Tarax: On-chain social graph metadata standard for decentralized forums

Developers Transaction Metadata
1

A proposed metadata schema for building censorship-resistant, self-hosted message boards on Cardano — no smart contracts required.

Abstract

Cardano transactions can carry arbitrary JSON metadata up to ~16KB per transaction (label 674, per CIP-0020). This makes the chain a viable backend for a decentralized forum — one where posts are permanent, censorship requires attacking the chain itself, and identity is a wallet address. What is missing is a convention: a shared schema that indexers and clients can agree on, enabling threading, follows, profiles, and reactions without any on-chain contract logic.

This post proposes CIP-XXXX, a metadata standard under label 7394 (chosen to be distinct from existing standards) that encodes the minimum viable social primitives: posts, replies, profiles, follows, and reactions.

Motivation

The problem with existing decentralized social protocols (Nostr, Farcaster, Lens) is that they require their own relay infrastructure or rollup chains. Cardano already has a globally distributed, incentivized node network. Any full node is already indexing all transaction metadata — a forum client only needs to filter by label.

Crucially, no smart contract is needed. Identity is a stake address. Authorship is proven by the signing key. Timestamps are block slots. The only missing layer is a schema convention so that independent clients can read each other’s posts — like email needing SMTP before anyone could interoperate.

A small ADA fee per post acts as natural spam protection — something Twitter and 4chan have always lacked.

How clients work

A forum client is just a metadata indexer with a UI. It queries a Cardano blockchain API (Blockfrost, Maestro, or a self-hosted DB-Sync) for all transactions carrying label 7394, then builds a local graph: posts, replies linked by root_tx, and a social graph from follow events.

“Deleting” a post means the client hides it locally — the data is still on-chain. Clients can implement their own moderation layers (mute lists, local filters) without any global authority. This is closer to the 4chan model (boards are opt-in namespaces) than Twitter (algorithmic curation).

Anyone can run a client. Anyone can run an indexer. The chain is the ground truth. Multiple competing clients reading the same chain is healthy — it’s how email works.

1 Like
2

Thanks @alexeusgr for beginning your plan with a metadata tag number distinct from 674 especially because infrastructure specialists have advised the community recently that the generic label has become very “congested” — and so all new projects are welcomed more than ever to pursue individual labels just as you have. :folded_hands:

2 Likes
3

Tarax was a Catalyst proposal: news and media DAO to solve professional integrity socially. I have posts I can’t delete. Maybe that’s the demo. I’ve been thinking about this wrong. It’s less of a forum and more like a blackmail machine.

use case 1: journalist publishes under a wallet. their government can’t scrub it.
use case 2: someone screenshots your bad take from 2024, anchors it on-chain with your stake address attached. Fun, if you’re the one doing it to someone else. The opt-out doesn’t exist.

What saves it, maybe, is the provenance angle — where provenance isn’t just “who said it” but “who vouches for it, under what quorum, with what revision history.” that’s closer to editorial accountability than surveillance.

why would anyone voluntarily use this…