Op-Ed – A Graveyard of Protocols

This article was originally published on Kairon’s Mirror publication on March 1st 2024. In this modified version, he dives deeper into the implications of how protocols “die” and what could happen when people resurface the immutable code at a later date. 

I once wrote a 21-part chronicle of the Tour de France while live reporting it. It was an experience equal parts gruelling and enriching. I was so close to giving up almost every day that went by, and yet, with every step I took to gather perseverance, I became a better creator. In the end, I wrote my most powerful piece to date. And, promptly lost it to a software error.

The frustration and pain of this experience is one of the reasons why I learned to love onchain publishing and the main reason I still do it, despite the uncertainty and frustrations of being an earliest adopter.

You've probably experienced something similar to me at some point: a video you loved taken down from YouTube, a childhood photograph lost to mold, or a teenage memory going away with a stolen phone.

We trust the internet and our devices to contain aspects of us, and we're left a little emptier when that fateful software update or code depreciation makes them obsolete.

Now that we can ensure smart contracts and blockchains survive pretty much any physical or digital threat to the information they contain, how does that affect these pieces of ourselves we seed onchain?

Onchain platforms have proven time and again that even when the company maintaining the contracts goes under, as long as we entrust our code to the chain, their core functionality will still work, even sometimes with a new front end to breathe a second life to their creation.

The only problem lies in why would anyone want to build on top of an abandoned project, it’s a well-known meme how most of the internet is thanklessly maintained by a sole developer keeping the lights on for an open-source repo. Onchain, things are different, the speed of building and the advances in the tech even to this day mean that there’s little to no backward compatibility except on very rare occasions.

All it takes is a network upgrade or a new and cleaner way to send a particular type of transaction, and your hard-fought smart contracts pile up to turn Ethereum (and any similar chain) into a graveyard of protocols. All technically functioning (like the previous versions of Uniswap), yet close to none living up to the promise of immutable code as law.

As I mentioned above, being part of the early adopter bucket of a new technology can be frustrating at times. This piece came to me as I considered migrating my writing onto a more traditional platform. The Permaweb is great at making content endure, but it does a pretty bad job of making it readily available for people to engage with.

I know this sounds sacrilegious to some of you, but the ability to fetch data and display it anywhere doesn't mean anyone will want to read it.

In his 2021 piece "What Comes After Open Source?" Mirror co-founder Denis Nazarov explores how onchain data, or "State," when compounded towards a particular use, can be both a moat and a catalyst, depending on how accessible it is to outside believers and creators. This, in a nutshell, is what motivated me to experiment with onchain media in the first place. 

Few people still realize how much potential is held in readily available onchain transactions and protocols to be built on top of the different behaviors we pool into the largest open database in the world.

Even when left to rot onchain. An abandoned protocol is still a gold mine of a capsule of people transacting, believing, and engaging with the platform while it was still active. Stuff like sybil prevention, vampire attacking projects, or retroactive airdrops are among the few who have learned how to harness this information properly; but that’s barely skimming what could be unlocked with the aggregate data that shows how people’s ways of interacting onchain have evolved over the years.

Ironically, Mirror is also an example of how this state moat can sometimes be forced upon you. A few months back, while helping build an onchain article aggregator, I learned just how much is still being done internally (i.e. not composably) to display what we call "onchain publishing." Yes, the data is there for you to aggregate and display. But things like attribution, NFT minting, and splits are still far from what the ideal of composability would lead you to believe.

I always took Mirror as an impregnable protocol, even besides the team and company building it. What they created was a new primitive so much has been built on top of, from being the inspiration behind the Jokerace as a governance medium, to experimenting with splits, permissioned mints and many other experiences that we take for granted today. Mirror’s impact on our current onchain paradigm can’t ever be denied.

And now that the baton is being passed to the Paragraph team to steward the protocol into a new era of onchain publishing, I’m left to wonder what the OG writing NFT protocol will be used for if the turning of the page inevitably means the contracts will be made obsolete when the new big thing drops.

____

Does anyone remember Glass protocol? They were among the first projects that sought to make onchain video streaming; before the days of Livepeer's dominance over this department, Glass took on a curated and Vimeo-like approach to video minting.

The technology wasn't there at the time. Ethereum gas fees and little interest in video patronage led to them migrating to Solana in an attempt to curb the high premiums attached to their core idea. After agonizing years of trying to make it stick, they officially folded in 2023.

In their announcement tweet, the Glass team made it clear that all of their smart contracts would still be available for anyone to use and interact with. But I'm left to wonder, what's the point of that? If there's no one to tell the story, did any of Glass' drops really happen?

____

I've also been here long enough to remember when Hic et Nunc's developer ragequit their project and left it at the mercy of the Tezos chain. I remember standing in awe as the community came together and reclaimed the contracts and mints to give them a new home, a place where they're still alive and thriving today.

To me, this is the prime example of what could happen in an ideal scenario if any of our media protocols were to die. The thesis of progressive decentralization can only really matter if there are people with the excitement and know-how to tend to the lore left onchain with every mint and every contract call.

There are countless stories similar to this: former bull-run NFT collections that are handed off to the community after their founders take the cash and leave (like Pudgy Penguins, Cryptopunks, Moonbirds, and Mooncats). The circumstances behind each are unique. Sometimes, it's the noble pursuit of giving back to the community, and sometimes, it's a corporate acquisition not dissimilar to what we’d find in Silicon Valley. But the constant remains. Every protocol is only as valuable as the people who are willing to make it endure.

We've all joked about how crypto can sometimes feel like a cult. But I mean it when I say this comparison goes much deeper than the chants and the rituals.

When thinking about this piece's core question of "What happens when a protocol dies?" I often drew parallels with religions and languages.

I grasped to find any other instance in human history when something truly permanent is created, and what happens when society leaves it behind. 

With human-made edifications, nature will eventually reclaim its land. With artifacts and names, history will do its thing and bury it all beneath the sand. The only real thing we humans can create that will truly outlast us, as I've said time and time again, is stories.

Protocols are just a digitized version of this. As I briefly touched upon in Whole Earth Theory, you can build a database big enough to contain every possible interaction and piece of content, but you can't put a limit to the ways people believe and tell stories around that information.

No matter what company goes under, or what treasury runs out of funds, as long as there is a way to give the protocol back to its believers, and there are people to believe in it in the first place, there will be a Rosetta Stone that revives and re-contextualizes any piece of media we leave behind onchain.

To preserve the memory and culture of platforms like Mirror, we at Autopsy look to collect and analyse data on the demise of protocols and web3 projects aiming to surface the fragments of code, learnings and people who could support future builders in bringing on the next iteration of onchain media platforms. This is the start of Autopsy’s Media Protocols section.

To submit an Autopsy, share your story here and get in touch if you would like to contribute to the open knowledge repo of failed companies hello@getautopsy.com. Follow for updates @getautopsy.