Ramine Darabiha · Product and R&D Leader

Open-Web Identity and Infrastructure

DWeb / @DNS

User-owned identity, social-login wallets, and a gasless social rollup that Tezos core developers called the first of its kind.

The open-web infrastructure I founded and led at @DNS: identity, a social rollup, and IPFS as a drive.

The open web has good primitives and bad social shape. Decentralized storage, portable identity, user-owned media: the pieces exist, but if the experience is slow or strange, nobody lives there. The work was compression: many open primitives, one consumer product.

Identity came first, and it was the hardest version of a problem I had been working for years, account systems at Rovio, cross-device identity at Storm8, marketplace identity at Republic. Most wallets charge the complexity tax up front: keys, recovery, chains, signatures. We made user-owned identity feel like a consumer account: a social login that creates a non-custodial wallet, a human-readable name, devices and wallets gathered behind one profile. Account abstraction, treated as a product problem, and the craft is deciding where the abstraction stops.

The social layer had one rule: posting, liking, and following cannot feel expensive, financially or mentally. Underneath sat a custom rollup. Actions landed instantly, batched off-chain, settled to IPFS, anchored on Tezos, public and auditable, with no gas on social actions. A core rollup developer at Marigold reviewed it, called it more open than Twitter because the entire history could be pulled from IPFS, and said we were the first to build social this way on Tezos. Tezos Commons called it one of the most sophisticated and ambitious consumer applications in the ecosystem. Messari and the Tezos Foundation picked it up independently. Marigold's own engineers were writing up the same architecture from the infrastructure side at the same time; we had arrived there from what a feed has to feel like, and shipped the consumer version.

The storage story started earlier, with Epona: IPFS mounted as a local drive, a content-addressed network you browse like a folder. The same instinct at every layer, give people a familiar handle on a strange system, then stop.

Gallery

  • The architecture: posts mint on Tezos, likes and comments batch onto the rollup, history settles to IPFS. No gas on social actions.
  • A creator's profile on the system: media, identity, and audience in one place they own.
  • The page a DID becomes: links, media, and identity on one address you own. Press called it a Linktree built on a decentralized identity.
  • Epona, the earlier R&D: IPFS mounted as a local drive, so the open internet browses like a folder on your computer.

Links