Venom Hackathon Winners Spotlight: An Interview With Qupe Protocol

For our final Venom Hackathon Winners Spotlight, we speak to the winner of the Web3, NFT, and Gaming track, Pavlo Khatrachian, from the project Qupe Protocol. Qupe Protocol facilitates the building of Web3 social media platforms on Threaded Virtual Machine (TVM) blockchains. Read on for the full scoop!

Hi Pavlo, congratulations on your winning project! Can you introduce your team and tell us how you started your Web3/blockchain journey?

Our team is called Tonred, a small team with just two developers. We’ve been developing on TVM blockchains since the launch of Everscale, and have now expanded to the Venom Blockchain. Some of our previous projects include EverName service, a bridge with Cardano.

How did you conceptualize the idea of Qupe Protocol?

There is a general consensus that centralized discussion platforms have many problems. Sometimes, they experience network issues and cease working at inopportune moments. Also, chat histories and discussions are subject to censorship, and user privacy gets compromised.

Hence, we thought it would be good to implement a decentralized version on a TVM blockchain since fees are low and transactions are fast. When we started developing smart contracts and architecture, we realized that these contracts are very versatile and could evolve beyond simple chat functions. With that, we came up with a protocol that provides universal contracts and tools to enable the building of decentralized social media platforms.

Can you tell us more about how your project works?

We developed our architecture and abstract smart contracts in a way that optimizes the Venom Blockchain. These can be used for specific implementations (chat, blog, etc) with access rights management, token handling (native and TIP-3), metadata, and more.

Additionally, we used our protocol to implement Qupe Chat, which is a public chat similar to Discord text channels but built on blockchain technology. Users have the freedom to set up user permissions and customize their own servers and rooms. Users can also create rooms where messages are paid for, and all tokens go to the owner.

Diving deeper into our message function, users don’t send messages through their wallet, but through their profile contract in which their public keys are stored. This helped to solve the following problems:

• Time to finality improved significantly. With a large number of shards, it only required one to two blocks, even if a message has a TIP-3 token attached.
• We don’t forward all the message content, only the hash from the external message. This means that the user only pays once for the forward fee.

How does your project meet business needs/solve real-world problems?

There is a rising demand for decentralized social media platforms, as they provide the benefits of anonymity, resistance to censorship, high performance, and safeguarding privacy. There are many good examples in the Web3 space, such as Mastodon and mirror.xyz. On our end, Qupe Protocol can leverage the strengths of Venom Blockchain to easily develop public platforms.

How did you find the Venom Hackathon experience?

The Venom Hackathon had excellent organization and execution. There was a welcoming environment with lots of materials for newcomers. The team was also very supportive in helping teams to solve challenges. Overall, it was inspiring to see many good projects and teams come together, and the number of participants and submissions is certainly impressive.

What was your biggest takeaway from the hackathon?

We received a lot of valuable feedback from the community, with ideas and suggestions on areas of improvement. This enabled us to confirm user demand and interest in our project, serving as a motivation to continue building.

Moving ahead, what are your next steps?

For starters, we want to showcase the full functionalities of our protocol, and further improve it in the process. We aim to build a decentralized forum, a microblogging platform in the likes of Twitter, and a platform for storing and viewing static HTML/markdown pages.

The next step is to develop Qupe Chat and its clients. We can optimize existing functions, and add new ones. For example, paid subscribers can write in the channel, access the server via NFTs, react to messages, threads, personal pages, and more.

We also have plans to develop various bots that can synchronize information from third-party sources, such as Telegram and Discord. Also, we aim to build a third-party indexer service that will store the entire history of some or all of the servers to allow full-text search. This will also allow various search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) to index the history of messages.

If all goes well, we hope to deploy Qupe Chat on Venom Testnet in the near future.

What are some of your hopes for the future of blockchain technology?

TVM blockchains provide a great infrastructure for various Web3 projects and have vast potential. The Venom blockchain has great bandwidth, low costs, and handy integration tools. It also has a programming language that is both strong and simple.

The only challenge is the finality of users’ messages, which is in the progress of being resolved. When this is complete, I’m certain that the user experience on these dApps will be pleasant and frictionless.

Thank you Pavlo for sharing about your project, we look forward to seeing Qupe Protocol grow with Venom!

Check out Qupe Protocol via these links:

GitHub: https://github.com/tonred/qupe

Qupe Chat: https://chat.qu.pe/

To find out more about Venom, check out the links below:

Website: https://venom.foundation/

Whitepaper: https://venom.foundation/Venom_Whitepaper.pdf

Documentation: https://docs.venom.foundation/

Medium: https://medium.com/@venom.foundation

Twitter: https://twitter.com/venomfoundation