DATT (Decentralize All The Things), a social platform created by Ryan X Charles, a bitcoin developer and a former Reddit engineer, enters the proof-of-concept stage.

On 5 July 2015 Charles, already a Reddit ex-employee by then, explained in a blog post the concept of Reddit restructuring that was discussed in the company and was supported by its previous CEO Yishan Wong. According to the plan, Reddit was to become a decentralised social platform filled with content. All users would be connected to the p2p network via their Reddit web applications. Users would pay a small amount in bitcoin to upload their content and receive some bitcoins back when the content is up-voted.

The system was aimed at incentivising users in the situation when no central organisation would animate the network. All content would be hosted by users who run the app, not by Reddit.Inc which was supposed only to perform the role of the biggest service provider. Besides, this project implied that the network would be uncensorable since there would be no central authority to block users’ content. However, the project was suspended after the Reddit’s leadership changed; Charles decided to elaborate the decentralised network himself.

On 1 August 2015 DATT held a global hackathon aimed at advancing the project that has been finally launched. Around this time the platform was widely considered in the bitcoin and fintech community as a challenging alternative to Reddit, although Charles had explained that his platform was not likely to replace Reddit.

Now, in January 2016, DATT has reached its proof-of-concept phase with the perspective to be completed by mid-year. As the developer explains, “It lets you post comments that are distributed peer to peer, and also pay to view a piece of content. If you want to run it, you have to follow the step-by-step instructions, but it’s very fragile as it’s only basically a proof of concept.” After this testing stage Charles plans to further enhance DATT's peer-to-peer protocol as well as work on other technical details.

Anna Lavinskaya