YZ.social is a platform designed to enable a new class of social applications—from high-performance gaming and messaging to global collaboration and commerce tools—hosted on a truly democratic, user-owned resource economy. Our vision is to eliminate centralized extraction and return all value directly to the community that creates it.
🌐 What is YZ?
YZ is enabling a comprehensive user ecosystem by creating network layers that provide secure communication, computation, and commerce. We believe anyone, anywhere, should be able to participate in and benefit from the digital infrastructure they rely on.
The system is engineered to allow any device—from high-end servers to mobile phones—to provide essential services like computing, communication, and storage and be rewarded in YZ coins. This compensation is the currency that fuels the very usage of the platform, creating a self-sustaining and democratic economic cycle.
⛓️ The Braided Blockchain
The Braided Blockchain is the financial and computational engine of the YZ.social network. It achieves mass-scale decentralization through a sharded architecture—a mesh of numerous smaller, parallel chains that break down massive computational loads, allowing them to be processed with high efficiency.
Fast, Secure P2P Payments: Each shard operates autonomously with its own small, fast, rotating group of validators, allowing thousands of local transactions to be finalized simultaneously across the network.
The key innovation is the Braid of Trust—a mesh of persistent peer-shard connections where a small, random group of peer shards (Notaries) audit a shard's history. Instead of relying on slow global consensus, Notaries issue signed validation receipts as a public seal of legitimacy for each finalized block.
⚡ The Concordance Engine
The Concordance Engine is the high-performance, distributed compute platform at the heart of running shared, multi-user applications. It is a censorship-resistant system that ensures reliable operation by running bit-identical replicated processes across multiple nodes.
Fast, Verifiable Processing: All participating validators arrive at auditable, identical results—a prerequisite for trustworthy decentralized applications in commerce, multi-user games, collaboration tools, and more.
- Replicated Compute Platform: A distributed virtual machine that runs bit-identical, censorship-proof processes in lock-step
- Handles Churn: Seamlessly handles node dropout by instantly replacing and synchronizing new nodes
- Bit-perfect Synchronization: Assures perfect integrity via cryptographic state verification
- Developer Empowerment: Treat the entire distributed system as a single, reliable computer
💰 Universal Supplementary Income
The system's most powerful feature is Universal Supplementary Income. Every node is regularly rewarded with YZ coins for demonstrating Proof of Availability—ensuring their device is online and ready to provide services.
This simple yet powerful financial model is the user's dividend of ownership, ensuring that direct value and economic control remain in the hands of the people who power the network.
- Proof of Availability: Checked hourly on a randomized schedule—just keep the application running
- Proof of Service: Additional rewards for actively providing services like computation, storage, or acting as a validator
- Proof of Storage: Rewards for storing data on behalf of the network
Participants can spend their earned reward income to use the YZ platform or for any other purpose.
👥 The Team
We are a team of experienced systems architects, application designers and futurists who intend to improve people's lives, fulfilling the promise of the Internet.
- David A Smith: World-leading architect in multiplayer and collaborative systems. Co-founder of Red Storm Entertainment, Chief Architect of the Croquet Project.
- Howard Stearns: Collaborated with computing visionaries (Berners-Lee, Kay, Rosedale). Expertise in Web technology and distributed systems.
- Aleksandr Petrosyan: Physicist, Blockchain expert. Co-wrote the world's fastest Authenticated Database.
- Ron Teitelbaum: Software engineer in immersive collaboration. Leads the Cryptography Team for Squeak.
🗺️ Roadmap
Our development roadmap outlines the path from core infrastructure to a fully realized decentralized ecosystem, with meaningful applications demonstrating the platform's capabilities at each stage.
Resources
📊 Presentation
View the YZ Braided Blockchain presentation
📄 Whitepaper
Read the full technical whitepaper on the Braided Blockchain
📱 Applications
The value of a platform is what you can do with it. Here are the applications being built on YZ:
