Decentralized Online Profiles
Introducing The Mimo Project
Today, I’m announcing The Mimo Project, a standard for tokenized pseudo-indentities (aka profiles) on the Ethereum blockchain. My mission with Mimo is to power a standard upon which Dapps can build new social networks and games centered around users without holding user information.
You can read the whitepaper (I gotta update it though), check out the code, or join us on Discord.
Mimo is currently in beta, with the first version of the contracts deployed on the Rinkeby testnet (make sure you have Rinkeby ETH). You can play around with it through a UI on my Pragma dashboard(you need Metamask).
Mission
Mimo is a tokenized Profile specification standard that enables the creation and use of decentralized pseudo-identities. The standard aims to build a common informational interface by which social networks, games and other Dapps can host user experiences on their services without hosting or owning user information. Mimo hopes to power a standard upon which Dapps can build new social networks and games centered around users without holding user information. A future in which apps are sorely focused on the UX of their apps and crafting the best experience and where users can switch to any apps they like while sill maintaining their following and profile info.
What Mimo is going for can be summed up in three words: Experiences, not services.
Basics
Each Profile on the Mimo network is an ERC-721 token. Hence where the tokenized part comes from. This has some advantages over address/proxy-contract based indentities. It’s tokenized form makes it easy to transfer and send to an address if say you want to start using a new wallet. Since it adheres to the ERC-721 standard it can also interact with other contracts that leverage this standard as well, meaning profiles can be traded via smart contracts for example.
Vision
I initially started working on Mimo on a whim because I was interested in building a system where you could import your followers from one social network into another Dapp, but the more I worked on it the more I saw potential for something much bigger than that.
One day, hopefully, Mimo will be able to power many Dapps on the blockchain where instead of user info being hosted by giants like Facebook and Google, user info is in the hands of the users. Because that info will be on the blockchain, there’s is no possibility of Mimo ever going out of service, essentially cutting out the middleman (me).
Since user info will be hosted on-chain and not off-chain, your followers from one Dapp can be imported into another Dapp with ease. The applications are not only limited to social networks, Mimo profiles can be used in games as well or any other Dapp that developers can think of.
Funding
Since I’m working on this project dolo, I’m gonna need some funding in order to hire people. I haven’t been coding for a long so I’ll need a little help, whether this is through an employee or contracts, and I’ll also need to get auditors.
At first, I was going to go the ICO route. I had even deployed a presale/gameified-ICO contract where you can play a game and if you beat it and pay the cost you will be able to mint our token. You can find my Reddit post about that here.
The problem with that approach is that it’s not a good fit with Mimo. I was not able to find a good use for a token so it was like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. There had to be a better way to fund this project.
For now, I’m doing what I can to find smart contract freelance gigs but one funding avenue I’ve been considering for a while was having a presale for V.I.P. status.
V.I.P. is the highest verification tier in Mimo. There are no features for it yet but Dapp developers could include perks for those who have basic verification and those who are VIPs. Once the network goes live on the mainnet, VIP status will cost at least $1000 but for the presale I might lower it to $50-$100 that way people who want to fund the project and have VIP status early will be able to purchase it.
The way this project will be monetized once it’s deployed on the mainnet will be through the cost of creating a profile ($1-$2 but I’ll probably make it free) and the cost of basic ($50-$100)*and VIP verification ($1000+)*. Charging for a profile makes me money for every profile created but it also has the side benefit of deterring people from making a bunch of fake profiles since doing so would be quite expensive. Paying for a profile will be pretty weird for most people though since it’s always been free till now.
*footnote: These prices will probably be in DAI (a stablecoin), since we don’t want any pesky volatility hindering the experiences.
What’s Next
For now I’m gonna sit back and see what happens with the beta and and I’ll also be answering questions on Discord and Twitter (@ghiliweld). If you have any suggestions or thoughts on Mimo that you’d like to share, feel free to respond to this post or talk on Discord, you can also email me at ghiliaweld@gmail.com.
