Portrait launches decentralised micro-websites powered by Waku
Portrait, a decentralised social platform built for the New Internet and powered by Waku, has announced its official public beta launch, allowing anyone to create, host, and manage their own micro-website.
These micro-websites–called Portraits–are owned entirely by their creators and stored across a distributed network of hundreds of devices. They are completely customisable, allowing users to embed videos or links, add text posts, and showcase images. Portrait’s hosting system replaces the traditional “follow’ mechanic with a more meaningful and considered way to connect.
Hosting a Portrait is a commitment to allocate storage to someone’s data, similar to seeding a torrent, which allows users to reconsider the value of connection and build authentic networks of trust that are more participatory and intentional than modern mainstream social media platforms.
The Portrait public beta is now running on the Base L2 testnet, and early adopters can reserve and create their Portraits for a one-time fee of $10 by visiting portrait.so. These Portraits will be minted upon mainnet launch, at which point they will become transferable.
Waku’s peer-to-peer communications stack provides the core communications infrastructure that underpins Portrait. Portraits are shared and hosted over the Waku network in a way that is both scalable and accessible to resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and browsers. The Portrait mobile app is under development, and the current Portrait hosting node implementation is within a standalone app on Mac.
The public beta launch of Portrait exemplifies the powerful potential applications of the Waku protocol by producing a censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving distributed network of personal micro-websites, offering an alternative to traditional social media where users truly own their digital space.
Democratic digital connections without advertisements
Waku and Portrait are aligned in our vision of a decentralised, democratic digital future that confers data sovereignty on all its residents.
Unlike the ubiquitous Web 2.0 model of centralised data storage and control, Portraits are stored on a distributed network that expands via social connection.
On traditional social media, you follow pages and people you know, but on Portrait, you host their page directly on your device to share with others. Hosting is easy and requires very few resources. With just 1GB of storage space, you can host up to 50,000 Portraits.
This decentralised model allows you and your friends to store copies of each others’ data, improving its accessibility and durability with each new connection. Portrait offers an alternative to the core structures of digital social interaction present today (such as feeds, followers, and engagement) that prioritises authentic human connections over the passive consumption encouraged by these legacy models. This intentional shift away from feed-centric design reduces the incentives for Portrait to evolve into the advertisement machines Web2 social media platforms have become and allows it to instead grow into a platform aligned with the core principles of Web3 and built on authentic human connections.
“Under this model, participating in the network becomes a democratic rather than financial process,” Portrait co-founder Ryan Shahine explains. “The protocol is truly decentralised, and at enough adoption can exist perpetually, even if our team and company stopped existing.”
To enable this goal of autonomy in everyday internet usage, Portrait uses a combination of on-chain components, including smart contracts and P2P infrastructure such as Waku’s peer-to-peer communications protocol.
How and why Portrait uses Waku
Waku is a family of open-source protocols enabling a decentralised and permissionless P2P messaging network, meaning anyone can participate. This openness and the protocol’s resistance to censorship are among the reasons Portrait chose to use Waku to deliver its underlying peer-to-peer infrastructure.
Both projects aim to improve decentralisation, preserve privacy, and foster digital sovereignty.From a technical perspective, Waku’s modular protocols facilitate peer-to-peer messaging at scale and address the specific requirements of Portrait’s unique hosting mechanism. Each Portrait’s data is compressed to fit within the constraints of Waku messages, allowing Portraits to be shared directly over the Waku network without centralised data storage.
Portrait’s hosting nodes, which are responsible for hosting the data associated with Portraits and ensuring this data is available to users, are Waku edge nodes extended with additional functionality. As Waku edge nodes are designed to run in resource-constrained environments without constant connectivity, such as browsers or smartphones, they are ideal for hosting Portraits on end-user devices.
Read our light protocols explainer blog post to learn more about Waku edge nodes and light protocols.
Portrait also uses service nodes, which are Waku relay nodes that implement the Waku Store protocol and are responsible for caching and relaying messages on the network. By leveraging Waku’s protocols in this configuration, Portrait delivers improved data reliability while remaining both decentralised and accessible.
“Compared with other decentralised messaging protocols, Waku is designed to offer much greater data reliability. It does this while remaining robust and lowering the requirements for participating in the network,” Ryan Shahine says.
Waku's end goal as a unified tech stack is to deliver reliable and scalable peer-to-peer messaging, and its modular design allows projects like Portrait to easily integrate the protocols they need to achieve their vision.
Head to the official Portrait website to create your Portrait and claim your username.
Inspired by how Portrait has used Waku to build a decentralised and democratic social platform for the new internet?
Join our Discord community to learn more about integrating Waku into your dapp, or read the documentation to start building with Waku’s modular P2P communications protocols today.