Introducing Alexandria and the Open Index Protocol

by Joseph Fiscella, co-founder and developer at alexandria.io

Alexandria is like an open-source decentralized YouTube.

Alexandria and the Open Index Protocol are the open application layer and the open standard protocol, respectively, built for the new format of the decentralized web. As blockchain technology moves forward there will be new and innovative solutions to many of the problems and reduction of many of the inefficiencies existing within legacy centralized systems. We're building a future that allows competition, is free (as in freedom), and builds on top of new p2p tech.

We are introducing Alexandria to that marketplace. Alexandria is a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer system allowing content creators to share their work with their fans directly and get paid directly too. That means if alexandria.io is down then the network is only a little bit weaker; it isn't totally offline. The content is delivered from IPFS. The metadata index is stored in the Florincoin blockchain. The source code is available on github.

If you haven't already, check out my live presentation from the BitDevs meetup group in NYC during the week of Consensus (link to tweet with VOD):

The Open Index Protocol

Open Index Protocol is the name we've given to our protocol layer. It's meant to be an open and industry-wide standard like the CD player or mp3 format. Would the CD player have succeeded if everyone needed to buy a different CD player when their favorite band released an album on a type of CD incompatible with certain devices? We think that it will be awful for the future of entertainment if content becomes restricted and suppressed by a fragmented ecosystem. It's already restricted enough behind walled gardens and behind 30-second unskippable intrusive and spyware-laden ads.

Can you imagine if HTTP or TCP/IP were proprietary protocols? We can't either. Eventually all media distribution platforms need to adhere to standards if they want mass adoption in this new space. The thought is to start that early and start it with a free and open-source model. A universal protocol is needed. We're building it and we're launching it soon.

San Diego

Three years ago the Alexandria project started as an idea in the minds of the Alexandria co-founders. At the time we rented a house to work on the project in Ocean Beach. It was exactly like the TV show Silicon Valley. We hacked away for a week before driving a bus to the Inside Bitcoins Las Vegas conference. That's where the world learned about Alexandria at first. It's where we met Melanie Swan, the author of Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy, who wrote about Florincoin and Alexandria in her book published by O'Reilly Media in January 2015. You know, the techie books with animal illustrations featured on each cover.

The team is back at it in Ocean Beach, but this year, the team is twice as large and the goals are twice as ambitious. Here's a sneak peek from our dev scrum session on Monday, day 1:

The idea is to get the new publisher and new backend done and ready to be released by the end of Q3. By then Alexandria should be in open beta mode ready for anyone to test and try out. It's been a long three years that we've managed to keep cool and not get pwned by the market. It is time to show the world what Alexandria is all about.

Following Florincoin and Alexandria

Look out for more updates on Alexandria and Florincoin, as well as the OIP working group (OIPWG), by following our twitter accounts:

Florincoin
Alexandria

We want Alexandria to be as awesome as possible because the tech we're building upon will make existing content providers seem outdated. It reminds me of the legacy banking systems showing their age in a world with new, programmable, censorship-proof Bitcoin.