Change Log

v0.0.x-demo

Last Updated: August 26th, 2024

The proof-of-concept Demo version of Aemula is now deprecated. The Demo showcased the economic viability of operating the main functionality of the Aemula platform on public blockchain test networks. The below change log is maintained as a record of progress.

v0.0.4 (8/26/2024)

Update Notes

  • Default login period increased from 15 minutes to 1 week
  • New donation link for testing fiat payment handling accessible under Account > Additional Resources
  • UI improvements on login
  • Increased emphasis on demo status by including “Demo” in header title
  • New Account page layout to accommodate upcoming features
  • Various minor bug fixes and improvements

Upcoming Fixes & Features

  • Support for both email login (account abstraction) and importing existing wallets
  • Integrating fiat-to-crypto onramps for upcoming subscription functionality
  • UX & design overhaul
  • Increased stability
  • Performance improvements
  • Increasing efficiency of smart contract transactions
  • Removing artificial rate limits on user registration
  • Removing artificial rate limits of data ingestion (from 5 minutes every ingestion cycle to 2 seconds)
  • Removing character limits on article publishing
  • Adding voting functionality for article reviews by the Moderator DAO
  • Implementing reputation tracking system
  • Adding reach and earnings analytics for “My Articles” view
  • Adding ability to “delete” articles (removes from Aemula recommendations and unpins the article from IPFS — the article will persist on IPFS until IPFS nodes determine it is no longer worth storing)

v0.0.3 (5/20/2024)

Update Notes

  • Various UX improvements
  • Renamed article interactions from “Agree” to “Support” and “Indifferent” to “Neutral”
  • Verbose “Need help?” dialog added to sign in
  • Added “Demo Docs” to Account page for more detailed documentation
  • Added “Explore the Graph” link to data visualization on Account page
  • Added loading feedback to “Get Tokens” claiming
  • Added minimum loading time to Moderate page
  • Reduced minimum loading time on login page

Upcoming Fixes & Features

  • Continued UX improvements
  • Increased stability
  • Performance improvements
  • Removing artificial rate limits on user registration
  • Removing artificial rate limits of data ingestion (from 5 minutes every ingestion cycle to 2 seconds)
  • Removing character limits on article publishing
  • Adding voting functionality for article reviews by the Moderator DAO
  • Implementing reputation tracking system
  • Adding reach and earnings analytics for “My Articles” view
  • Adding ability to “delete” articles (removes from Aemula recommendations and unpins the article from IPFS — the article will persist on IPFS until IPFS nodes determine it is no longer worth storing)

v0.0.2 - Account Abstraction (4/30/2024)

Overview

This update implements Account Abstraction, an Ethereum-compatible method that allows applications to streamline the user experience of interacting with blockchains.

Prior to this update, users were required to set up their own Web3 wallet through MetaMask, connect to the Optimism Sepolia test network, and pay for their own gas fees using test ETH. This means that the user and their MetaMask wallet had to handle the majority of the steps that occurred between interacting with Aemula and actually writing data to the blockchain.

Now, we are able to abstract away a lot of this process for the users so they can seamlessly interact with the blockchain without needing to understand the full process themselves.

Users can now sign up and authenticate their accounts using their email address, then proceed to use the platform. Everything else works in the background.

The tradeoff is that Aemula now has centralized control over user wallet creation and management. To avoid this, it is important that we give users the option to manage and import their externally-owned wallets, or the ability to export a wallet created through Aemula into their own possession. If users maintain that flexibility, then we are merely offering a convenient service rather than centralizing control.

This import/export functionality will be built into upcoming updates in order to offset the centralization that occurs with Account Abstraction. However, all relevant user data is written to the blockchain, meaning that Aemula does not wield any central authority over the flow information. We are just making it more convenient for users to access that information for the time being.

Since it will likely be most people’s first time accessing the demo, we will include some basic overviews of functionality for each page below.

Write

Enables users to compose an article to publish to the InterPlanetary File System (”IPFS”), a peer-to-peer network for storing data. This is a decentralized system, meaning that Aemula does not control the storage of this information. Once an article is published, the user is given the ID hash for their article so that they can access it from any accessible gateway to IPFS. We then write the author’s public address and the article’s IPFD ID hash to the blockchain to record the publication.

Currently, there are character limits to be able to publish an article. This is to reduce the amount of spam posts until the moderator community has reached a critical mass. This limitation will be removed in a future update.

Read

Curates a personalized news feed of articles that have been published using the Aemula Protocol. Recommendations are based on your prior interactions with articles on the platform, which have been written to the blockchain. We are currently using a simplified recommendation algorithm as a starting point, which will eventually be open-sourced for the community to govern and expand.

Moderate

Allows users to join the Moderation DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), which handles the moderation of content on the platform. As articles are reported by users, they will eventually be pulled from circulation and put into moderator review. In the Moderator Portal, members of the DAO will be able to review reported articles and vote on whether or not to remove them from the platform. Moderators are compensated by earning a share of the bounty placed on each article under review. The more controversial the article, the higher the bounty, which will draw in more moderators to review and fact-check. Voting functionality is not yet live.

Account

Currently, the account page is just used to get more tokens. Every day, users can get 10 tokens that they spend on actions across the platform. This is our way of rate-limiting usage of the demo prior to implementing subscriptions.

Upcoming Fixes & Features

  • numerous UX improvements
  • increased stability
  • performance improvements
  • removing artificial rate limits on user registration (currently, there are 2 second buffers to each step to avoid duplicate user registration)
  • removing artificial rate limits of data ingestion (from 5 minutes every ingestion cycle to 2 seconds)
  • removing character limits on article publishing
  • adding voting functionality for article reviews by the Moderator DAO
Previous
v0.1.x-alpha
Next
Terms of Service