Fileverse unveils Google Documents competitor ddocs

Fileverse, the web3 startup looking to offer a suite of alternatives to Google products, released a collaborative document-sharing program last week. Dubbed ddocs, the system offers almost all of the features of Google’s popular online Google Docs application but boasts better privacy and a host of web3 features. 

“It's been a long time coming, to be honest,” Andreas Tsamados, founder of Fileverse, told The Block in a video interview. Fileverse was launched using multiple funding rounds from the decentralized crowdfunding platform Gitcoin in 2022. The team also raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round from venture capital firm Factor and others including Balaji Srinivasan, wallet provider Safe and Gnosis Chain, on which Fileverse was built. 

The team describes ddocs as a serious competitor to Google’s docs application and has done what it can to make the transition to the new software easy. “Just as people can create new Google docs by writing docs.new into their browser URL search, people will now be able to access the decentalized alternative by typing ddocs.new,” the team wrote in a press release.

While one doesn’t need to interact with web3 infrastructure to use the product, users can create an account by signing a multi-sig wallet on the smart contract platform Gnosis Safe. This enables users to store a hashed version of the document on-chain and to control who has permission access to the file. 

“It acts as a registry for the content that you're saving. When you publish a document on IPFS, you get a hash that represents the information in the document,” Tsamados said, referring to the decentralized BitTorrent-like InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) developed by Protocol Labs. “Whatever happens, you always have a view of your list of documents that exist off-chain in a peer-to-peer network.”

The Fileverse smart contract also has access permissions that control who can view and/or edit documents. It can also encode a “social recovery” feature, which is a way of giving up to five people access to a fragment of a recovery code in case you lose access to your account. 

“We don't have much info on how many people are using ddocs at the moment, which is by design, right?” Tsamados said. The team installed a “Wizard,” akin to Microsoft Office’s infamous Paperclip, to assist people in creating a smart contract account “to incentivize a little bit of visibility” into how many people are using the web3 features without necessarily divulging personal information. 

Ddocs is just the latest in a series of alternative online-base applications the Fileverse team has built, including the Notion-like Fileverse Portal and filesharing service Fileverse Solo. 

“I must say we were proud of what we have built. We knew that it was just version 0.1, and just wanted to get it out there to see if people actually wanted to have a tool like that,” Tsamados said. “I think for many, it is a breath of fresh air.”