value and content will be mixed, but let’s start simply. Here are some core things that make Cortex unique, even revolutionary, for a crypto web.

1. Own your data. Because it is decentralized, you choose where your notes and data live. Your notes don’t live on a Cortex server somewhere. The default location will live will be IPFS, but you will eventually be able to store your notes anywhere you choose, locally, AWS or anywhere. No third party can access your notes, not even Cortex.
2. Decentralized domains. We are part of the Bproto Innovation Fund that provides support to companies building on the Butterfly Protocol Decentralized DNS. The DNS is run by a smart contract where each domain is an NFT, actually a tree of NFTs. Within Cortex, you’ll be able to establish a domain that also becomes your identity, your messaging, and a simple way to reference all of your digital assets with human-readable names. Say Alice wants to share her immunization record. She has secured the “alice” domain. Within Cortex her record could be at “alice.immunizations” and if she want to publish it on the web, she can publish decentralized at “alice.crtx/immunizations” and/or on the legacy web at “alice.crtx.app/immunizations” . When you combine with #1, owning your data, you get a way to publish and navigate in a completely decentralized environment.
3. Each page can store content and assets. Each page you create will have an address that gives the location to access the document, like a normal URL. But perhaps the most unique part of Cortex is that the address also helps define a public/private key pair, which can give a valid crypto address for each page as well. That means each page is associated with all sorts of value. You could hold NFTs or other tokens at this same address. You could receive tokens for pages you publish. You can also organize your NFTs to be used in new ways at those same addresses and associate them with content.
4. New ways of linking and sharing. The way the keys and names are created involves a concept called channels. Channels create private or public spaces for you notes and content, so there’s a public/private/group context. In addition, when you create a link to a new page, you are also linking keys. The keys have an organization in a hierarchy, like a file system. These new structure give a whole new way to organize but also connect around crypto assets that you can store, reference and link at these addresses.
5. Simple publishing. Because notes are in familiar markdown, it make it easy to publish nice looking pages.
6. Navigate on Web3. Cortex doesn’t just let you create notes and pages, it’s also a browser that lets you find relevant content.

That’s just a start. We’re working on plenty of new features around collaboration that will make Cortex an indispensable tool for publishing, collaborating, and generating value around content.

Make sure to join us on at crtx.app, Telegram, YouTube (demo videos), Discord and Twitter to stay up to date!

For a long-form discussion, check out this great podcast with Brad Nickel, Leonard Kish and Josh Robinson at Mission:DeFi!