A ‘crypto Crunchbase’ is mapping the decentralized web

A searchable, reliable index of the decentralized web—that’s the vision of Everest, a new social registry built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Everest launched yesterday with 100 decentralized projects already added to the registry. The platform comes with built-in governance to ensure a useful and accurate record, and incentivizes its users to keep it that way.

Employees or key stakeholders of these projects can claim ownership of these initial projects, but any user can register a project by paying a fee of 10 DAI. The DAI fee is sent to the Everest Reserve Bank, which pools these funds to be used to settle listing disputes and fund registry improvements through bounties, according to the team behind the project.

In the words of Coinfund founder Jake Brukhman, Everest is a kind of “crypto Crunchbase where the startups will actually have incentives to self-report, because they earn some kind of token incentive and share in the profits.”

Everest uses the ERC-1056 standard to give each project a unique on-chain identity. Listings include relevant descriptions, links, and images, and additional features are expected in the future for blog posts, job listings, and more.

Projects that are misrepresented or have inaccurate details can be challenged by members of the community by staking 10 DAI to the Everest Reserve Bank. Existing projects on the registry vote to accept or reject the challenge—if it passes, the challenger receives their original staked DAI plus 9 additional DAI as a reward paid from the Everest Reserve Bank. 

Through this system, the community is responsible for maintaining the registry instead of a volunteer force or centralized third party. If a project is registered that is not owned by employees or key stakeholders of the actual project, the creator can transfer ownership to a true stakeholder. If they refuse, the unauthorized project can be challenged, removed, and replaced with one created by employees.

Everest has been developed by the minds behind The Graph, a project aiming to make it easier to access and share on-chain data between dapps. The Graph project lead Yaniv Tal spoke with Decrypt about his team’s plans for Everest, and its potential to inspire other decentralized projects:

“Right now most products in the crypto space are centralized products that slightly use blockchains,” Tal said. “We wanted to demonstrate that you could build beautiful products on top of an entirely decentralized protocol stack,” he said. 

“Everest project data is indexed on The Graph. It’s curated by its members in a decentralized way. As we link more and more data through decentralized curation we are forming the fabric of Web3, a new platform that will completely change how software is built and how humans cooperate and organize,” said Tal.

Tal elaborated on Twitter that the Everest Reserve Bank can be used to improve the platform via bounties. Keys to the Everest Reserve Bank are currently held by the The Graph team who plan to transfer ownership to a DAO in the future. The project acts as a template that could be used for other on-chain social registries of content, assets, or identities.