*Disclaimer – Products & services introduced in this blog are discontinued or deprecated; check out our ecosystem for current alternatives and documentation for latest developer guides.

Over the last few months, the core team at RSS3 has implemented many updates to the entire RSS3 project. We are so excited to share what they entail, as they form a critical part in helping us build the future of Web3.

RSS3 is the feed of Web3. Whether you’re building a social media network, an activity tracker, a marketplace, or a profile page- you will need a feed and a source to run it. With Web3 growing way beyond its financial origins, we are looking forward to seeing RSS3 become one of the most important infrastructures in the ecosystem. We have gained a considerable amount of experience as not only the first but the top Web3 feed provider and would love to share our thoughts on our recent updates.

The Feed of Web3

The fundamental unit of existence in the Web3 world is an address. A feed is usually understood as all the activities of a given (or series of) address(es). However, it is tough to decide what should be included in an address’s feed, as the Web3 ecosystem is quite complicated. Thus, a feed should not be considered as a transaction history but rather a series of items that will collectively describe what the address is about.

For now, we define a feed of Web3 as the collection of all activities about an address that are:

• Origin-Exclusive: The original intention behind the item should be bonded with the owner- spam is likely excluded.
• Content-Valuable: The item itself needs to sufficiently be utilized as valuable content to become part of the feed.
• Human-Readable: All items need to be easy for a human to read
• Action-Explainable: The action behind the item should be explainable. If some activities are less informative and cannot be interpreted as actions, they will be skipped.

RSS3 will guarantee a far more secure, reliable, and comprehensive information source using this definition. For example, if someone spams a user such as vitalik.eth with random NFTs, these activities are not included as items in his feed. This also means that finance-related activities will not be excluded in the way they were before, as some of them fit our above definition. The way we support Web2 content and information will change as well according to the updates we have made to our infrastructure

RSS3 utilizes a data interpretation and information dissemination rule (generalized from human activities) to output a general Web3 feed. However, we also understand that the value of information varies by context. Thus, we are looking forward to introducing a mechanism based on a general feed that allows users (applications) to customize their configurations.

Of course, we are also introducing a new API to help all types of developers gain access to this data according to their different structural needs.

The New API and Unidata*

It is essential to remain focused and modularized as we upgrade RSS3’s API in this manner. The new RSS3 API will no longer support data such as profiles, assets or links, as we want to ensure that RSS3 creates the best feed possible.

Of course, there is still great value that lies in aggregated data. That is why we have introduced Unidata. For those who use RSS3 for more than just feed items, Unidata enables all developers to access Web3 data in a quick, easy, modularized, and configurable way.

The new RSS3 API is powerful yet concise: it allows users to quickly get the feed of one or a set of addresses. Furthermore, you can set what feed type (s) you would like to see by simply adding a parameter. We expect a more significant number of better-quality dApps to be built using this new beta API. For further reading, our API doc can be found here: https://docs.rss3.io. One can now build an NFT whale tracker or a Mirror.xyz reader in minutes!

RSS3.io

RSS3.io used to be our only developer portal, and as such, we often received comments from users who said they had a hard time understanding what RSS3/ “The Feed of Web3” means. We were looking at various options and decided that the best way to convey the ideas behind RSS3 is to make the protocol usable for an average user.

The challenge here resides in what kind of product RSS3.io should be. We have developed different demo apps previously, including Re:ID, Web3 Pass (Cheers), and Revery. While they have been fantastic products, we believe we needed to build something more essential. The most fundamental unit of RSS3 is the feed of a single address, and we believe this can be a fascinating starting point.

Now, on the RSS3.io homepage*, you will see a clean site with just one feature (other than the developer portal): searching for an address’s feed. If you want to learn about an address, there are five popular scanners to use, each with separate transaction types.

However, RSS3.io provides a significantly more accessible and straightforward way to search for feeds. A beautiful feed with cross-network activities, including gaming, NFTs, events, and token transactions, will appear in milliseconds by simply inputting an ENS or an EVM address. As stated previously, this aesthetic feed will also become configurable in the near future.

$RSS3

We released our native token in February and have already experimented with governance proposals. Seeing as the project is making tremendous progress, we would love to see $RSS3 gradually take on more utilities even before releasing our fully decentralized nodes. We are also expecting two new use cases alongside the existing governance utility:

• For Gated-Queries: We expect to see more growth in the usage of RSS3 API. Just as we have been testing the staking mechanism with a pre-staking test run, we will gradually start experimenting with how developers can use $RSS3 to get more queries, either in number or frequency.
• For RSS3.io: As Rss3.io becomes an official application, we would love to see how $RSS3 will directly interact with some of our future features. This might include unlocking specific functionalities within the app or other services of value.

One More Thing…

As described above, these are significant changes to RSS3. Naturally, this comes with a considerable amount of offloading. As RSS3 now focuses exclusively on feeds, profiles, and links will be moved to a new infrastructure called Crossbell. For those who have burnt $PASS before for an RNS, Crossbell will also take care of you.

We look forward to seeing the upcoming social summer and new apps built upon these enhanced infrastructures. Stay tuned for more information about RSS3 and Crossbell!

The RSS3 Team