RSS3, a next-generation protocol building a decentralized web feed for content distribution across blockchains, has announced a new round of funding. RSS3 indexes and connects all our cyber existence in the era of Web3, and is working toward the vision of enabling platformless media and applications.
In traditional web architecture, RSS is a protocol standard that allows applications to access updates to websites in a standardized format. It allows users to keep track of many different websites in a single aggregator, removing the need to manually check each site.
In Web3 architecture, there is no feed to receive updated information, and users have to check sites individually. Moreover, more and more data is migrating across chains, requiring complex and cumbersome effort on behalf of users and application devs to gather data from across each chain and its native wallets, blockchain explorers, and applications in order to gather new information and track updates. RSS3 is aggregating all of this data into one single feed, making it easy for Web3 developers and users to keep track of many different networks, assets, and events in one single feed.
With a 100-billion dollar online content market generated from 50 million content creators worldwide on the existing Internet, the Web3 content economy is expected to contain a much more significant potential given its crypto and platformless nature.
The round was led by CoinShares Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Mask Network, HashKey Group, Fabric Ventures, Arweave, Dapper Labs, Avalanche Asia Star Fund, Youbi Capital, Headline VC, Formless Capital, imToken Ventures, and private investors, including Balaji Srinivasan, The Jiho, and Miss ₿itcoin.
Meltem Demirors, head of CoinShares Ventures, commented, “Since the early days of the Internet, we have been creating assets online. With over 4 billion internet users and 50 million online creators, there is massive potential for these assets to become financialized and represented on-chain via new crypto primitives. RSS3 enables a future where these assets will be “platformless” – minimizing the monopoly that web2 platforms have on user behaviour and enabling aggregation in applications and a wide variety of new use cases such as online credentialing, certification, and more.”
Team members of RSS3 from all over the world have a wealth of experience. Since launching two months ago, RSS3 has indexed 18k users, 76k links, and 834k assets while integrating multiple blockchains, including layer two chains and cross-chain bridges. The RSS3 protocols now support assets, NTFs, activities, and content from numerous centralized or decentralized networks, including Ethereum, Mirror.xyz, Arweave, Polygon, xDai, and Twitter, and is working on supporting projects such as Flow, Ronin, Solana, and Avalanche.
While RSS3’s predecessor, the RSS protocol, has been struggling with the centralization and the restrictive platform-driven approach of the web led by giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tiktok. The RSS3 team is excited to build towards a future where cyberspace is open, decentralized, and permissionless, as it was in the early days of the internet.
The team will be utilizing the fund for developing the decentralized RSS3 node and attracting more developers toward building different applications.
The RSS3 team commented, “Our generation saw how the Internet once was when we were kids, and we saw how trailblazers like Aaron Swartz fought for the freedom of information – it’s time for us to pick up the baton.”