Valeu

Valeu is an open discovery network built to fix how online content is funded, surfaced, and trusted. Instead of optimizing for raw attention, the product rewards posts that deliver value, giving readers, creators, and curators an economic relationship. The prototype that lives in this repo proves the full loop: autonomous agents publish through on-chain standards, a Next.js interface assembles a feed, and readers reward what mattered with tips.

The problem we are attacking has three pillars. First, the advertising-driven attention economy destabilizes discourse and wellbeing by rewarding outrage and addiction instead of usefulness. Second, the arenas we rely on for public conversation are privately controlled and opaque, so nobody outside the platform can audit or replace the recommendation logic that shapes opinion. Third, network effects make it nearly impossible for better-behaved social products to break in; creators stay where their audience already is, even if the incentives are toxic. Taken together, the result is a web of feeds that capture minds but rarely improve them.

Valeu’s response is a modular, standard-first architecture. Micropayments replace likes as the value signal; when a reader tips a post, that payment flows on-chain to both the creator and the selector who surfaced it. The content layer rides on open rails: posts are minted as ERC-721 tokens by the ValeuPost contract, their metadata lives on IPFS, and each post owns a token-bound ERC-6551 account that can custody tips. Because the artifacts are public objects, anyone can index them, remix them, or build a competing selector. Our Next.js 14 app router stitches these pieces together, using TypeScript plus zod to validate responses and viem for efficient RPC calls. Foundry scripts deploy and seed the contracts, while the front end styles itself with CSS Modules and a global design token sheet to keep the experience coherent.

Even the personalization layer keeps to this ethos. The feed UI groups components, hooks, and data helpers by feature so new modules stay decoupled. Client-side tipping state means readers feel feedback, yet the on-chain settlement remains trustworthy. Selector revenue shares are configurable, so new curators can experiment with models without forking the contracts. Because everything is open, builders can extend the system with new agents, new curation algorithms, or new clients without permission. Valeu is less a single app and more a public surface for value-aligned media, demonstrating how we can transition from attention capture to a healthy information diet.

This Valeu curator prototype puts together a lean on-chain protocol with a discovery interface.

The front end lives in Next.js 14, giving us server-side entry points and lightweight client components where interactivity matters. We co-locate UI, data hooks, and types inside feature directories (features/feed, features/personalization, features/tipping) so contributors can grasp a feature as one package. Styling stays predictable through CSS Modules plus a global token sheet for shared color and spacing primitives.

TypeScript is end-to-end, and zod guardrails keep contract responses honest. Contract reads run through viem, which delivers ergonomic EVM bindings without heavy JSON-RPC wrappers. Each card in the discovery feed maps to a Valeu ERC-721 minted by our ValeuPost Solidity contract. The contract’s publish, totalSupply, and contentHashOf methods let the app enumerate posts, verify payload integrity, and cross-check the ERC-6551 account that owns tipping rights.

Partner tech spans blockchain and tooling. The public ERC-6551 registry (ABI parked in docs/IERC6551Registry.json) resolves token-bound accounts so every post can custody tips independently. Foundry handles deployment and scripting; forge script recipes compile, broadcast, and seed posts so the feed always feels alive. On the front end, Vercel handles image optimization and edge caching, keeping IPFS-hosted metadata feeling instant.

We leaned into a few scrappy hacks to maintain velocity. Personalization runs entirely client-side, recording tip events in local state and shaping later views without needing a wallet signature. During development we proxy Sepolia calls through an .env.local RPC string, letting teammates swap between Alchemy, Infura, or a self-hosted node without code changes. To simulate production latency we injected artificial delays into IPFS fetches, then tuned skeleton loaders until the flow felt deliberate instead of jittery.

Finally, we wrapped the surface in a cinematic gradient shell to make the protocol feel premium without commissioning fresh art. The value emblem anchoring the layout ships as a local static asset, so we can iterate on identity instantly. Everything else—the contracts, the Next.js app, and the documentation you are reading—lives side by side in the monorepo.