Partnered With:

EOS founder BM has launched a new social project, Clarion, and is building a development team

Read this article in 7 Minutes

Clarion's ultimate goal is to provide the freedom and independence of a logically centralized network, while also allowing everyone to enjoy the performance and reliability of a "central service".

On March 2, EOS founder and former Block.one CTO BM (Daniel Larimer) spoke out again when he posted an introduction to a new project, Clarion, on GitHub.

Clarion's goal, according to GitHub terse, is to give everyone in the world the tools to broadcast their messages to anyone who wants to hear them, without relying on a centralized infrastructure. It will do this through a censorship-resistant "friend to friend" network, which will distribute your content using unused resources from your friends and family.

Clarion's ultimate goal is to provide the freedom and independence of a logically centralized network, while also allowing everyone to enjoy the performance and reliability of a "central service". With the help of the Clarion community, friends and family can be freed from the tyranny of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, and Google, and a social network free of manipulation and third party dependence can emerge.

Existing technology

Clarion from RetroShare,Hive(formerlyCalled SteemIt) andVoiceLessons have been learned in these projects. Retroshare is closer to the desired decentralization, but the interface is clunky and not feasible on mobile devices. Meanwhile, blockchain-based networks are "logically centralized" and require all full nodes to process all transactions. This is not suitable for large home users and can create dependencies on a small number of Web portals.

IPFS and IPNS are one of the more successful decentralized protocols. These P2P protocols facilitate the publishing of location-independent websites; However, they have two drawbacks. These disadvantages include the need to keep your own nodes online to seed content - there is no free "push to IPFS" method. There is also a high latency in finding content. Finally, there is no real opportunity for dynamic multi-user interaction.

Protocols such as ZeroNet provide an application framework for building dynamic Web sites that are loaded/shared over the BitTorrent protocol. BM's experience with ZeroNet is that it doesn't work well on mobile, "syncing" pages takes a long time, and suffers from excessive spam and/or moderation. In terms of scale, the ZeroNet application is logically just a blockchain application and is actually centralized.

Progressive Web applications

One of the architectural design decisions that sets Clarion apart from most other peer applications is the choice to use a progressive Web application driven by Web Assembly. Recent actions by Google, Amazon, and Apple show that we can't rely on app stores and hosting providers to distribute our apps and content. This means that the only viable way to add censorship resistant applications to the phone is through progressive Web applications.

Web Assembly enables us to implement social networking logic in high-performance C ++ while reusing most of the same code in the browser that is used in a "full node" running on an open platform such as a desktop or personal server.

Application platform

At the heart of Clarion OS is a friend-to-friend messaging protocol that allows the following types of message flows between encrypted identities:

▪️ person-to-person non-real-time messaging (e.g., E-mail)

▪️ Real-time person-to-person messaging (video/chat)

Forced the ️ & have spent One-to-many messaging (e.g. Tweet/Facebook)

Forced the ️ & have spent Many-to-many messaging (e.g. open chat room/blockchain)

With the Web Assembly plug-in, it should be possible to build many different types of applications on top of the Clarion OS, including tokens and smart contracts. The main difference between Clarion OS and previous blockchain platforms is that the base layer does not have to agree on the "order" of user actions, nor does it have to explain the meaning of transactions. If you think of typical Ethereum and EOS smart contracts as "layer 1", you can think of Clarion OS as "layer 0".

Project status

Clarion OS is just getting started and is in the early stages of design. A development team is currently being assembled to build the first prototype. The project will be developed in an open manner and will welcome contributions from anyone interested in restoring the Internet to a logical decentralization level.

As previously reported by Rulse, on January 10, 2021, BM (Daniel Larimer) announced on his Hive Blog personal account that he has resigned as CTO of Block.one, effective December 31, 2020. Block.one later officially confirmed the news.