The Butterfly Mobile App
Own Your Own Voice
As a way to showcase the decentralized and censorship resistant qualities of the Butterfly Protocol platform we are currently developing the Butterfly mobile application. This new app will allow anyone in the world to easily acquire and own a domain name to establish your unique identity on the decentralized web. You can then use that identity to publish content for others to read. No person or organization can block your content, censor you, or cancel your account. You own your identity, and you own your content.
True Domain Ownership
With the Butterfly Protocol, possession of an Ethereum ERC721 token proves that you own a specific domain, for example john_smith.human. The .human top level domain will be one of the primary domains used in the Butterfly app to establish each user’s identity, however we’ll also provide other options to keep it fun. When you install the Butterfly mobile app and create an account, what you are really doing is creating an Ethereum wallet that has sole ownership of your identity token. Since you own this token, you can later sell it or trade it with someone else. And because the token adheres to existing Ethereum contract specifications, you can manage your token on any marketplace that supports Ethereum tokens. One example is opensea.io, but there are now many options.
Setting Up An Account
Since the Butterfly mobile app is an Ethereum cryptocurrency wallet you restore an existing wallet that you already own using your 12 word passphrase. Or can you follow our onboarding process to create a new wallet and record your passphrase in a secure, offline place. The app makes this simple by asking you a few questions instead of requiring you to input your entire passphrase.
Publishing Content
Once you have created or restored your crypto wallet, you can then create a simple profile and immediately start publishing content.
Reading Content
You can easily discover new content by searching by text and tags or by viewing popular posts. You can also filter the results to only the people that you are following.
Summary
What is different about the Butterfly app compared to other publishing and blogging apps? There are no central servers! Your Butterfly identity is owned by you within your Ethereum wallet, to which only you have the secret to access. Information about your domain name is stored in IPFS, the interplanetary file system, a decentralized file storage mechanism. All content published from the Butterfly app is also stored in IPFS and is associated to the Ethereum account that created it. Ethereum smart contracts control the publishing and viewing of content and therefore publishers cannot be censored by governments or corporations.
