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“Safe is an incredible tool for individuals, teams, communities, and groups of anons to manage assets both collectively or individually. While the primary application of multisigs has been asset management, we are demonstrating that it can also be an extremely powerful tool to manage any type of online content including your files and website!”
About Fileverse
Industry: Collaboration and knowledge production tools
Fileverse is a trustless collaboration space and workspace enabled through smart contracts and p2p networks for content addressing and storage. You can think of Fileverse as an alternative to platforms such as Google Workspace, Notion, and even Gitbook, with features such as:
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File sharing and storage
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Live collaboration documents and whiteboards
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Documentation and knowledge bases
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Group ownership of an archive and websites
The challenge
Fileverse needed a robust peer-to-peer tech stack that is not only infinitely composable but also allows individuals and groups to cryptographically impose the terms of their interaction with the world.
The major challenge was finding an infrastructure that they could rely on today and in 20 years, to enable trustless collaboration between individuals and groups. They needed a solution that could handle granular permissions management, facilitate complex transactions and group dynamics, and enable seamless dApp interactions, all while ensuring high levels of data security and users’ anonymity.
The solution
Fileverse integrated Safe's Smart Account infrastructure to address their challenges effectively. The integration enabled Fileverse to leverage Safe's advanced features for decentralised control, including robust permissions management and secure transaction facilitation with multisignature capabilities. Safe's infrastructure provided the necessary foundation for Fileverse to build a highly secure, decentralised platform for online collaboration and knowledge production, thus overcoming the limitations of traditional web2 tools.
By utilising Safe's technology, Fileverse could ensure data integrity and privacy for its users, thus disrupting the traditional web2 online collaboration model with a trustless, onchain alternative.
“A pressing issue when it comes to interacting online is understanding that as users, we need more control and knowledge over what happens behind web2 platforms, which is why we believe that operating in a fully on-chain environment is the better path forward. By using Fileverse along with Safe, both open-source technologies, I have more trust in the security of the protocols I'm using and can feel comfortable collaborating with the other owners of my Safe and additional collaborators from around the world.” – Yohan, Fileverse power user
How it began
As very early users of Safe, the Fileverse team was first inspired by the trust and coordination they observed within groups like MolochDAO and ConstitutionDAO, where massive amounts of funds were confidently secured and managed to achieve greater collective impact.
The real turning point came when some of Fileverse’s power users began voicing the need to integrate multisig functionality directly into their workspaces. This feedback led to the idea of a use case besides financial coordination. Fileverse started to think of ways to use Safe's modular smart account infrastructure to create a new onchain collaborative space that extends the trustless management of assets with Safe (alone or as a group) to the trustless management of assets and content/files.
How Fileverse works: Taking online collaboration tools onchain
Leveraging Safe's Smart Account infrastructure, Fileverse enables users to deploy collaboration smart contracts while ensuring secure and controlled access. Safe's robust framework allows permissions management and coordinates seamless transactions in a customisable multisig setup, making Fileverse a safe and efficient space for onchain content collaboration.
Users benefit from end-to-end encryption and IPFS/Arweave for file storage, all facilitated by Safe's battle-tested infrastructure. The integration allows Fileverse to offer diverse tools such as multimedia sharing, simultaneous document editing, and personal website publishing, all underpinned by Safe's multisig functionality, ensuring collective control and enhanced security for all onchain activities.
Why Safe: Reliable with exceptional UX
Safe was the obvious choice for Fileverse. The team wanted to build on top of the most stable foundation to give users a reliable tool with exceptional UX. The sheer amount of people’s funds ($70B) that have been secured through Safe’s contracts for a long time without any hiccup is the kind of reliability that Fileverse aspires to.
Secondly, Safe’s leaps and advances in account abstraction make the protocol an ideal partner for the team’s UX goal of making crypto easily enjoyable with no barriers to entry (eg. requiring a wallet, tokens or technical knowledge).Key decision factors for choosing Safe include:
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Self-sovereigntyThe use of smart contracts gave Fileverse total ownership while ensuring endless composability between both projects.
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Launch of Safe{Core} Protocol
The launch of Safe{Core} Protocol sealed the deal as the team saw Safe committing to a path that would pave the road for account abstraction infrastructure and kick-start an ecosystem of trustless applications.
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Safe Modules
The team found Safe Modules to be an amazing way to expand Safe multisigs and introduce new features and capabilities.
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Safe Apps
Discovering the Safe Apps directory was an “eureka moment,” as the ability to use and discover favourite dApps directly from a trusted wallet was essential for users’ confidence in experimenting with new crypto protocols safely.
Benefits
“Integrating Safe is an important UX leap for our users in terms of providing a robust technology to manage their content as well as to recover that content even in a “worse case scenario” whereby none of the Fileverse team or infrastructure would be available.”
Fileverse believes that the crypto space is finally at a stage where people can be offboarded from predatory collaboration apps and onboarded to dApps that offer key benefits including:
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Cryptographic rules of engagement
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Better privacy guarantees
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Decentralised storage and control of data (i.e., departure from the usual server-client model)
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Infinite customizability and composability (i.e., mix and match dApps and protocols under your preferred user interface)
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Cheaper pricing options
“Building on Safe’s infrastructure for an organisation's file systems and the underlying multisigs they control is a step forward in improving the connection between the social and financial layers a crypto company interacts with. Fileverse inherently allows for public and private collaboration between multiple users, however, leveraging Safe, Owners can simultaneously collaborate on documents and ongoing projects with the same layer of trust that they've centred their company's financial management around.” – Yohan, Fileverse power user
Key results and impact
“Our journey with Safe has been nothing but smooth! While working on the Safe integration for Fileverse, we received great support from the Safe team, who introduced us to the rest of the Safe community and invited us to showcase our dApp during the Safe{Con} 2023 conference.”
Fileverse’s integration of Safe has marked a significant advancement for the crypto community at large, in terms of discovering more non-financial use cases of the crypto tech stack. It enabled the creation of a trustless application that allows people from around the globe to collaborate, coordinate, be productive, or creative, etc, all without fearing censorship, surveillance, arbitrary decisions, and data manipulation.The integration has a real impact on how digital collaboration and data sovereignty can evolve in an onchain future.
The marriage of Fileverse and Safe offers a blueprint for future applications looking to put users first and ensure data protection by design. Fileverse also hopes that this work sets precedent for other projects to use Safe for a wide array of non-financial experiences onchain.
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