Point Network

A holistic web3 framework on Solana+Arweave

Comment 4

Alpha

Welcome!

Point Network is the newest holistic web3 framework on Solana, aimed at radical decentralization - only decentralized domains, only decentralized storage, only decentralized identities. Please try us out and send feedback!

Join us at https://t.me/pointnetworkchat for updates and any questions!

Instructions to use Point Network

Please see the steps here: https://pointnetwork.io/alpha

If you experience any issues, or want to post encouraging screenshots when you succeed in running it, join the alpha tester group: https://t.me/pointnetworkalpha

Don't lose your seed phrase you will generate in the Dashboard! When we launch mainnet in a few months, we are going to be very appreciative of the early testers who helped us through the alpha stage. You will always have "Early Adopter" signed badge attached as part of your web3 profile. Might come in handy e.g. for when you want to find a job on any of the DAOs.

Inspiration

Edward Snowden blew the whistle 8 years ago, sacrificing his career and endangering his life, yet the internet is still under mass-surveillance, virtually no security and no privacy, and big tech shamelessly dominating public discourse. We want web3.0, and we want it now, but there are still no projects implementing a holistic infrastructure for decentralized internet. If there were, we would have used them instead, but here we are. We believe we got closer to this Holy Grail and figured out the first version of the holistic web3 architecture, but you be the judge. Please, try us out and see for yourself!

What it does

We envision Web3 as a completely separate space from Web2, which is why instead of browser extensions, we have a whole Point Browser for accessing web3 (like Tor Browser for accessing Deep Web), where you cannot open facebook.com or ping any web2 server by IP address - the old internet is blocked - you can only open decentralized domains (hosted on Solana), and only the content uploaded onto decentralized storage (Arweave).

This forces developers of "decentralized" apps to stop cheating and use centralized domains that can be taken away or hacked into (like uniswap.org), or spy on users, or store NFTs on AWS, or, worse yet, store there the code for the website itself which can be silently modified by any number of parties. No, for the first time, on Point Network we enforce truly decentralized internet, in every aspect.

We also provide a number of built-in web3 tools we made: ZProxy, Point SDK with JS API, ZHTML backend language, routes files, and a deployer.

Try out several applications that are already working: Point Social (social network on Solana), Point Mail (decentralized end-to-end encrypted email), and others, including the websites users are deploying themselves!

How we built it

We bootstrapped the project with our own money and of some of our friends/connections, and started as a startup earlier this year, hacking away at a local demo. It was initially using Ethereum and we tried to roll out our own storage, but when we learned about the hackathon, we discovered Solana and Arweave, which simplified things a lot in terms of speed, fees and other things, and we've decided that the testnet of the first implementation of decentralized internet must be built on Solana!

What's next for Point Network

Winning the hackathon! To have more resources to accelerate web3.0 ecosystem sprawling on Solana. And then hello token sale and mainnet!

$SOLdiers, please support us! You can help us by becoming an alpha tester, voting for us, and participating in discussions. If we win this, the first completely decentralized internet will be on Solana! Learn more and join us at https://t.me/pointnetworkchat. See you there!

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Updates

posted an update —

October 14, 2021

The day we launched our alpha testnet, and Point Network went level up. It went from a pipe dream to an idea to a prototype running locally, to grueling development phase, and now finally the first alpha with real users, still buggy but already working on other people’s computers. And we can even see them registering and see their posts and comments on Point Social and reply.

All previous projects, while they have laid important work, were useful stepping stones, and produced various web3 tools, were (and still are) part of web2. Uniswap.org can be taken away from Uniswap team at any moment right now, or its contents can be modified without the team’s knowledge (like when bitcoin.org was hacked recently) and you would never know it. Same is true with protonmail.com and others, you never know what files will be served to you the next moment and whether they will be served at all.

Before, when people ask you where web3 is, you would be hard-pressed to find any boundaries that are non-vague. Now, for the first time, we have a completely isolated virtual space that has the right to be called “web 3.0” and “decentralized internet” - decentralized domains, decentralized websites, decentralized storage, decentralized identities, all combined together, with no centralized server to shut down, no censorship capability, no mass surveillance, as “free speech”-free as physics allowing people to speak words into air, with no middleman deciding whether and when to take away this ability.

Web 3.0 has started now. And you are the first users to set a foot in this isolated virtual space today. Big heartwarming welcome and congratulations! Let’s see what awesome things we, together as a community, can now do from this point on.

It’s a cause for celebration, but not for slacking off. There’s a lot of things we will have to improve in the coming days, and especially as we get more users soon. But we will always remember today as a major turning point, and will probably celebrate every Point anniversary on this day, and host yearly PointCon around this time. Thanks everyone, both to first alpha users, and people who are just on the sideline rooting for us! Let’s make this journey we’re starting together as positively impactful on the world as possible

~ Serge

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