Project Name: Fabstir Web3 Platform
By Jules Lai (Founder and Chief Technology Officer)
Website landing page
Purpose
The great promise of Web3 is of a power shift away from the control of big corporations towards the hands of the people. Some of the criticisms of Web2 include the centralisation of platforms owned by big tech who not only own the network but all the content created; in many cases, contributed freely by the platform users. Whilst their private data is harvested to allow targeted ads to be delivered, generating vast amount of revenue for the platform owners.
Web3 is touted to solve these problems via decentralisation, blockchain technologies and token-based economies; being built by, operated and owned by its users. But will we build the Web3 applications that can wrestle control away from the big corps.? Will we have the courage and longtermism? Here, we present our solution…
Fabstir is a Web3 platform for e-commerce, video and audio streaming, social media and governance for a fairer society. Borne out of the UK government’s introduction of IR35 that literally shutdown vast sectors of entrepreneurship, Spotify’s and the big rights holders who keep 70% income from every artist creation, and the film industry’s walled gardens with locked-in distribution deals that drive out creative and cultural innovation in favour of mega franchises. I was faced with all these challenges and decided to develop a solution platform for the people, myself and the creative industry.
Fabstir has built-in extensive social media features with no data mining privacy invasion for targeted ads found on Web2 social media apps. Your data is your own! All messages run on the GUN decentralised database and p2p graph network. Content creators have free reign to demonstrate value and build their own communities around their work, and provide a richer, fuller more diverse experience.
Fabstir gives back power to the people. Its decentralisation means that creators own their work, to reverse power away from tech conglomerates and enjoy complete control to monetarise and receive a majority of the income less our platform fee. Creators can run their business on our platform as there are easy options to create DAOs, even to create proposals to expand functionality as Fabstir uses Diamond EIP-2535 standard for powerful upgrade functionality. Creators get back their digital life and more!
Fabstir enables a creator economy with support of decentralised subscription services, tipping, undercollateralised loans, donations, fractionalisation and tokenisation of content, as well as digital asset sales via NFTs and secondary markets. Creators are able to tokenise their content and their business to invite community investment so that everyone benefits for a fairer society.
Fabstir uses top-level encryption, hashing and signatures so that prying eyes cannot break-in and steal personal data to control you, unless you wish to make it public. This includes video/audio encryption and encryption of messages to prevent surveillance.
Fabstir allows business to be conducted world-wide without borders, without centralised interference and walled garden intermediaries with its use of ERC-20 tokens such as ETH, BTC and USDC, plus NFTs ERC-721 and ERC-1155. Transactions run on top of an EVM compatible blockchain with low gas fees. With little cost for entry for anyone to setup a DAO on Fabstir, there will be true competition and a level playing field for all!
Fabstir does away with centralised censorship. Instead, its solution is to provide community censorship where elected members (soulbound token holders) are given the power to self-regulate to remove other members from the group. Actions are kept transparent via the blockchain.
These are but some of the features that Fabstir has implemented and working today. For more information, please check out our whitepaper at fabstir.com
Development history
Previously, before becoming founder and CTO of Fabstir, I worked with a financial consultancy as senior programmer and architect of financial modelling software used by clients such as the Bank of England and Lloyds of London. After the unfortunate introduction of IR35 that scuppered the contract industry and curtailed my career, I teamed up with others with the view of developing a Web3 platform. Unfortunately the two other developers, one a web developer and the other an engineering student, found the transition to Web3 programming too difficult and dropped out.
This didn’t stop the project there, instead galvanised me to press on, believing in my own ability. It’s been an incremental process for a year and four months to build an all-in-one solution Web3 platform for creators! Whilst many others talk about the future of Web3, I can look at where we are now and say proudly that I have built the future today with Fabstir.
My team currently consists of one of the original founders (graphic designer) along with myself (CTO), plus a new appointment in business development.
Fabstir uses Sia Skynet
For media storage (video and music), images and NFT metadata, Fabstir uses Skynet for storage and retrieval. The smaller minimum file size of 4MB, the greater redundancy and the Skynet API are all great attributes for our Web3 application storage needs. Fabstir is committed to Skynet’s hosting for both development and as a production ready solution for its storage needs. We aim to drive forward mainstream adoption of our Web3 platform with Sia Skynet storage technology at the heart of it.
How we would use the grant money
The Fabstir platform project is asking for $40,000 USD for six months.
We have on our roadmap initially to host a world, film, music and animation festival for short films. I have in the past hosted around twenty short film in-person screening events in London (UK) through my film industry events company Non-Multiplex Cinema for over a decade. The on-line and in-person festival will give focus and credence to delivery of an MVP product that will be stress tested and garner invaluable feedback from real life users as well as generate goodwill towards Web3 in the media industry. To achieve this, Fabstir will require funds for audit of its Solidity smart contracts, marketing of its platform and the festival exposure, plus pay myself and hire an outsourced specialist company to help with deployment and testing. The latter to which we have already interviewed and agreed initial terms with.
In this time period, we can provide valuable feedback on the use of Sia as a media streaming storage platform as well as bring in new business. It will be also an opportunity to fine-tune next generation Web3 concepts, like the trust layer soulbound tokens, for use in real scenarios.
We also believe that a marketing campaign targeted towards the film industry should spark additional interest for Sia from parties wishing to backup/transfer their media content onto a safer decentralised platform. From my dealings, a lot of movie production and post-production houses have not heard of Sia and its capabilities.
In summary, the funds are for a leg up from where we are now, i.e. from a fully working prototype to one deployed onto an EVM layer 2 blockchain and used by real users. The expected timespan required would be 5-6 months. We would welcome the opportunity to work with the Sia Foundation.
Collaboration with Lume
We share the same vision with Derrick Hammer from Lume, and would love the opportunity to work together to create a Web3 nirvana where anyone can conduct business without intermediaries, walled gardens and borders to enjoy the fruits of a fairer, freer and prosperous society. Without interference from centralised control of tech corporations and without surveillance from governments, social media and advertising companies. To prosper the human race for this generation and the next!