Stellar : AT Protocol Integration

Disclaimer: see about me @ the end

High level technical strategy and community benefits of an integration of the Stellar blockchain with AT Protocol. To describe community benefits I will use as examples projects from round #33 of the Stellar Community Fund from the Crowdfunding, Social Impact and Marketplace use case categories.

About AT Protocol:

The Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol or atproto) is a decentralised network protocol for building open social media applications. AT Protocol essentially allows for the creation of a global network of Personal Data Servers that applications built using the protocol can access and inter operate with. Currently there are approx. 30 million users using the network primarily through the Bluesky app.

From Wikipedia “Bluesky was developed as a reference implementation of the AT Protocol, an open communication protocol for distributed social networks. Bluesky began in 2019 as a research initiative at Twitter, becoming an independent Public Benefit Company in 2021.^[19][20]Development for the social app accelerated in 2022 after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and subsequent severing of ties between the companies.^[21][22] Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in February 2023 and opened registrations in February 2024.^[23] Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey left Bluesky Social’s board by May 2024.^[24] The social media platform grew after October 2024, reaching 20 million users by November 2024.^[25][26]”

Here’s how it works:

• Identity: Users in AT Protocol have permanent decentralized identifiers (DIDs) that are used to control the authentication and transfer of data.
• Data is stored in repositories in Personal Data Servers (PDS) – anyone can run a PDS.
• Relays collect data updates from many servers in to a single firehose.
• App Views provide aggregated application data for the entire network. They support large-scale metrics (likes, reposts, followers), content discovery (algorithms – which r actually mainly heuristics), and user search.

This separation of roles is intended to provide users with choice between multiple interoperable providers, while also scaling to large network sizes including billions of users.

Stellar and AT Protocol:

In round #33 of the Stellar Community Fund there were numerous great projects that included a crowdfunding component, in fact most Social Impact projects involve some kind of crowdfunding component as the major driver of the project that’s why they are so well suited to the Stellar network. I am going to redefine crowdfunding as peer to peer exchange of value and data. This is where the integration makes sense, have you heard the saying “data is the new oil”. Stellar can provide a secure payment layer that allows for individual entities using atproto to manage their data sharing with micro fees for access. The cryptographic key pair used to sign both the stellar account and the atproto account gives the user entity complete control over their data in terms of where it is stored and who has access to it under what conditions, this is called Decentralised Data Sovereignty.

Use case example: Crowdfunding her education by Fund Stella – in this example a student beneficiary of the crowdfunding can post content data to their AT Protocol account creatively describing their education progress. The sponsors could follow the beneficiaries account on AT Protocol and interact with the content. They could also send funds directly to the beneficiaries stellar account (linked to their AT Protocol account) from their stellar account that is embedded in their AT Protocol account and it all happens seamlessly within the one application.

The stellar blockchain ecosystem and the AT Protocol social network ecosystem were both born out of the peer to peer developer community. Jed McCaleb who co-founded Stellar developed e-donkey, one of the most popular peer to peer file sharing sites, when he was 25. Paul Frazee and his team that were recruited by Jack Dorsey @ Twitter to develop the decentralised social network protocol (AT Protocol), also primarily came out of the peer to peer developer community. Jed recruited David Mazieres (head of secure computing @ Stanford University) to develop a secure consensus mechanism for the Stellar blockchain. David developed a Federated Byzantine Agreement protocol called Proof of Agreement (PoA), that is the heart of the Stellar network and effectively guarantees secure consensus for any group of agents that share trust lines. PoA is different from all other blockchain consensus protocols in that it effectively prevents $ybil attacks (51% style attacks). It is very much akin to the concept of peering that is at the heart of the internet, Mazieres developed it using what he calls his internet hypothesis insight. The fact that there is only one internet and that it prevents $ybil attacks forms the basis of the proof of the Stellar Consensus Protocol.

Federated Systems:

Both Stellar and AT Protocol (atproto) use a federated network of servers that all run the open source software of their respective protocols. In Stella’s case the servers act as nodes that run the stellar consensus protocol and maintain the decentralised blockchain ledger. In the case of atproto they are Personal Data Servers (PDS) and serve as repositories for user’s data. On both networks the servers exchange messages with each other, which is very much how the internet operates, as it too is a federated system. A federated system refers to a collection of interconnected but autonomous systems or components that work together to achieve a common goal. These systems maintain their independence while sharing data and resources as needed. Forests are very good examples of federated systems with trees behaving like nodes and mycelium providing the network that connects them.

In the case of the Stellar network the messages that servers exchange are binary votes of trust i.e. do I trust or not trust you, this is referred to as the agency of flexible trust. This is what prevents bad actors like $ybil from gaining a disproportionate influence over the network by undermining its reputation system.

In the case of atproto network: Individual records can be referenced across the network by the DID. A Personal Data Server (PDS) acts as an account’s trusted agent in the network, routes client network requests, and hosts repositories. A relay crawls many repositories and outputs a unified event Firehose. While the Web exchanges documents, the atproto exchanges schematic and semantic information, enabling the software from different organizations to understand each others’ data. This gives atproto clients freedom to produce user interfaces independently of the servers, and removes the need to exchange rendering code (HTML/JS/CSS) while browsing content.

Integration @ the protocol level:

Essentially Stellar decentralises the secure storage and transfer of value and atproto decentralises the secure storage and transfer of data. Integration of the 2 protocols is made quite seamless through the use of the Decentralised IDentifier (DID) standard. Atproto uses identity at the core of how the protocol works hence its name is a play on the @ symbol.

The atproto identity system consists of:

• ID provision. Users should be able to create global IDs which are stable across services. These IDs should never change, to ensure that links to their content are stable.
• Public key distribution. Distributed systems rely on cryptography to prove the authenticity of data. The identity system must publish their public keys with strong security.
• Key rotation. Users must be able to rotate their key material without disrupting their identity.
• Service discovery. Applications must be able to discover the services in use by a given user.
• Usability. Users should have human-readable and memorable names.
• Portability. Identities should be portable across services. Changing a provider should not cause a user to lose their identity, social graph, or content.

Using the atproto identity system gives applications the tools for end-to-end encryption, signed user data, service sign-in, and general interoperation.

I believe the key to a seamless and relatively easeful integration of the 2 protocols is to use a stellar account cryptographic key pair as the signing key for the atproto DID. This is done through the DID document. Stellar developers could then integrate smart wallets into atproto App Views through this key pair management via the DID document. A simple example could be taking the open source code for the Bluesky App View of atproto and introducing a stellar wallet that uses the same key pair in the DID document to sign transactions and view account balances of digital assets on the stellar network as the Bluesky App View uses to sign the authentication of data transfer on the atproto network.

Benefits of Integrating the Protocols:

If the following projects from round #33 of the Stellar Community Fund:

1. Kindfi – social impact crowd funding – $80k
2. The Give Hub – crowdfunding for impact projects in Latam and Africa – $45k
3. Fund Stella – crowdfunding her education – $30k
4. Geld project – RWA land management data verification and tokenisation – $150k

were to develop each of their projects utilising this integration then they have potential access to the nearly 30 million users (growing rapidly) who are already using atproto via the Bluesky App View. The benefits of this are obvious from a crowdfunding perspective especially given those 30 million users are predominantly from the progressive left in America (one of the ideal target demographics for social impact crowdfunding).

One Big peer to peer secure Marketplace for Data and Value:

Each of the communities associated with each of these projects and other Social Impact and Marketplace projects like:

• 5. Gain forest – bringing conservation data income to stellar – $150k
• 6. Nutri Chain – secure distribution of meals in Zambia – $120k
• 7. Kwikpik – same team as Gear up marketplace, a delivery marketplace – $140k

Could all become completely interoperable at the user level, so it is one big peer to peer marketplace and each App View brings an additional community of users and their unique data repositories to the network.

Each user has Decentralised Data Sovereignty:

Each of the users also now has a way to securely control their data and who has access to it for what fees. This obviously provides a very powerful development engine for how social impact data could be traded. Also for the users who develop creative content like music and video they can charge micro fees for access from a potentially massive interoperable marketplace of users. From my research this is the most powerful way to build user adoption on the stellar network.

Also for entities running Personal Data Servers (PDS) the stellar integration provides the payment rails that could be used to charge micro fees to user’s for data storage as well.

Possible call to action:

A group of interested members of the stellar community, ideally consisting of people that are developing crowdfunding, social impact and marketplace projects on stellar could come together and review the merits of integrating stellar with atproto. Then if it is deemed feasible and beneficial they could go about creating a protocol for the integration. If this is done at a protocol level then the whole community could benefit from the integration and most importantly have seamless access to the rapidly growing global marketplace for data.

For projects like Gain Forest and Geld Project that have sophisticated RWA data verification software that allows the data to be tokenised this integration would provide the ideal marketplace. In the sense that atproto would allow them to creatively engage a global market with their data, using sophisticated multi media. It also gives them huge potential for creating transparent exchanges between their sponsors and their beneficiaries.

Another powerful outcome of the integration could involve leveraging verification protocols for the DID, such that every service provider has one standardised location for sourcing any kind of user verification like KYC. This in turn has major implications for decentralised governance @degov.

Probably the best way to get a sense of the possibilities is to imagine billions of users using:

An open source and decentralised social media app development ecosystem with stellar fully integrated and each user has a secure DID, that controls both their data and their digital assets.

Possible next steps:

• Review DID:STELLAR https://www.mavennet.com/ Developers discord handle is @pmandic. If have tried reaching out to them but no response. This project was awarded $117.1k in round #16 of the Stellar Community Fund and has established a standard for DID:Stellar integration.
• Review the DID specs atproto and establish standard integration of the DID:Stellar:atproto.
• Review @proto app view documentation with a view to creating an app view with a stellar smart wallet integrated.
• Run an instance of atproto with a prototype app view that includes the wallet. Set up a Personal Data Server and have a small group of people start experimenting with the instance and smart wallet enabled app view.

Disclaimer: The only exposure I have had to computer science is through the stellar ecosystem. Mainly participating in the community fund beginning with round 4. So I am a bunny so to speak, which I think allows me to see things from the user perspective. So everything that has been said needs to be validated by professional computer science nerds.