A Letter from the Founders of Sapien

The Journey so Far

It was rainy and cloudy but we decided to go for a hike anyways.

Despite the chilly weather, the Fire Trails were absolutely beautiful.

Communing with the Nature Spirits

We slipped in mud a few times — got drenched in a mixture of water, dirt, and sweat, but the journey was worth every step of the way. Endless conversations consisting of lucid debates, corner cases, and ethical situations helped us build synergy very early on.

One of the ways we were able to synthesize our ideas was through hackathons at Cal. 48 hours of highly caffeinated, sleep-deprived, non-stop hacking to create something that never existed before.

A bunch of sweaty engineers in one room furiously smashing away at their keyboards and chugging free Red Bulls until the hallucinations set in.

Our idea of a fun weekend…

Cal Hacks 2015 @ UC Berkeley

HSNIMP (Summer 2015)

Hybridized Social Network Integrated Media Platform

(Yeah, it’s a mouthful)

It all started off as a side project. We set aside maybe a few hours every few weekend to indulge this idea about a brand-new social platform. A web application that would be situated in the middle of Reddit and Facebook with several innovative features, focused on privacy and free speech.

Here is the initial product description (2015), copied from our Asana page:

This project aims to create a platform that will provide users with an experience that combines the rich features of a social network (adding friends, user profiles, etc.) with the anonymity (to the rest of the World) and structure of Reddit. Our goal is to cultivate an environment where friends can communicate and share effortlessly via groups and “sub-reddits” and yet also have the ability to browse and post videos, images, and links (thus, the idea of hybridization). Additionally, we want our site to be at the frontier of new technology, in terms of integration. Thus, we must make our platform modular and have the ability to quickly adapt to ANY tech innovation. The next couple paragraphs will outline this modularity (in the sense that we should, in theory, be able to add any FEATURE to the web app independently). Rob recently had an idea with implementing cryptocurrency within a Transaction Hub (similar to Venmo) that would partner with video games (Dota, LoL, etc.) and consumer stores (7/11, Uber, Netflix, etc.) to provide a way for users to exchange and purchase points and goods. I believe security is a high priority. Just go read Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. privacy policies and you will find they store a lot of unnecessary data. Other troubling issues with the NSA and Snowden prove that the world needs a secure platform. Websites store IP addresses and other user data One approach is to use client-side encryption which as you guys know will effectively store gibberish in the database. Moreover, the backend of the social network should be extremely minimalistic. So to summarize the three features so far:

- Hybrid Platform

- Transaction Hub with crypto support

- Client-side encryption with minimal user data Of course, why stop there? There is so much more potential with a platform and other possible features that we should discuss:

- Adjustable live feeds (Switch between “Friend” feed and “World” feed)

- A point system with upvotes and downvotes

- Allow users to customize the entire layout and design of the site

- Encrypt EVERYTHING (all posts, videos, pics). Untraceable.

- Post with a self-destruct timer (Say you want a video up for only 1 day).

- Open platform to third party applications (Hololens, Oculus, etc.)

- Gamification (points to level up, points within groups to compete,etc)

- Education platform (MOOCs as groups)

- Collaboration platform (build in something like asana, google docs etc) And yes, it seems like we are doing a lot. BUT, that’s the point. We are going to be the first site to integrate everything with a fluid User Interface and smooth AWS backend. Hence the name Hybridized Social Network Integrated Media Platform ;) (we still need to find a name and domain lol)

Indeed, even then we realized how overly ambitious the vision was, yet we convinced each other with the simple carrot, “Dude….could you imagine if…”

A snapshot of our task list

Django Pre-Alpha (Winter 2015)

In our little spare time, we threw together the first prototype of the application. We chose Python for its readability and the Django Framework because it came with so many features right out the box.

Pre-Alpha with lovely CSS styling

At this point we already had built out posting, commenting, voting, categories, and a simple public-private dichotomy to let users browse with their real identity or anonymously. To our surprise, the application was already slowing down with these features. We decided to ditch Python.

Enter Meteor.js (Summer 2016)

We (painstakingly) ported the entire application over to JavaScript. Meteor.js was the framework of choice since it was fast, reactive, and recommended for decentralized applications.

End-to-end Encryption Tangent (Spring 2016)

From early on, we knew security was extremely important to any online platform, and felt centralized entities should collect minimal data. One of the options we experimented with was creating the first entirely client-side encrypted social platform that ensured posts, comments, and user activity were untraceable.

Planifica: Highly-experimental encryption for Meteor that still needed a few more enhancements before it was ready for a production-level app.

2. Zerokit: Simple node-based API to add end-to-end encryption to any app. We turned away from it after facing scalability issues for our use case.

Why Blockchain?

Throughout all of our talks we kept coming back to the same few ideas.

There was one question that kept intriguing us. Where does the value of a social platform come from? Thinking about this idea in depth led us to realize the paradoxical nature of current social media platforms. These platforms would be nothing without their users. And although they owe everything to their users, they feel no need to share the value that their user base has painstakingly created, instead taking every chance possible to extract even more in the form of advertisements and data mining.

We felt that these things were fundamentally opposed to our ideologies and that there must be some way to change the status quo. What if we could pay our users for the content that they create? Not only would this provide content creators with compensation for their efforts, it would also let them know that their efforts are truly valued by the community. There was only the question of implementation.

Although we were well aware of Bitcoin, the idea of creating our own Blockchain from scratch and maintaining it was daunting. Fortunately, we soon discovered Ethereum. After seeing the enthusiastic community and the flexibility of the ERC20 token, the solution soon became obvious.

The power of the Blockchain became an obvious tool for other problems that we had long discussed. Our new token would provide a framework for users to vote on proposals and truly influence the direction of the platform. It could also be used to empower users by sharing ad revenues with them.

The inclusion of a marketplace was a natural extension. With a social platform and a currency this was the next step to create a truly decentralized and tokenized economy. Reputation was the last missing piece of the puzzle, enabling users to be confident in their transactions and promoting the creation of content that would be truly valuable to the community.

Present Moment