Earlier this evening, Jon, Adil, and I launched Etched – a protocol that displays your writing while allowing authors to own what they write.

Put another way – Etched looks like a writing platform, but reads its data from the Solana blockchain rather than its own database. Compare this with basically any of the writing platforms of choice today, including Substack, and it’s a subtle but radical difference.

The data of the internet today is owned by the applications we use rather than by ourselves, the users. Every time we register for a new app, we’re handing over personal information that goes straight into that application’s database. Whether they use it or not is up to them; some do, some don’t. Every time we create something of value on those platforms, our creations go into their databases. How we’re compensated for that value is up to them; some (like Substack) are creator-friendly. Others are not. It’s up to them. Not us.

Etched is putting a different thought into the air. What if we ensured that authors owned their writing and Etched-the-platform simply displayed what they own? Authors can freely take their work off-platform, and many platforms could display the same underlying work. If Substack decided to support Solana NFTs, an author could mint her work on-chain and have it show up on both Substack and Etched.

We want to build a platform that is valuable to users because it enables awesome experiences, not because we are holding useful data captive. We launched a bare-bones concept today, but down the line we want to add features that showcase what you can do when the underlying data is on-chain. In a world where Substack, Medium, and Etched all display the same writing, and perhaps even the same followers and engagement stats, the dynamics of competition will skew towards sites that enable awesome interactions between a vibrant community, not sites that trap creators with their own data.

Once we improve the base experience of creating, verifying, and sharing your writing, we’ll be experimenting with annotations and reading groups, among other value-add ideas. More on that soon :)

Happy writing!