The Greeting Protocol

The Greeting provides core logic that all users can reference as a smart contract on the blockchain. This core logic has basic features such as receiving and sending greetings when logged in with a web3 account, and also includes the following original features and mechanisms. By combining these elements, The Greeting protocol can strengthen connections between people through greetings and establish credible accounts. Furthermore, it can protect privacy and establish a new culture using greeting words. Ultimately, The Greeting protocol could facilitate the exchange of greetings on a public blockchain, building a new foundation for trust and communication in the digital world. This would enable users with good intentions to smoothly use various services and reduce the number of malicious users.

Campaigns and Greeting Words

Events that serve as opportunities for greetings, such as Christmas cards and New Year's cards, are called campaigns. Campaigns must be smart contracts, but anyone can create them as long as they are linked to the core logic managed by The Greeting. Each campaign will have its individual greetings structure. The protocol stipulates that data and logic, such as the amount per message, greeting data specifications, campaign duration, and a list of greeting words, should be included in the campaign. Although smart contracts have immutable constraints and changing the logic after deployment is not easy, deploying a new smart contract for each campaign allows for continuous specification adjustments in the future.

As social norms change over time, expressions like "Dear" and "I hope this finds you well" have become less common, and AI generators like GPT have started to supplement the surface layer of emails. We propose a bold move to essential, short-word communication. Therefore, we introduced the concept of greeting words into campaigns. Each campaign will have a few short words, about four characters each, registered as greeting words. Accounts will be required to choose a greeting word for each campaign. These greeting words will be stored on-chain, and which campaign and which greeting word were chosen will be public. Once a greeting word is chosen, it cannot be changed within the campaign, and users cannot switch between greeting words based on the recipient. We expect this to be a simple and enjoyable game for everyone, such as displaying popularity rankings of greeting words after a campaign ends or showing the match rate of greeting words in one's exchanged greetings. Additionally, we aim to create a new culture where sending a message without any content is not considered rude and a new level of convenience where users can send greetings with just the feeling of wanting to send them, simply by having a greeting word.

Sending Fee

The sending fee per message can be set for each campaign. This allows communities to create campaigns and reflect the economic situation of each country at that time, using indicators such as 0.01% of GDP per capita, in the fee. For example, in current Japan, this would be equivalent to 500 yen per message. Traditional letters could be sent for 63 yen per piece, but in this abundant era with countless free communication methods, the greetings in this project have more of a digital gift nature rather than just being a means of communication. Therefore, we have set the target at 500 yen, which is considered a suitable price range for a small gift that is not too high or too low. The sender's financial burden serves as a reason to not send messages recklessly, and the goal is to enable sending only to those who truly want to receive them. We also expect that the cost performance of spam-like sending by businesses will become unfavorable, making their existence unviable.

Furthermore, 90% of the sending fee will be pooled as a fund for The Greeting, and 10% will be sent to the recipient as an incentive. By having 10% deposited to the recipient, even if unwanted greetings are sent, there is a gain, so it will not be a nuisance. In the case of email, for example, changing addresses was a common response to an increase in spam, but web3 accounts have past activity history associated with them, so we don't want users to change their accounts. With the 10% incentive, even if many greetings seeking connections with celebrities arrive, there will be a financial gain, and it will not be a simple nuisance, so we expect users to continue using the service.

Privacy

The information stored on-chain includes only the header information, such as the recipient account, sender account, affiliated campaign, and the greeting word chosen for each campaign. The content and images will be stored on devices using end-to-end (E2E) encryption, making it viewable only by the sender and recipient. As for the E2E encryption procedure, the sender's client app uploads the encrypted content and images, encrypted using public key cryptography, to IPFS. Then, the encrypted secret key is stored on-chain, and only the sender and recipient accounts can restore the secret key. Lit Protocol will be utilized for the exchange of secret keys on-chain.

Soul Bound Token (SBT) and Public Content and Images

The individual greeting standard adopts Soul Bound Tokens (SBTs). SBTs are non-transferable NFTs that can be viewed in client apps capable of viewing NFTs, allowing users to view the received greetings as SBTs. The intention is for users who cherish their NFT collections to perceive the greetings as SBTs, displayed alongside their collections, as part of their collection. At the same time, we believe that users will appreciate the ability to display greetings like NFT collections in B2C applications, such as when celebrities send greetings to event attendees. However, as secret information is transmitted off-chain, the SBT cannot directly display the content or images. To address this, we allow users to optionally set public content and images. If the user does not set anything, an appropriate display will be generated based on the public greeting word and sender account information.

Greeting Graph and Data Referencing for Account Credibility Calculation

As mentioned earlier, The Greeting deals with greetings, which have universality and seasonality, and take time to accumulate history. This makes them potentially more reliable data for proving the goodwill of an account than existing on-chain data for many service providers. However, the logic for account credibility is not included in The Greeting protocol. While we plan to provide a reference implementation for account credibility as part of this project to demonstrate the concept, the protocol will focus on providing the underlying greeting graph and campaign attributions for calculation. We believe that it is appropriate and best suited to meet the needs of all users for third-party for-profit companies and other non-profit organizations to independently provide their own solutions within The Greeting ecosystem.