New Look, Same Goals

With the launch of the Sarcophagus dApp on mainnet, we’ve updated our visual brand identity and are showcasing an evolved visual style through the landing page for sarcophagus.io. Moving towards an exciting (and more accessible) future for the DAO and the project.

We’ve gotten a lot of love and our fair share of critiques from our initial launch, and we’re arriving in a new era where we’re a bit more modern and approachable without losing our original intent. We are working to better communicate through this updated visual style, and hope to attract even more potential users and collaborators.

Some traits we’d like to embrace in both form and function:

Versatile.

Utilitarian.

Accessible.

Not Minimal but Essential.

Security hasn’t been the most outwardly inclusive industry or popular facet of our increasingly digital experiences as humans. We believe everyone deserves the freedom to own, store, transfer and recover data without an elaborate knowledge of cryptography or the latest cyber-security practices or software. Security in todays digital world shouldn’t be saved for those who can afford it, or have been afforded it through a position of power.

Everyone should be able to use this tool, and everyone should be able to join the community and participate in our leadership. We’ve made a considerable effort to remove everything from the landing page that wasn’t valuable & necessary to visitors; only the bare essentials. We’ve seen a lot of sites crowded with content and features that don’t always deliver on product and promises made for the purpose of marketing.

We want our project to speak for itself, and remain open to interpretation.

There are a few use cases we can cite, but we don’t want to limit the capabilities of this tool by telling anyone what its meant for. The d’app is going to prove most useful as an underlying building block; a solution for anyone in any industry who wants to use it. As an open-source project centered around transparency and decentralization, we are constantly encouraging people to build with us or come to us with their ideas.

For now, we’re avoiding the temptation of elaborate storytelling (until we can do it with more certainty). Another core value of the project is the infinite potential within our community. Peer to peer protocol & the structuring as a DAO means the community has an open door into what might ordinarily be kept ‘behind the scenes’ or between stakeholders.

After all, the service providers are all individual node operators with the freedom to set their own working parameters. Our token is only for use within our ecosystem, so the ability to pursue a role as a leader in embedded in our DNA.

As a DAO, we believe in empowering everyone with ownership over the developments and infrastructure of the project itself. Every member of the community is a stakeholder, and we invite everyone to come build with us and help grow; whether you’re a developer, mod, or just a fan of the project and the functionality.

A page from the V2 style guide.

We are introducing some new badge style designs to be used along with our logo as a way to bring more context to the original designs and illustrations we introduced with V1.

COLORS

We’re introducing some earthy, rich tones in shades of green, red, and tan/ brown. We want to keep the use of color understated, and maintain the simplicity of black and white. These tones should help reflect the variety in USE CASE potential for the brand. The dapp has more potential than we can dream up- there is no singular definition of what sarcophagus is- because the answer to what it CAN BE is supposed to be open ended.

TYPOGRAPHY

Helvetica seems like a stark contrast to our former font, courier. Its one of the most widely used and versatile sans serifs around- and you can’t go anywhere without seeing this font (whether you know it or not). Its legibility in every design scenario is one of its greatest strengths; remaining readable in a variety of type settings. The sans serif is considerably more modern, but still works across all browsers and devices- one of our biggest priorities for the project.

Well known as one of the most timeless fonts around, we believe this font will help us communicate more efficiently and emphasize the accessibility of our product.

LANGUAGE

We’ve worked to simplify the way we talk about the protocol to help new users understand the front end while creating a sarcophagus, and we hope to educate and be a resource for those who want to use it. The V2 litepaper will reflect this and demonstrate a much different use of language when it comes to explaining the roles and processes at work within the dapp. The terminology isn’t being discarded, but introduced in tandem with the more common terms they’re meant to represent.

Archaeologists are still the node operators, embalmers are still the creators, and the curse is still the smart contract. While we believe the shorthand could prove helpful for some- they also present a barrier to those who aren’t familiar with the project and aren’t able to invest a lot of time into decoding our handy metaphors.

We are increasing our focus on user experience and making our community more accessible, and getting more engagement in the DAO’s and leadership roles within our community (where we can eventually vote on which language we should use; if necessary!) We look forward to getting feedback on our new approach, and fine tuning this over time.

As for the dapp, there has been several changes to the way it works for creators and node operators alike. Most notably, the introduction of a multi-node architecture. In v1, the creator could view a list of available nodes and choose one to enter into a smart contract with, giving them the responsibility for moving the encrypted payload onto Arweave, and publishing it for the recipient to decrypt if the resurrection time passed. The builders knew this could be unreliable in the event of a node operator going offline or acting maliciously regardless of incentives built into their bond and curse contract.

The multi-node architecture was one of our biggest priorities and focus for building over the past year or so; critical in making Sarcophagus as robust as possible.

For V2, we’ve used the Shamir Secret Sharing scheme to design an anti-fragile, robust multi-node architecture. The more technical aspects of the encryption has become far more complex, and the creator now has the ability to choose how many nodes they’d like to employ, and how many must be available for their individual sarcophagus’ unwrapping.

This creates a sliding scale of security for each sarcophagus that can be unique to the creators needs and intention. Instead of 2 layers of encryption, there are key shards which are encrypted, divided between nodes, and encrypted again.

Luckily, we’ve been testing profusely and really ‘kicking the tires’ before going to mainnet. We’ve had an incredible amount of help from the community during testing and successfully got more than 100 node operators up, running, and ready to continue their work on mainnet. This was aided by our unique system of incentives planned and executed by the DAO.

We look forward to expanding our work, seeing the dapp in use for any variety of circumstances, meeting and working with other teams and to continue learning how to improve security and build foundational frameworks for the future of the web!

To view the new style guide: https://www.notion.so/sarcophagus/Dep-Sarcophagus-Documentation-e9366eab35f54d8a86229541eb3b0778?pvs=4#ff722d2712134672b3f87c2f1ad46bc0

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