Matters Lab launches collaboration with Meson Network

When Matters Lab builds out the decentralized social and content graph that users can control and applications can share, we have to solve the entire process from content creation to distribution. 

When it comes to decentralized storage, there are many options available. For example on IPFS, the de facto standard of content addressing, we can pin data with centralized services such as Pinata, Infura, and matters.news, or with decentralized incentive mechanisms such as Filecoin, Arweave, and Crust. 

However, when it comes to accessing data, the infrastructure is lacking. If a user wants to retrieve a piece of content using IPFS directly, she has to go through a public IPFS gateway. Public gateways, some of which we listed in our IPFS modal, are voluntarily provided by the IPFS community, without much guarantee or incentives for their sustainability. A similar problem exists for blockchain as well: when a user requests the content stored on Ethereum by Traveloggers, she has to go through a particular service provider such as Infura, which introduces a centralized point.

This is the bandwidth sharing problem, and what Meson Network sets out to solve. Meson Network allows nodes to contribute their bandwidth while earning tokens, effectively forming a trustless CDN. Applications can then use routing tables maintained by Meson Network to find the nearest and fasted node for their users, improving the user experience while keeping it sustainable.

Matters Lab is thrilled to announce our collaboration with Meson Network, which fills a crucial piece in our infrastructure. As the first step, matters.news integrated Meson Network API into the IPFS modal, so when a user retrieves content from IPFS directly, she can use it to redirect to the nearest gateway, speeding up the process of content retrieval.

As Matters Lab further decentralized its social and content graph, more use cases of fast, reliable, and decentralized content retrieval will emerge. We are excited to go down this route together with the Meson Network team, and together build a truly decentralized social and content graph for everyone. 

Let us know what you think of the new feature, and what new use cases can be supported!

About Meson Network

Meson Network is committed to creating an efficient bandwidth marketplace on Web3, using blockchain protocol model to replace the traditional labor-based sales models, consolidating and monetizing idle bandwidth from long-tail users with low cost. Meson is the foundation of data transmission for decentralized storage, computation, and the emerging Web3 Dapp ecosystem.

About Matters Lab 

Matters Lab was established in 2018, with the mission to create a freer and fairer creator ecosystem through the next evolution of the Internet, Web3. Our initiatives include using decentralization tools to protect digital rights, design a self-governing system and community, and invent models for a new creator economy.

Matters.News is the first entrance of Matters Lab. It is the largest open-source decentralized publishing platform in the Web3 world with 80,000 content creators. Traveloggers is the second entrance leading to a news creator economy model. We will be launching our third project, The Space, towards governing public space with radical market principles.