msgs.eth is a protocol that allows you to communicate on the blockchain. It became necessary that the atlas corporation would need to reach out and communicate to ethereum addresses in which no information was known as to the identity of some addresses. how do you reach an address with a msg? msgs.eth is one expression of an answer to that question. here’s how it works:
Storage Contract
tl;dr you send someone an nft. the nft can be thought of as a window into a “storage contract” currently housed on polygon to leverage near-gasless transactions. more on the nft contract later. the storage contract stores a status which can be updated as often as the owner of an address would like down to the block which on poly is 2-5 seconds at the time of writing. so essentially you have a mapping of address to string (“status”) which can be updated, but read from the blockchain at any point in time. you might even index the blockchain to show updates to the value of your storage contract through time.
there is also the native feature of censorship resistance that you get by putting your msgs on the blockchain. as the site says, there’s going to be a whole bunch of proof of work/stake/authority blocks piled on top of your msgs so its not going to be easy to censor your msg.
we’re also certainly not the first to create a true blockchain-based social network. we were deeply inspired by memo.cash, a bitcoin cash based dApp. say what you will about BCH, the cheap block storage allows for a pretty interesting paradigm.
storage contract updates aren’t payable, they’re just poly gas. our hunch is that the tokenomics will work out that if you’re updating your msg often enough with something noteworthy to say others may mint tokens against your address to view your stream of updates which would provide funds for the gas for the updates…
the Season 1 Token Contract
the season 1 token contract is an atlas corporation 721 contract which creates tokens (nfts) pointed at an ethereum address. the ethereum address is used to reference the storage contract we just talked about above – it reads the “status” from the contract and uses it to construct an image on the fly.
the season 1 contract creates msgs tokens on polygon. these msgs are minted with a pseudo-randomly generated dna. this dna is used to define its traits – currently background, font, font color – which will not change from msg to msg. the same traits will be used to render each of the address’s msgs deployed to the storage contract. varying rarities were assigned to each of the trait categories and values.
so when you (or opensea or our website or whatever you’re using to view your poly nft) calls out to get the image for your token, you’re going to see an image built from:
- the latest status of the address the token is pointed at on the storage contract
- same bg – using the msg dna
- same font & font color – also determined by the msg dna
- a printout of the the address the token is pointed at on the storage contract (who’s doin the talking)
- the time of last update
season 1 tokenomics are set that for each token minted against your address, you get 50% of the proceeds of the sale. tokens are currently priced at 1 matic, so 1/2 a matic gets held in escrow (on the msgs 721 contract) against your address every time someone mints a window pointed at your “voice”. When you see an alert that you’ve made money, that button is a legit way to claim any of this matic you might have made from others wanting to hear what you have to say, pulling it out of the msgs 721 contract.
if you don’t want to trust us and the websites, go to the season 1 msgs contract on etherscan which is verified so you can call the “16. withdraw payments” function using your address and receive the rewards that way if you see the banner. claiming on our website is purely for convenience and is not required to claim your rewards.
also note that anyone can trigger the withdraw payments against your address if there’s someone out there magnanimous enough to cover your gas fees for you.
season 1? does that imply future seasons?
definitely. future seasons will likely be aimed around collabs and web3 innovation. we have some ideas but good ideas can come from anyone. If you’re an artist or a builder that wants to get involved hit us up. send a msg lol
why is it msgs.eth and not…?
because ens is on ethereum and that deserves to be the url. msgs.eth.link currently reroutes to our subdivision Decentralandalytics’ public website to make use of our beast of a server which is currently handling the load of generates all of your images.
how do I use this?
up to you. you can send tokens to addresses you have something to say to, and then update your status to have your msg rendered. maybe you collect tokens of a bunch of people who talk often so you have a slate of “gms” every morning or whatever.
if you have something to say maybe lots of people are minting your tokens to read it in their personally curated “feed” which would – in season one at least – fund your msg spreading. It also helps that there is no way to delete the msg but as it’s figuratively etched into the blockchain we’re hoping users will choose their msgs carefully.
get out the msg.
