Introducing Geo Genesis

Five years ago, a group of us saw the activity happening around Ethereum and decided to contribute by building The Graph. I saw The Graph's potential to be a global decentralized knowledge graph of all the world’s public knowledge and information. By using public infrastructure to organize and serve information, we could have better open and fair processes for influencing what information is considered the truth. Today we have a vibrant decentralized network and The Graph is solving the critical problem of efficiently accessing blockchain data for thousands of developers, but we still need to go a step further to see the full vision come to life.

Today I’m excited to share that we’ve spun out a separate company called Geo that I will be leading alongside some very talented engineers and designers. This is the very beginning of this journey and building Geo into its full form will undoubtedly take a lot of experimentation, iteration, and collaboration.

The problem

The current systems we use for managing and sharing information are broken. They’re controlled by corporations, making it hard for individuals and communities to retain control over their work. The internet was supposed to decentralize power but that power’s been reconcentrated into platforms. We need better tools for processing, curating, and making sense of information using public means that we can depend on and trust. We need that work to be verifiable and composable so that knowledge can be shared and used across applications.

The Graph, a decentralized infrastructure protocol for indexing and querying public information, was the first step toward solving that problem. Before decentralizing the infrastructure, platforms and applications could always re-exert control over users. Now, with The Graph mostly built out, it’s time to move one level up and get the rest of the way to the decentralization vision.

It’s time to bring real world data onto The Graph and change how people cooperate and organize.

Our goals with Geo are to:

1. Make it easy for communities to organize public knowledge and information into a knowledge graph
2. Create the best possible user interface for browsing and adding data to the global knowledge graph
3. Give communities the ability to create reputation systems based on merit, giving people power to influence their areas of expertise
4. Create political, cultural, and technological change by helping communities solve big challenges

Everything is information. The tools we use to organize information influence the structure of our companies, our institutions, and society itself. Geo is a new tool for organizing any kind of information.

On top of this foundation, developers can build amazing applications or end users can interact directly with an intuitive interface to create, customize, and build UIs without needing to code.

We unveiled Geo at Graph Day. One of our engineers, Devin Abbott, shared his take on Geo here. The initial demo we showed was an early version of the web3 browser.

Geo is two things: a web3 browser and a knowledge graph app. After Graph Day, we decided to refocus on the second part to make sure that we get the data building blocks right before coming back to the browser. This brings us to our initial upcoming public release: Geo Genesis.

Geo Genesis is a dapp for adding data to and searching for data from the global knowledge graph. Each datapoint is a triple with an entity, attribute, and value.

Information on Geo is interconnected and verifiable. You can see who added what and what process was used to vote on and accept that information. By introducing flexible reputation and governance systems, each community, or Space, can decide for themselves how they want to come to consensus on their part of the knowledge graph. Each industry can manage its own data, process for allocating power, and user interfaces. Geo Genesis has a stripped down feature set, but the initial users can help us make sure we have the starting point right.

We want to see Geo used in every field including Politics, Health, Science and more. Web3 is going to disrupt and displace many web incumbents. But we think its potential is even greater. We want to see web3 tackle problems the web wasn’t equipped to touch.

How can we use crypto to help solve the world’s biggest challenges?

Most of the big problems in the world are problems of coordination. We either can’t agree on what the right course of action is or we have the wrong incentives in place. Humans are endlessly creative. With the right incentives and coordination tools, there’s no problem we can’t solve. At Geo, we want to take that outlook and focus it on one geography to start so we can go deep and put these ideas into action. The city we’re going to focus on initially is San Francisco. We’re going to be using in person events to organize and help make a difference using web3. If we’re successful in using web3 for impact at a local level, people can adopt what works in other cities to scale around the globe.

Crypto is a technological, political, and cultural movement. The technology for web3 is almost ready. The other two acts are about to get started.

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