Cortex App to launch new Web3 content network this summer | ZDNet

In its quest to make “Web3 available to everyone,” the Core team behind the newly-formed Cortex App said Monday that it’s introducing a new Web3 content network for launch in June. It will “bring Web2 functionality, such as social posts and blogs, into a decentralized and user-owned Web3.” This is the same group who launched free “.hmn” domain names on the Polygon protocol earlier this year.

Cortex Network, according to the release on Monday, will afford users new levels of control and privacy for themselves and their content. What’s more, the network will enable new ways to collaborate and define payment models for NFTs and content. 

“In the Cortex Network, each page (URL), will be a wallet address where a user could receive tokens for their content, or send out tokens as well,” Leonard Kish, co-founder of Cortex App told ZDNet. “Each page will essentially be a store for data and a store for NFTs or other tokens,” he said.

How it works

The Cortex Network will act like a proof-of-stake blockchain, whereby publishers stake so-called CRTX tokens to validate user updates and then publish them over the Polygon network. A new kind of index, known as HDIndex, will create a hash that will act as an on-chain proof and a lookup to content updates. The press release claims that “when publishing on the Cortex Network, users will own their content as they control updates with their keys.”

The goal for the Cortex Network is to simplify Web3 publishing, making it easier for current Web2 publishers to migrate to a user-owned Web3 content network.

The Network is based on a network architecture in which batches of updates (known as “commits”) contribute to a local state of content which, in turn, becomes part of the globally verifiable localized consensus. What all that means is that each commit contributes to a globally verifiable state for content with a complete history of the content at a particular web address. “In the Cortex system, URLs and crypto addresses are nearly synonymous as part of a human-readable namespace for keys that act as lookups to content,” according to the press release. 

Kish notes that when it comes to new ways to collaborate and define payment models for NFTs, the NFT domains (such as “kish.hmn”) and subdomains (“leo.kish.hmn”) on where the content lives are fully transferable, so an NFT can have a full story. And when transferred, that story (the content) can move with the NFT domain as well. 

“We are working on several ways to expand how NFTs work and the kinds of value they can transmit, and this is one,” Kish said. “Others are coming as well.”

Barriers to break down

Price, complexity, scalability and consistency are four obstacles in the Web3 publishing progress, and the Cortex Content Network intends to overcome them. The Network will act as a “complete stack to enable not only a fast and reliable decentralized content environment for Web3, but scalable as well,” according to the Cortex App blog.  

Further work is needed before the Network is ready for prime time. “We are working with partners now on testing elements of the network, but we don’t have an exact date,” Kish said. “We do expect to be able to provide an exact date for launch in the month of June.”