ImmutableType Wins Grant Award
From the City of Miami’s "Built-in-Miami" program to a Flow Foundation grant, ImmutableType is proving communities will own the future of news media.
Greetings, All!
2025 has been nothing short of…exciting!!
It feels great to send this update about ImmutableType and our journey to decentralize journalism.
First, I’m proud to announce ImmutableType has just won a grant allocation from the Flow Foundation. We placed 3rd (podium!) in the very first GrantDAO Round 1 on DoraHacks.
The mission of the grants are to support builders who are pushing the limits of what’s possible on the Flow EVM blockchain. It turns out the mission to decentralize journalism hit all the write keys with the Flow community voters.
The Long Journey
It seems like yesterday, but it’s been nearly 4 years since I wrote a blog post describing the value of blockchains for journalism.
We often mention within the crypto and blockchain industry that “we’re so early” and indeed, sometimes we are TOO early. The technology could not do what we wanted it to do four year ago, but from that initial vision and by chipping away at the blockers ImmutableType has been taking shape along this long path. Much of the progress has been outside our control. While spending time meeting Angel Investors around Miami, I came to learn about the City of Miami’s short-lived incubator program, Built-in Miami, which provided the first footing to speak about ImmutableType locally. Also, AI tools were commercialized during this time which helped to dramatically bring down the cost of software development. Additionally, the media industry trust publicly imploded live on air and brought to light for the audience the perverse incentives of the corporate media worldwide. On the regulator front, the SEC had to replace its management to open blockchain innovation for founders, which really was an imminent threat to everyone in building blockchain technology. And, ultimately, blockchain technology itself had to advance sufficiently to solve important problems for everyday people.
NOTE: The series of miracles that had to happen within society for blockchain businesses to become legal is impossible to describe to outsiders. A whole regime of powerful people tried to kill it and remake it under their ownership for centralized control. The fact that we escaped that ruin as a citizenry is something that will be studied for generations.
It’s wild to think about in hindsight, but we had to make that journey just to get here, and it really is just the beginning.
Enter Flow Blockchain & “Forte” Upgrade
Flow blockchain has been quite the revelation to me recently. I began building on it in February of this year and haven’t looked back.
It was born when CryptoKitties clogged Ethereum in 2017 and Dapper Labs decided to build a new blockchain instead of waiting for the technology to improve. I remember this event well, as I was needled about my “crypto beliefs” during a board meeting in 2017. “How’s your crypto doing? Doesn’t even work, does it?” (Note: I don’t forgive easily—silly fires lit by small, feeble, old men drive me.)
Flow’s design solved the scalability problem by splitting validation across specialized node types for Collector, Consensus, Execution, Verification. This strategy solved throughput constraint while allowing it to scale without compromising security. It’s the type of solution that feeble old men don’t bother to pursue, because it requires the type of fortitude they don’t hold in reserve. Flow just did the work. I respect that.
Those solutions alone make it go time for consumer blockchain, as is evidenced by clients like Disney, the NFL, and the UFC using Flow for real blockchain deployments that serve millions of users. Capacity is not necessarily elegance. Enter Forte…
Flow’s Forte upgrade will make ImmutableType feel…just normal…instead of like “crypto”. BUT ALSO, we’ll be able to improve upon user experience for existing media consumption workflows that introduce UX value. Forte will help ImmutableType make news and journalism experience significantly better than the traditional media ever could. They don’t have the fortitude in reserve as mentioned.
A simple example: Instead of juggling paywalls and log-ins and passwords and “content” bundles you don’t want, Forte allows ImmutableType to build a platform where community members may automate their information subscriptions with narrow precision, such as “fund every new story proposal from these reporters each week”. Those transactions will be funded automatically and directly to the journalist, almost like a personalized Sunday paper in your web3 wallet using an algorithm only the individual reader controls — no overlords, no advertisers, no control. Traditional media can’t do that, nor will they. They’ll just chide and deride on-chain publishing to polite coastal applause as their ships disappear below the surface of America rising.
Why This Matters for ImmutableType
ImmutableType is demonstrating the first real upgrade to free speech since Gutenberg. We’re simply using the blockchain as intended, as verifiable peer-to-peer communication. The invention, blockchain, which is protected by settled free-speech laws as a new form of publishing, is what gives power of speech back to the people. The publishing platform is simply the interface and smart contracts that make it accessible for people to organize.
ImmutableType is this type of publishing platform. We facilitate “publishers” of journalism to communicate permissionlessly on-chain. One of the key differences from traditional media business models is….there’s no middlemen, no gatekeepers, no corporate choke points, no editorial bias, no advertisers influencing stories, no NGOs, no government influence, no centralized agenda. People verifiably fund journalism directly to journalists and own the media assets as a result of their efforts to fund journalism. This all happens onchain. No annual telethons or giving pledges necessary. No donations to administrators of non-profit corporations. Direct funding is the hack to the existing system.
Furthermore, for the 70 million Americans living within news deserts, this isn’t an academic experiment. It’s an opportunity to assure survival of their local culture and a maintain connection to broader citizenry. Flow blockchain transactions are very low costs, much much lower than credit card fees, which makes micropayments practical (Holy Grail), so communities can directly fund reporting without relying on clickbait ads, subsidies from wealthy media owners, NGOs, or non-profit benefactors. ImmutableType enables local ownership and local priorities of the local media.
Putting the Flow Grant to Work — What’s Next…
The grant we won accelerates the platform development roadmap beyond our live demo to a full-scale launch of a POC in Miami. The grant provides the credibility necessary to have formative conversations with local leaders and community representatives to work with journalists to represent their interests.
The core of the code we’ve built for the ImmutableType platform is bottoms-up information funding. The below is the interview video recorded by DoraHacks team that outlines what has already been built. The roadmap is to move each feature from the Flow testnet to the Flow EVM mainnet over the coming weeks and months.
Notable roadmap items to migrate to mainnet:
Mint a verifiable and transferable profile
Encrypt article onchain - journalist
Publish an article onchain - journalist
Publish an article proposal for funding onchain - journalist & member
Fund an article - members
Own transferable NFTs of the article - members
Decrypt article content via “reader license” - members
Sell articles within secondary marketplace
NEW: Integrate MoonBuffaFLOW & $BUFFAFLOW as access tokens
NEW: Integrate Crossmint
NEW: Activate FORTE actions
https://x.com/Immutable_type/status/1953507652870291839
Join Us
One of the wildest experiences I’ve had as a founder is finding supporters of this mission. I’m forever grateful to the first few people who signed up to this newsletter, because you gave me authority to keep talking and thinking, to keep learning and building and slowly gather more people together to see the vision of decentralized journalism.
It has become clear to me that building ImmutableType is a bit strange. The ideas are strange. The ‘conspiracy’ of media capture is strange…crypto is strange…censorship is strange. It’s also become clear over the last half decade that everything is strange until it’s obvious. We’ll look back one day and wonder why we ever allowed anonymous forces to influence our decisions about what to read and how to think. We’ll shake our heads about how we allowed “truth” to be defined apart from facts and constrained by moderators to filter only words and pictures that affirmed their truths.
It will be strange looking back to the dates, years, months, days, hours, and minutes when we almost lost our First Amendment rights forever. It’s clear now that we indeed lost it all and were living under a censorship operation turned upon American citizens and that only a sequence of unlikely chance events gave us the opportunity to expose the miscreant forces and come alive to work at dismantling them.
It’s equally strange to believe that journalism will prevail, despite the forces working against its freedoms. A free press is a great power balance, which is why it is such a target for capture. The only antidote is light. Blockchain is that light for the people. It’s strange to people when you ask them to image a free world with information they may trust and act upon. It seems illusive and childish to think these things are possible today among all the machines and automation pointed toward behavioral influence, but it has to be possible, and even likely, to establish a system to reliably find the signal. If we have to adopt delusion to achieve this mission, then delusion it is until reality it becomes.
Scuttle with us toward delusion. It’ll be the most fun journey with the unlikeliest of conclusions.
Thank you as always,
Damon Peters
Founder, ImmutableType