TL;DR

Leaning on my UX expertise and familiarity with web3 consumer experiences, I led a team of designers and engineers from product definition through execution to deliver Medium’s first web3 prototype, Identitoy. Identitoy launched as a prototype to internal Medium staff and select partners.

Context

As Medium continued to explore ideas for the future of digital publishing, we took notice of the innovations happening around decentralized technologies and web3. Seeing the opportunity here to regain competitive and innovative edge in the online publishing industry, Medium formed an experimental team of engineers, designers, and researchers to investigate the first steps into a “decentralized Medium.”

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Problem

Consumer Problems

As the creator economy matured, consumers were facing new problems on Medium:

Creators wanted to truly own their content and not be reliant on particular platforms
Creators had to grow audiences within silo-ed ecosystems, making it hard to switch platforms due to protected network effects
Consumers are looking for unique and new ways to form deeper and more meaningful relationships with creators
Consumers want to have more influence over product development, not the other way around

Business Problems

Some of the initial business problems Medium faced during this transition were:

Medium’s teams across the board had low levels of familiarity with the web3 and broader decentralized internet
There was no clear strategy on where and how to begin transitioning Medium toward web3
A successful transition would require strong technical and strategic partnerships with existing players gaining momentum, such as Lens, Farcaster, Ceramic, Solid, and Dapper

Opportunity

Despite the ambiguous nature of pivoting Medium to a web3, we saw a massive opportunity to:

Deliver more value to creators, consumers, and developers through:
- True content ownership by leveraging decentralized storages
- Creating simpler identity management systems via wallets across fragmented platforms
- Creating follow-graphs that are independent of platform
- Bootstrapping new products with modular components (e.g., content, network)
- Building new content creation tools, formats, and consumer experiences
Build interoperable technology in collaboration with partners and competitors alike in the ecosystem, placing more agency, power, and value in the hands of the end-user
Medium’s pivot toward decentralization would position the company as a future-forward industry leader, especially after observing the downtrend of centralized technology companies (e.g., Facebook)

Preliminary discussions culminated in two approaches: 1) a protocol as a new content standard where platforms like Medium and Substack would become clients of, 2) a decentralized identity protocol where follow-graphs and content become embedded parts of the identity object. Due to adoption concerns, Medium chose to start with explorations around option 2.

Goals

To begin exploring possible ways to build a decentralized identity protocol, our experimental team decided to initiate a project titled Identitoy: a prototype that re-imagined what a web3-enabled LinkTree product might look like.

The prototype would allow users to create a wallet on the Flow blockchain, create an identity object tied to the wallet, and upload basic information such as content links to it.

The goals for Identitoy were the following:

<aside> 🎯 1. Leverage Identitoy as a learning process to familiarize ourselves with basic design and engineering processes of web3 products

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<aside> 🎯 2. Use Identitoy to demonstrate seriousness and building capabilities with partners and internal staff

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Some non-goals:

Be built on top of existing Medium codebase
Be a public-facing consumer product