Supercluster

The Supercluster DApp significantly lowers the barrier for both creators and interested participants to join and help secure an IPFS network. A creator will be able to begin building their network by minting an NFT collection on the Polygon network. Once the collection has been minted, NFTs can either be purchased or airdropped to interested participants.

Once a user has acquired an NFT for the creator's network, the creator can then pin new data to the IPFS network, and send messages with the CIDs to all owners of their NFT. The participants will automatically receive those messages, and either pin or unpin content automatically.

This mechanism will overall allow users to join and help secure private networks on the IPFS infrastructure without having to use the IPFS Cluster CLI tool. Further, content creators can then incentivize users to join their network without introducing a technical barrier of entry for participants.

We believe this is just the start of a set of tools that will greatly lower the user friction for participating in decentralized networks, such as IPFS. Driving user adoption, especially for non-technical users, will ensure that these systems become widespread.

Supercluster DApp provides a user-friendly interface for content creators and consumers (followers) to share content. The DApp performs IPFS pinning/unpinning orchestration using NFTs, XMTP messaging channel, and an IPFS Node (ex. Brave IPFS Companion). The NFTs are built on Polygon utilizing NFT.Storage for organization and efficiency. Valist is used to distribute the Supercluster DApp.

Followers may own NFTs from various creators. Supercluster minted 4 different NFT collections using Polygon and NFT.Storage. Deployment and minting prices on Polygon were very reasonable. NFT.Storage provided a user-friendly way to upload and organize the NFT files.

Compatible supercluster NFTs have a specific attribute, "TBA" (stands for trusted broadcast address), that provides who is the trusted source of truth for a NFT collection. Typically the TBA is the creator’s wallet address. A creator can use their own NFT contract and add the attribute to become a compatible NFT.

Under the hood, the DAPP allows the TBAs to send out messages to the NFT holders. The followers will only listen for messages from TBAs of NFTs that they own. Currently, the DApp is getting the list of NFT holders and NFT metadata from Moralis.

The followers will automatically pin the content in IPFS that is coming from their NFT content creator (TBA).

The XMTP stack allows us to create an encrypted layer 3 communication channel, that's between ethereum like addresses. This provides a secure communication channel between each individual follower and creator. This is used by the DApp to share CIDs to pin/unpin (orchestrate the pinning/unpinning). It also provides the capability for content creators to share encryption keys for premium content with their followers. The encryption feature will be added in a future release.

Valist is used to distribute the Supercluster DApp.

Supercluster DApp utilizes various existing components in web3, IPFS, XMTP, NFT.Storage, Polygon, Valist to build a user friendly application for content creators and followers to share content.

Valist: https://app.valist.io/gov218/supercluster Supercluster GitHub: https://github.com/dysntr/supercluster Supercluster NFT GitHub: https://github.com/dysntr/superclusternft