Hello, Hyper

In our experience, Dat has not only been used to solve problems, we have also made contributions of different kind to the ecosystem. As community contributors, we have proudly hosted many comm-comm meetings and we attend every consortium meeting we’ve been invited to for the last year.

Welcome, Hypercore Protocol

Last week, the Dat Foundation published a post announcing their rebranding into Hypercore Protocol and also introducing the new Hypercore Protocol organization for governing its tech. Since we were closer to the community and many of their teams, we were familiarized with the new modules. In fact, we’ve been using some of the newest modules, like the hyperdrive-daemon in some of the projects that we are working on.

But, let’s get back to the announcement. It involves two really cool things. First, all the Hyper modules are the shiniest building blocks in town for building decentralized apps. They come with a lot of improvement, from better P2P networking to increased performance. By the way, one of the star products around the Hyper ecosystem was also released last week, we are talking about Beaker Browser beta release. The Beaker release is a good example to watch first hand all the improvements that Hyper stack brings to the table.

Then, the other interesting point that derives directly from the post, is about the governance model for the Hypercore Protocol organization. Now, building block modules that were previously attached to a single user account in GitHub for example, are moved to this brand new organization. This movement in combination with the new HYP proposal specs (some sort of replacement for Dat’s DEP) give us a hint on how the new features will eventually land into the Hypercore modules set.

It’s also important to notice that behind Hypercore Protocol there are two companies that were steadily pushing forward the old Dat landscape and now they bring us to this new Hyper place, these are Blue Link Labs (the company behind Beaker) and Hyperdivision. Knowing all this can help to clarify and hence improve a challenging issue that haunted Dat organization in the past (and quite possibly many other open source projects too), we are talking about communication issues. And for better communication, one important requirement is transparency, without transparency you can’t have clear processes and reaching a goal this way becomes really hard. Having a separate organization, detached from personal accounts, with clear faces behind the final decisions and an open process for introducing new changes (all this in a context with limited resources and bandwidth) give us a much more defined and clear shape. Making things better becomes easier if we start from this point.

The New Dat Community Ecosystem

There is another interesting but subtle aspect that comes with the new Hyper organization and this rebranding, hyper, just becomes another actor, another place in this decentralized puzzle. With the rebranding, the need for a new umbrella term becomes clearer and will give us a new perspective of the ecosystem. Along the last years, many projects have grown using some of the basic mechanisms introduced by the foundational blocks, more specifically, Hypercore. This foundational (self-declared) structure has given a lot of flexibility to many projects, like Cabal, Ara, Mapeo, just to name a few. Whilst these projects maintain a concrete relationship with some Hyper modules, they have made their own little ecosystem too. Naming things help us identify and also describe the world surrounding us. With the rebranding and the new Hypercore Protocol org scope, the necessity to name the new scenario becomes only that, a necessity. So, the new Dat Community Ecosystem is here. A conglomerate of projects with interconnected stacks all being part of this specific decentralized “neighbourhood”. Now the ecosystem feels bigger and stronger.

We Speak Hyper

We continue to invest time and efforts working on decentralized technologies. This rebranding didn’t come as something new for us, it was on our radar. In fact, we witnessed almost everything from the very front row. For the p2pcommons SDK we are working on a new integration with the hyperdrive-daemon that will land quite soon. We have also released two building blocks wrappers that improve the developer experience using Hyper. These are hypercore-promise and hyperdrive-promise. They have been eagerly adopted by projects like the dat sdk. Another of the additions is the experiment run by Martin that enables the latest libsodium to work in the browser, sodium-javascript-plus. Using it you can have hypercore@9 support in browsers today. We have more things planned for this hyper future that will hopefully help us push the decentralized space forward. If you are interested in building this future together, drop us a line, we are always looking for strategic partnerships.