The Cellarius Universe (CX) is an original, transmedia cyberpunk franchise that leverages blockchain technology and user-generated assets to create a collaborative, fan-curated story. To read our Universe Guide, and apply for our Alpha, please visit https://cellarius.network.

Our Cellarius x Ethereum logo

The Cellarius Alpha application process has been open for two months now and we are thrilled with the response we’ve received so far. To date, we’ve received over 800 applications from artists, authors, crypto enthusiasts, musicians, and science fiction aficionados around the world. Keep the applications coming!

Our team is working hard to move many aspects of the project forward, from working with our production partners on our teasers (check out the links to “Where To?” and “Strongman” below) to commissioning the stories that will be featured in the first Cellarius Anthology (more details to come!).

“Where To?” invites the community to speculate on the heroine’s mission.

“Strongman” wonders how society will react to athletes who enhance themselves with cybernetics.

In parallel, we are working on our technical roadmap and building out components that will support blockchain-enabled transmedia storytelling. This post will briefly detail some of the progress our team has made and outline what our Alpha roadmap looks like.

A MetaMask Gateway

What does the Fox say?

One of the main goals of the Cellarius project is to educate users about how to use blockchain technology and tools , particularly Public-Key Cryptography. To that end, our design team is making MetaMask the default identity tool of the Cellarius platform.

MetaMask is a bridge that allows you to visit the distributed web of tomorrow in your browser today. It allows you to run Ethereum dApps right in your browser without running a full Ethereum node. MetaMask includes a secure identity vault, providing a user interface to manage your identities on different sites and sign blockchain transactions.

Cryptokitties and Dada — two of the more popular apps in the Ethereum ecosystem today—also use MetaMask. Like Cellarius, MetaMask is a project at ConsenSys, a global formation of technologists and entrepreneurs building the infrastructure, applications, and practices that enable a decentralized world.

A common feature of many blockchain apps is the departure from private sessions in the browser. While private browsing is familiar to all Web 2.0 users, there’s no need for it on a blockchain-supported browser because of protected private keys. For example, anyone on the web can explore my personal Dada art collection without having to sign in themselves. Blockchain apps can take this approach because my key is protected (as all private keys should be!) and only I can buy or sell from my account. This means there is no risk that my art can be stolen.

While having cryptographic security is great, what is lost by this approach is the ability to have private application state. Work-in-progress drafts on a blogging platform (such as Medium) are an example of private state: data that should live in the app, but should not be readable to the public. Alex Miller from Grid+ has written about how app developers can use MetaMask to eliminate the need for passwords, which we’ve done for our Alpha platform. Users will log in to their profiles with MetaMask and have access to their private portfolios, while also being able to publish their works to the broader Cellarius audience.

Metadata, metadata, metadata

A core element of enabling community-created intellectual property is ensuring that the metadata for each contribution is well-defined. Metadata is “data that provides information about other data.” Who drew a piece of digital art? When? What rights are associated with that art? Was it a derivative of another piece of art? Which Cellarius factions are included? Where in the universe timeline does the illustration fit? These questions are indicative of the types of data we intend to capture for each piece of content in the Cellarius universe. Archive of Our Own is a community storytelling platform with a very extensive tagging system that lets the community easily search and explore the rich breadth of fan works. We think robust metadata and tagging will also help the Cellarius community discover content.

As often happens in our fast-moving Ethereum ecosystem, we’re not alone in our quest to wrangle metadata in order to create next-generation blockchain platforms. Our friends at Ujo Music, Civil and Conscience are also exploring the metadata question. In order to maximize knowledge-sharing, our teams have formed a Blockchain Metadata Task Force and we will be sharing insights as we make progress. Luckily, with resources like COALA IP, Schema.org, and Dublin Core, there is a rich existing knowledge base for our teams to build upon.

Science Fiction is for Everyone, Everywhere

Our team is really excited about the potential for many kinds of stories inspired by the Universe Guide. The professional writers, illustrators, musicians, and filmmakers who have spent time with our early lore have given us some excellent feedback and are already telling exciting new stories set in the Cellarius Universe.

Concept art from Kira, a CellCon Zero story-in-progress

At the core of our ethos is our mission to tell a global story that includes many diverse perspectives. We are exploring, and inviting the community to explore, regions and cultures of human civilization that are rarely (if ever) represented in mainstream science fiction storytelling. The early Cellarius works have some incredibly compelling characters and we’re excited to build a platform that will showcase these works and more.

Wireframes for our content stream — pizzaparty2084 is our most prolific user!

We’re drawing inspiration from platforms that will be familiar to many working creatives: DeviantArt, Tumblr, Medium, ArtStation, Behance, and many more. We’re calling this our Web 2.5 experience — not a completely decentralized, fully peer-to-peer application just yet, but not your traditional web app, either. It’s worth pausing to mention bootstrapping: most of us in the Ethereum ecosystem believe in facilitating decentralization and disintermediation, but it can’t happen at the flip of a switch. As our resident Wordsmith Mally likes to say, decentralization is both a goal and a process. Web 3.0 for creatives is the goal, but we have to build a bridge to get there — which will necessarily include selective centralization on early platform iterations, and trust from the community that we’re working toward that goal. It’s worth testing our assumptions fully in the Alpha phase so we can get the decentralized part right the first time.

One of the unique design challenges we face is that we’re building a platform for a single media franchise. The platforms from which we’re sourcing inspiration, in contrast, showcase content from many different universes and IPs. It’s our job to ensure that the Cellarius platform is engaging and gives readers and collaborators a reason to keep coming back to this one story universe.

Bounties and tokens — oh my!

For Cellarius to be truly successful, we’ll need to build a robust, meaningful economic model so that professional collaborators can contribute to our universe without feeling like they’re working pro bono. Our team is noodling on many possible models and approaches for bringing liquidity to our platform in order to compensate our collaborators appropriately. These are in a very nascent stage, and are not ready to share.

One low-hanging fruit we intend to offer the community sooner is content contests. The team at Bounties.network has been working tirelessly to create a standardized Ethereum bounty experience for collaboration and we definitely plan on incorporating bounties into Cellarius. A creative could post a bounty to another creative for a specialized task or an asset to go with one of their own stories, or a patron could post one offering an idea for artists to create, as imagined in the concept screen below.

An early concept screen for our Cellarius bounties experience

Our thoughts regarding bounties and contests are inspired by the Gitcoin project’s approach to dogfooding: they host bounties on the Gitcoin platform in order to develop the platform itself. Cellarius hopes to attract many creatives to the project and dogfood our platform in order to commission much of our content.

The tokenized ecosystem more broadly has seen tremendous growth has thanks to Ethereum’s groundbreaking innovations. When I was sitting in Microsoft’s offices creating templates for Azure’s Ethereum Blockchain As A Service back in 2015, I never would have imagined that there would be so many tokenized projects this quickly.

The past two and a half years have been fascinating in the nascent field of cryptoeconomics. I’m incredibly proud to have been a part of the AdChain project, which pioneered the field of token curated registries. The reception to practical, innovative, and interesting token designs such as TCRs inspires our team and sets our tokenization bar very high. The Cellarius project does not have a token model to announce at this time, but we are exploring mechanism designs that can create tight and positive feedback loops to empower many different user types in the Cellarius community.

We have the good fortune of having access to the best legal team in the blockchain industry and we are actively following the amazing strides that The Brooklyn Project is making in the legal space. We expect any Cellarius token to conform to industry best practices and to set an example for future projects.

Swag

By the way, did you know the Cellarius Store has been open for over two months? We’ve integrated Coinbase Commerce so you can cop Cellarius swag with crypto!

Timeline

One does not simply create an emergent, decentralized, globally collaborative intellectual property and copyright framework. We’re working on our platform every single day and learning a ton about intellectual property, copyright, production, and publishing as we go. A successful media franchise has never been created this way before — probably because it’s either 1) simply not feasible, or 2) really, really hard. As we say in our FAQ:

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” — Shigeru Miyamoto

We hope to be able to share more with the community soon™. We appreciate all the feedback and engagement so far! Please keep sharing your thoughts, insights, and ideas—and follow along on Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.