A Letter Before Open
Hi! It’s Joshua here. If you are reading this, I assume you are either a core contributor, a backer, or an important partner of a related project.
There is something that we have been working on for almost a year, and I’d like to share a bit about it. Before we start, please make sure that everything is still confidential and subject to changes before an official announcement - so please keep this between us.
TLDR; we are stepping beyond Web3 to offer information abstraction and compute abstraction to a broader audience. RSS3* will merge with RSSHub**, Open Information Initiative, and several other crucial technical modules into a new project called Open.
Some elaborations:
Over the past several years, RSS3 has done well as the open information layer of Web3 - but it doesn’t allow us to achieve all what we want. And the reason is simple, just as how Google grew with the growth of webpage information, RSS3 relies on the growth of information within the Web3 definition - and the quality and quantity of such information hasn’t grown as fast for ecosystem applications to compete against centralized information for massive adoption. Yes, there have been valuable applications and services built around the current infrastructure, and yes, information within Web3 is and will keep growing, but to provide enough resource for open web developers to compete with centralized giants, it still has a long way. Meanwhile, websites, existing open protocols (e.g. RSS w/ 200m+ users & ActivityPub w/ 130m+ MAU), and some centralized platforms (e.g. Youtube w/ 4bn+ videos & Telegram) that are open to permissionless access, are all forces we need to unite - and Open will be doing this through information abstraction (Actually ecosystem application Follow is already demonstrating this).
Meanwhile, the full potential of information abstraction cannot be realized without compute. We are living in an age where AI and information technology are penetrating into every important aspect of our lives. Such a transition in human society has made it necessary for transparent and verifiable compute to emerge. Blockchain is a good example for such computing, but the architectures of blockchains limits the capability of such compute. Therefore, Open will come with a module called OVM which extends existing blockchain virtual machines like EVM to offer verifiable high performance computing without sacrificing the open and decentralized nature or having developers leaving their familiar language or environment. Right now Ethereum is struggling for simple tasks as calculating the value of Pi. Bridging external verifiable compute will make it possible for AI modeling and physical simulations.
As a merger, Open is granted with a much bigger ecosystem facing a much broader audience. In addition to communities within Web3, Open will have access to up to 300 million existing open protocol users, and offer them better experience and monetization with modern open technologies. Such a merge also makes it possible for Open to explore on more incentivization mechanisms to better structure a community-owned Internet.
The world of Web3 needs users outside of this existing community much more than ever, and we sure should make that happen.
And in a time where privately controlled and closed source intelligence is the focus of future information technology, we believe otherwise.
These can only be proven with real world users, revenue, and developer adoption, and we are dedicated to make it happen.
To learn more about Open, visit
https://www.notion.so/rss3/Open-One-Pager-70794f2e19d64ba886418961da941669?pvs=4
*RSS3: founded in 2021, RSS3 is the largest information network in Web3 with over 80 nodes covering over 2 billion activities. It operates a blockchain, RSS3 VSL, with its token $RSS3.
**RSSHub: started in 2018, RSSHub is the largest RSS network with over 5,000 instances serving over 255k MAUs. RSSHub has over 1,000 contributors (vs 500+ for Solana).
