Seers

We want to create decentralised societies and enable the world to participate in the crypto revolution.

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Inspiration/Summary

Seers is a decentralised, open source and permissionless social network framework, currently based on Twitter, that incorporates crypto primitives natively.

We previously built a prediction market dapp and saw the need to make it more social. This hackathon gave us the perfect opportunity to create a social network that natively incorporates prediction markets.

After incorporating prediction markets and related features like bets, we are already thinking to incorporate other crypto primitives like NFTs and DAOs. This could create a network of community based social dapps that share the same protocol.

History

We started in April 2022 developing a prediction market smart contract, based on a AMM, on top of the Internet Computer. We quickly gain hundreds of users and saw the exciting of the community placing bets on topics as diverse as crypto token prices, football matches, and the Queen Elizabeth.

While investigating more about prediction markets we came across an article saying something like "prediction markets are not going to reach adoption unless the user doesn't know they are using them". After reaching ourselves a plateau, it felt quite true. But we also think it applies to all crypto.

Right now, most crypto dapps, what we like to call crypto primitives (AMM, Prediction Markets, NFTs marketplaces), can be accessed only by advanced users through un-intuitive interfaces and therefore are far from being integrated into our social life.

In order to integrate crypto into our social life and to reach mass adoption, a starting point could then be to try to integrate these crypto primitives into our current social networks. If something can be integrated into a social network, like a simple tweet, it can become viral.

Imagine if a prediction market, asking a question like "What will be the max price of BTC in 2022?" could fit in the size of a simple tweet. Then users could share them, comment on them, like them, quote them, like they do with normal tweets. Moreover, since it's after all a prediction market, users could be able to bet on them by simple clicking a button on the tweet. In this way a prediction market (post) can become viral and crypto massive adoption has better chances.

Twitter already has something similar to prediction markets in the shape of polls, so we have the idea of using the polls interface to insert prediction markets into the social medium.

Ultimately, it might be possible to integrate in a similar way other crypto primitives, like NFTs marketplaces, DAOs. We want to re-think from first principles how a social network with crypto natively enabled should look like.

By building a social network like Twitter that incorporates all main crypto primitives we will be one step closer to building a decentralised society. The end goal is to give power back to communities and this could be a way to get there.

What it does

For this hackathon we implemented all the social network features:

  • Profiles with posts.
  • Create simple tweets.
  • Likes, retweet, comment.
  • Implement threads.
  • Post a picture.
  • Create prediction markets using UI/UX similar to polls in Twitter.
  • Create 1 to 1 bets using UI/UX similar to polls in Twitter.
  • Implement ICP as collateral in prediction markets and bets.
  • Send ICP to another user by handle.

How we built it

In terms of languages, we're using Motoko and Svelte (Javascript). The architecture is for the moment one single canister, but we envision an architecture with as much as one smart contract per community or user.

Challenges we ran into

  • Figuring out how Twitter works behind the scenes.
  • Integrating ICP in an efficient and secure way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having (almost) built Twitter + Prediction Markets + Bets in just a few weeks :) .

What we learned

  • Many things about UI/UX of Twitter.
  • We gain more knowledge about the Motoko language and the Internet Computer.

What's next for Seers

In general we will keep adding features, getting user feedback, iterating and following our vision of creating decentralised societies.

In the near term we need to continue improving UI/UX and completing the features part of the Twitter + Prediction Markets experience. Then we will start adding other crypto primitives, decentralising and making the architecture more robust and stable. The goal is to end with a web3 social network framework where any user can customise and own its social network experience.

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