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.

Our narrative begins in the near future and will expand through the galaxy in both space and time. Written works, art, and other media will explore the relationship between humans, sentient artificial superintelligence, and the full spectrum in between. In essence, the Cellarius Universe is a future-oriented mythology. It is also a collective storytelling project whose content and contours will be shaped by its community.

We want YOU to join our community!

The community is the lifeblood of the CX project. In the decentralization movement, power and opportunity is “pushed from the center to the edge.” What this enables is for every participant in the network to play a necessary and meaningful role. We believe the depth of engagement and strong personal rewards for participation will make CX an exciting place to be. This is evident as you read our goals for the platform.

Our Goals:

Create an open marketplace where a truly global, diverse, and inclusive audience of collaborators can contribute content, and be recognized for those contributions;

Onboard collaborators and content consumers to blockchain technology, increasing awareness and educating users to the benefits of Web 3.0 technology; and

Build an inspiring, emotional, and thought-provoking collection of stories.

As we emerge from “stealth-mode,” we hope that many of you are eager to get involved. Your first step should be to go on our website — cellarius.network — and download the three foundational documents: Universe Guide, White Paper, and Community Guidelines. These speak to the CX story architecture, the framing for the platform, and the rules of engagement, respectively. Please read these to better acquaint yourself with the project. A lot of love went into developing these documents!

Motivation

We are inspired by the decentralized movement currently being spearheaded by blockchain technology. Never before has the future looked so bright! With Web 3.0 technology, we are on the cusp of a beautiful transformation of our socio-economic fabric, which will usher in amazing opportunities. The introduction to our Community Guidelines neatly summarizes our motivations:

“Prometheus heretofore went up to Heaven, and stole fire from thence. Have not I as much Boldness as he?” -Cyrano de Bergerac Through generations of civilization, storytelling has been the lens through which humankind perceives its place in the universe. Decentralized story creation is the foundation of culture, an intricate web of social connections and experiences that provide context to each of us and how we fit into the cosmos. These stories go by many names — myths, fables, legends, folktales, ghost stories, nursery rhymes — but they all emerge from various individual contributions to art, writing, theatrical performance, religion, and oral tradition. They help society conceptualize the present with reference to the past and an expectation of the future. Like many cultural processes, storytelling has evolved through the ages. Today, it has become heavily commercialized and often subject to governmental forces. Capitalism combined with strict intellectual property regulation has produced entertainment monoliths that control nearly all of the world’s most popular mythologies. Just as Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and made it available to all of humanity, the Cellarius Project is an attempt to reverse the pendulum back to decentralized storytelling by returning the myth-creation process to the hands of the community.

So…I thought this was a “blockchain project?”

The CX project is a ConsenSys Formation. ConsenSys is the world’s largest blockchain development studio and focuses on building revolutionary decentralized applications for the Ethereum blockchain. The invention of the blockchain has introduced a paradigm shift in technology, one which we are calling Web 3.0! We are still in the very early days of adoption and development. However, despite open access to everyone, the adoption is not equally distributed. The CX platform is an attempt to bring the benefits of the blockchain to creative content creators all around the world. In our White Paper we use an analogy to help make this point:

The seventeenth-century flourishing of Western art, culture, and science we call the Renaissance was enabled by what is now considered a mundane invention — accounting. The Medici family was one of the most prolific patrons of the arts during the Renaissance. Their wealth, in large part, was the result of refining and perfecting double-entry accounting. This innovation in ledger construction allowed the Medici Bank to accumulate wealth, which they used to support artists, sculptors, writers and the like. Blockchain technology represents the advent of “triple-entry accounting” in the form of cryptographically secure distributed ledgers. Just as the invention of double-entry accounting enabled vast opportunities for the creation of wealth and culture, Web 3.0 technology will enable a “Decentralized Renaissance.” This dramatic shift in the ways producers connect directly with their consumers will enable new incentive mechanisms to create value. This new paradigm allows individuals worldwide to follow the precedent set by the Medici family and become patrons of the arts.

Or perhaps, if you have more of a developer’s brain, these tweets from a new community member may help put this in context:

Isabella 🐇 Rebel‏ @rabbyte sooo my take on @Cellarius2084 is it’s an experiment for spawning a forever-cascading reinterpretation of an artistic work by building a freeform open source project around decentralizing tech, repurposable resources, style guides, collaborative tooling, etc if you’re a developer and don’t get why their approach is novel with all the attention on story / non-technicals: it’s a framework for non-developer needs, onboards more users to reinterpret and use whatever you built. basically if this is wildly successful you would be able to almost live in this universe as a developer by working in markets that build out user concepts and connect it to the game. I suppose I shouldn’t say “game” so much as “story” because there’s no reason to limit it to any medium

But how can a trans-media franchise use a blockchain?

The Cellarius Universe makes use of the Ethereum blockchain to do several things. Primarly, the blockchain provides a mechanism for decentralized governance used in content curation and voting. Members of the community will be given the power to decide what content is highlighted and eventually adopted as part of the canonical story. We call this the Cellarius Core Canon submission process. You can read more about how this works in our White Paper which is available on our website.

Additionally, we plan on using the blockchain to create digital collectibles in the form of tokens. When a piece of content has been voted into the “core canon,” we will give the content creator the opportunity to issue tokens as a digital representation. The way to think about these tokens is like a digital baseball card or a CryptoKitty. But unlike those well known examples, CX canon will provide an unprecedented level of engagement and depth to the content. We anticipate that token owners will be active participants in building out additional story content related to their token holdings. The opportunities that are possible with collectible tokens are nearly endless and we look forward to the creative ways in which content creators will use these to interact with their fans. Just to give a few examples: special access to art galleries/book signings, virtual assets in a video game/VR experience, whitelist for an insider club, exclusive communications, patron opportunities, real-life merchandise, and the list goes on and on. We plan on offering these tokens as part of a CX digital marketplace.

Education

We hope you are as excited as we are about the potential of the CX platform! But many of you may be feeling a bit like Ryan Selkis as he posted on twitter:

Ryan Selkis‏ @twobitidiot + I don’t understand @Cellarius2084 at all, but I’m excited for it.

We understand that these concepts are new and push the limits of how the blockchain can be used. Blockchain technology is changing the fabric of commerce and we take it a step farther to the very foundation of our culture. We plan on helping spread the vision through educational outreach across various media. In fact, Christian Gossett taught a storytelling workshop at the ETHDenver Hackathon, and we plan to have many more such events both in person and online. Also, stay tuned for our first Cellarius AMA on reddit to be announced soon!

But you don’t really mean me…

YES, WE DO! You’ve been taught to simply consume content from your favorite franchises. This is a chance to change the paradigm. We want you to join us in building the Cellarius Universe together. Everyone has something to contribute! Bring all of your experience and talents and share them with us. One of my favorite examples I recently heard was someone who offered to share a recipe for a home brew which they thought would fit the “Rattler” faction described in the Universe Guide.

In addition to content creation, we need patrons, blockchain developers, community organizers, cosplayers, game designers, podcasters, bloggers, web app developers, YouTubers, translators, fashion designers, and many more. Whatever your skills, come share them with us and watch as the universe comes alive with the depth of human (and AI) experiences. Come prepared to play nice and lose yourself in the wonderful universe of Cellarius. We need you and we’re glad you came.

Apply to join our Alpha, do it NOW!