If you like:

• root cause, system level solutions
• with massive TAM potential
• that support everyday needs and big social purposes
• and utilize bleeding edge tech, novel monetization and more

have we got a project for you!

What we are up to:

Web42 is building KYN (Know Your Neighbors), a fully decentralized network of decentralized neighborhood networks plus dApps (decentralized applications), to do two big things:

• bring back the neighborhood
• ○ more engaging, resilient and inclusive than ever
• ○ enterprise powers for neighbors and communities, made accessible for all
• ○ support people sharing their IRL (off-screen as much as possible) lives and resources smoothly
• ○ strong identity and verification (no device, card or biometrics needed for many uses), community safe anonymity, community fintech, mutual aid, and more
• fix the Internet https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/03/30/were-fixing-the-internet-join-us/
• ○ starts with monetization fixes - monetization drives design drives group dynamics, etc.
• ○ put people in control of their digital selves - can't be evil, by design
• ○ decentralize controls
• ○ flexible, positive social theory driven (rather than ad, etc. driven) governance, grouping, etc.
• ○ best balance between privacy (anon & pseudo by default - pairwise pseudonyms for most interactions) and community safety
• ○ Internet, itself, is optional.

Where we are with that:

Right now we have the first set of core technologies built and are about to head into alpha with our first dApp, a dApp which is designed to help people make 3 close friends within a 5 minute walk & build those local webs of trust that drive everyday happiness and resilience.

Why we would love to partner with you:

We are not Silicon Valley standard. Our tech, underserved markets, go-to-market, monetization and even investment options are not standard. We are what comes next.

We have a nearly infinite number of engineering projects we could use your help on.

We do, of course, have some we need next. ;)

Very open to hearing your ideas for projects - those that best suit your learning & social purpose objectives, etc.

A few ideas:

• Signal hand-offs. A neighborhood will generally have dozens of wireless routers that can provide a signal to anyone, anywhere in the neighborhood. Setting up this sort of access on every wireless router is problematic. We will already have a facility to make micropayments to compensate people for roaming bandwidth, as they use whatever router is available. We need to explore a mechanism to smoothly hand off signals among dozens of distributed wireless gateways, without requiring individual configuration at the routers.
• Animated avatars and voice changers. KYN allows you to communicate pseudonymously to the neighborhood and to the world. If it is important to protect your identity, you cannot transmit your voice or picture to the other party. This is unfortunate because a lot of information is conveyed through tonality, emphasis, facial expression & body language. We seek to use a person’s webcam to animate an avatar which the other party will see when you are pseudonymous. Similarly, we would like to disguise the voice of the speaker. This work involves neural network creation & using the input from cam & mic to produce an avatar which conveys most of the information.
• Kyth. A peer network requires a way to economize the usage of resources. Compute, RAM, storage, and bandwidth can all be paid for with microtransactions utilizing a utility token. Kyth is the user generated utility token planned for this use by the KYN network. Each user generates a fixed amount of Kyth per day. These amount to ledger additions on a ledger shared by the community. Kyth will be primarily used for resources, but should be designed with general use in mind.
• ○ Kyth must be anonymously spendable.
• ○ Suitable for microtransactions.
• ○ Fungible with Kyth from other networks, and transferrable between networks via the Interledger protocol (or alternative.)

Off the top of our heads, we can do:

• milestone meetings
• scrum style check-ins (every other day, 5-10)
• weekly check-ins (30 mins - more if explicitly needed)

Open to other options. How can we make this the best possible experience for you? :)