Releap Protocol - Dropping Solana for Sui But Staying True to Arweave

I had the opportunity to speak with Aaron, the founder of Releap Protocol.

Some of you might remember Releap as the go-to Web3 NFT music marketplace on Solana. But all of that has now changed. Releap is now Releap Protocol, the first decentralised social graph on the Sui Network and Arweave, and its ambitious goals and innovative features have attracted significant attention. 

So what exactly happened to bring on this transformation?

Aaron explains that the initial red flag that they might be heading down the wrong path was the fact that it wasn't easy to get traction with music NFTs.

There really was no traction mostly because the market wasn’t interested in music-related NFTs and onboarding artists wasn’t easy.

The Releap team faced no hard fact that there was a lack of supply and demand. Not many artists were interested in making their music into NFTs, and on the other hand, collectors, buyers, and fans were not interested in purchasing and paying high premiums for the NFTs of underground bands they had never heard of. And the user base was saturated with people that just wanted to make a quick buck.

The team was faced with a very serious decision: Were they to continue building a platform, which was struggling as its very core, unable to onboard users as they had hoped to, or were they to move on to something which the Web3 space was more interested in - at least for the time being? (Anyone reading my articles will know I’m both a musician myself and an avid supporter of Web3 in the music space, but it seems Releap was not in the right place at the right time.)

It was tough ditching everything and going back to the drawing board.

So the team decided to scrap the first iteration of Releap - the NFT music marketplace - and make what the people wanted at the time: a decentralised social media platform.

We thought about what we could do.[…]We had to find product market fit.

But now, by building a decentralised social media platform, they also had to rethink the blockchains they were using. The underlying architecture of Solana that Releap was using was not adequate enough to be used to build a decentralised social media platform. So they looked elsewhere.

And so they found Sui.

Why SUI?

We felt the architecture was superior, Aaron said, continuing, “The way you write contracts, you can write [them] independently of each other, that run in parallel.”

Aaron told me that one of the biggest benefits of building a decentralised social media platform on Sui - one that is unique to it - is Dynamic Fields. And thanks to these, the team was able to build what they needed.

What are Dynamic Fields?

According to the Sui blog: Dynamic Fields are a generalisation of Child Objects. They allow Sui Move developers to extend their structs with new data, on-the-fly.

Having found Sui, the Releap team started building, and throughout 4 to 5 months were able to scrap all the music-related aspects of the platform and have a working product for decentralised social media. They also had the benefit that they are all developers, and could expedite the change.

I’m very grateful for my team.

And so, this was the birth of the Releap Protocol.

Releap Protocol

At this stage, the platform boasts a nice 5k+ registered profiles, including some of the Sui creators' ones. The platform allows you to connect with your wallet, and you are in. Each profile, post, and all other objects on the platform work as NFTs on Sui. 

Anyone familiar with Twitter (which is probably most people reading this) will find Releap Protocol familiar. Aaron mentioned how some people have even called it a "Twitter clone."

Check out Releap Protocol here.

Where does Arweave fit into the mix?

With the first iteration of Releap, a.k.a., the music platform, all music NFTs were stored on Arweave and directly streamed from it. With Releap Protocol the team aim to store all images, videos, and NFTs on Arweave too.

However, that isn't the case just yet.

The team had to temporarily remove Arweave from the mix due to time constraints when building the platform, as well as them looking for the best way to be able to pay for Arweave uploads in the background - without sacrificing any of the User Experience. 

“Have you heard of the Bundlr Network?” I asked Aaron, which he had not. I promptly shared their Twitter profile with him in hopes of them getting connected. Bundlr has built an infrastructure that allows for payments to the Arweave Network to be made with non-native tokens.

But, for now, Releap Protocol is using IPFS and pinning services as an alternative, but that is not where they are settling.

We love Arweave obviously, for us it was just about survival, said Aaron, referencing the temporary integration of IPFS due to their time constraints when building up Releap Protocol.

But integrating Arweave is still very much part of their plan.

We want to integrate Arweave again in the next 1-2 months.