Picture this

Who it is for

A diaspora association wants to save elders' stories. Members upload recordings, others vouch for accuracy, and the archive lives on permanent storage owned by the community with contributors credited forever.

Two ways to own it

What you get

Base$199

$50 deposit to reserve

Upload flow, permanent storage pinning, vouching, curator roles, contributor credits, public archive.

You choose: chain
You choose: name and logo
You choose: accent color
You choose: curator rules

Customfrom $1,500

Built around you

Reshape it entirely: new features, your flows, your brand end to end, integrations you need. We scope it with you.

Everything in Base
Custom features and design
Priority build

Why it is new

What exists today, and what this does differently

What is new

Permanent archives exist; group-curated community memory onchain is less common.

Closest things out there

Arweave-based permanent archives and offchain oral history sites exist; not separately verified for group curation.

Checked with web searches in October 2026. A search is not proof that nothing similar exists, and the market moves fast, so we recheck before every build.

What it unlocks

The human in it

Mines heritage and creativity into lasting ownership.

The Regatta Board

Races it can enter

grant · Gitcoin · upcoming

Gitcoin Grants rounds

quarterly-ish rounds; next round dates unknown

Official page ↗

Cultural public goods; OSS required

Their rule on existing code: Existing open-source projects OK (generally required)

grant · Ethereum Foundation · rolling

Ethereum Foundation ESP

rolling

Official page ↗

Existing projects OK

Their rule on existing code: Existing projects OK

What you own

The whole app, not a starter kit.

The complete Memory Commons app: a community records its elders, members vouch for what is true, and the archive lives on permanent storage the community owns, with teller and recorder credited forever.

Base price · $199

The user app, complete

Every buyer gets the same finished app. Basic branding and copy changes come through a quick form.

Three step onboardingHome

Shown once: record them while they are here, people who were there vouch, the community owns the shelf.

Next action and circle statusHome

One clear next step, memories on the shelf, vouches waiting and the Sunday streak.

Recorder with draft transcriptsRecord

Record, strip location, and get Somali and English drafts marked draft until a fluent member approves.

Consent and name checksRecord

Teller consent recorded before upload, names of living people checked before anything goes public.

Sealed family memoriesRecord

Hard stories encrypted on the phone, with family key holders and an opening year. Always free.

Member vouching with a thresholdCircle

A memory goes on the public shelf after the set number of vouches, each recorded as an attestation.

Two versions kept for disputesCircle

When people disagree, both versions are kept and credited. There is no overwrite button.

Name the faces boardCircle

The archivist suggests, a family member confirms. Gated behind the Association plan.

The shelf with search and receiptsShelf

Search by teller, place or year, filter public, in the circle or sealed, and see what is onchain and what is not.

Family listening linksShelf

Send grandchildren abroad a link with no account needed. Gated behind the Association plan.

Sunday circleSunday

Pick the week's question, join the cushions and keep the shared streak. Sending to all members is gated.

Plans, credits and settingsMe

Pricing from the owner paywall through USDC checkout, your credits on every memory, permissions and vision.

Open the full app demo

Add-on

Owner console

Your admin side: revenue, paywall editor, users, rules and the agent log.

Revenue and paywall editorRevenue

MRR, payouts, incoming USDC, accepted payment methods, and live editing of tier names, prices, gates and the free limit.

House rulesRules

Vouch threshold, seal years, curators, languages, storage network, human transcriber route and storage cap.

Archivist log, storage and roadmapArchivist

What the agent got wrong and how it adapted, storage spend against the cap, and the priced Roadmap.

Top-up

Growth and referrals

Referral and growth mechanics, switched on when you are ready to grow.

Members, cohorts and growth loopsMembers

Shoebox afternoons for neighbouring associations, cohorts and association to association referrals.

The money path, built in

How it earns for you

Keeping a story and sealing a hard one is always free. Associations pay monthly for the tools that bring the whole community in, heritage partners pay for several communities, and storage is passed through at cost.

CircleFreeUp to 25 new memories a year, vouching, sealed family memories, storage at cost

Association$29 a monthUnlimited memories, Sunday prompts to all members, name the faces board, branded public archive and listening links

Heritage partner$149 a monthSeveral communities, bulk import of old tapes, consented exports for researchers

Permanent storage is passed through at cost (roughly $10 per GB once on Arweave). The owner can cap monthly storage spend per association.

Prices are yours to set. Illustrative, not a promise of income.

Growth loops, built in

How it spreads

Family abroad: each kept memory goes to relatives in other countries, who add photos and vouches
The Sunday circle: a weekly question with a shared streak turns a project into a ritual
Shoebox afternoons that start a shelf for a neighbouring association
Association to association referral codes worth a free month for both
Share card when a memory is kept: now 212 of us keep it, forever

Roadmap · build the next phase with us

Where it goes next

v1 included

The full community archive

Record, draft transcripts and consent checks
Member vouching with a threshold
Two versions kept for disputes
Sealed family memories with key holders
The shelf, receipts, Sunday circle and plans

Included

Old tapes and the listening app

Bulk import of cassettes and VHS with chapter detection
A family listening app with no account
WhatsApp voice note intake
Human transcriber marketplace for small languages

Add-on from $500

Linked diaspora archives

Link shelves across cities and countries
Cross archive photo matching, family confirms
Consented research exports for libraries
Community vote before any model training

Add-on from $1,100

For investors and grant reviewers

The pitch, ready

A shoebox the whole community keeps: elders recorded, members vouch, the archive is owned by the community forever.

Problem: Diaspora and minority communities lose their elders' stories every year. Recordings sit on one phone, photos in a shoebox nobody can label, and paid websites vanish when the subscription lapses.

Solution: Members record elders, vouch for what they know, and keep both versions when they disagree. Media goes to permanent storage; vouches, credits and seal dates are attestations on Base, and hard stories are sealed for family.

Why now: Permanent storage costs a few dollars per GB, speech models draft transcripts for cents a story, and phone login with embedded wallets lets elders' grandchildren join without crypto knowledge.

Market: Diaspora associations, mosques, churches and cultural centres, plus the libraries, museums and universities that want consented community archives.

The ask: Pilot partners: two diaspora associations and one public library, plus public goods and heritage grant funding.

Funding is never guaranteed. Check each program's rules.

For hackathons and demo days

Your 2 minute demo

Home: meet Hodan, 19, in Cedar Riverside, and her great aunt Faadumo, 81.
Record: record the ship to Aden, see the draft transcript, confirm consent, send to the circle.
Circle: vouch as Mr Warsame and Uncle Abdi until it goes on the shelf, then keep both versions of the Via Roma tea shop.
Shelf: search the archive, open a receipt showing what is onchain, and see Maryan's sealed memory.
Sunday: pick the question for the elders and hit the Association paywall to send it, upgrade with USDC.
Owner Archivist: the Maay Maay mistake and the wrong face, and how it adapted.
Owner Revenue: change the Association price in the paywall editor and preview the member Plans screen.
Owner Members and Roadmap: run a shoebox afternoon, then request the v2 old tapes import.

Many hackathons require code written at the event. See the Regatta Boardfor each race's rule.

Make it entirely yours

Custom work from $1,000: your own languages and transcriber routes, integrations with a library catalogue or museum system, branded deployments for a federation of associations, or extra consent workflows. Scoped on a call.

Custom from $1,500

BLUEPRINT

Why it matters and how it really works

The need

Diaspora and minority communities are losing their elders' stories every year. Recordings sit on one person's phone, photos in a shoebox nobody can label, and paid websites disappear when the subscription lapses. Nobody has the authority, or the tools, to decide together what is true and who gets credit.

What exists and what is new

Permanent archives on Arweave and similar networks already exist, as do many offchain oral history projects run by libraries and universities. We did not separately verify an existing product for group-curated community memory, so we make a modest claim: what is less common is the combination of member vouching before a memory goes public, elected curators who annotate rather than delete, permanent credit to teller and recorder, and family-sealed encrypted memories, all owned by the community itself. Research verdict: rare, medium novelty.

The data it runs on

Audio, video and photos contributed by members, draft transcripts and translations, vouch attestations from members, curator annotations, consent and seal settings, and teller and recorder credits. Media lives on permanent storage; sealed items are encrypted on the device before upload. Onchain: fingerprints, vouches, credits and seal dates.

1.The mission

Let any community keep its own memory: recorded while the elders are here, checked by the people who were there, and owned by the community forever.

2.Why people can't resist it

Your name on it, forever Every memory credits the teller and the recorder by name, and every vouch is visible. Grandchildren can see who kept the story alive.

Truth by people who were there Members vouch for what they know. When people disagree, both versions are kept and credited instead of one being overwritten.

One question every Sunday A weekly prompt brings elders and young people together to record one more story, with a streak the whole circle shares.

3.How it works for real

Membership and wallets: Privy login with phone or email and an embedded wallet for each member. The association is a Safe multisig on Base that owns the archive contract and pays storage.

Recording and upload: The phone records audio or video, strips location metadata, and for sealed items encrypts locally (for example with Lit Protocol access conditions tied to family wallets) before upload.

Permanent storage: Public media goes to Arweave via a bundler such as Irys or ArDrive Turbo, paid once; or Filecoin with yearly renewal. The archive keeps the transaction ids.

Vouches and credits: EAS attestations on Base record each vouch, the teller and recorder credit, curator annotations and seal dates. A memory goes public when it reaches the vouch threshold.

The archivist agent: Speech to text drafts with a Whisper class model, translation and summaries with a mid tier model such as Claude Sonnet or Gemini Flash. It detects dialect and routes languages it handles poorly, such as Maay Maay, to paid human transcribers. It never names faces on its own.

Public archive: A Next.js site reads an indexer (Ponder) of attestations and storage ids, with search by teller, place and year, and a share card per memory.

4.Cost per use and pricing

Storage: Arweave pricing moves with the token; at the time of writing it is roughly a few dollars to about $10 per GB stored permanently, so a 50 MB voice memory with photos costs well under $1 once. Transcription with a Whisper class API is about $0.006 per minute, so a 15 minute story is about $0.10; translation and summary about $0.02. Base gas for a few attestations is typically under $0.01 each. Example month with 40 memories: about $15 storage, $6 transcription and translation, $1 gas, $25 hosting, under $50 total, plus any human transcriber hours.

Circle Free

Up to 25 memories and 5 GB, members pay storage at cost per upload.

Association $29 a month

Unlimited members, elected curators, sealed memories, Sunday prompts and a branded public archive.

Heritage partner $149 a month

For libraries, museums and cultural centres: several communities, bulk import of old tapes and exports for researchers with consent.

5.Growth loop

Each preserved memory is shared to family in other countries, who then add their own photos and vouches. The Sunday circle turns a one-time project into a weekly ritual, and other associations ask to start their own shelf.

6.Risks and guardrails

Permanence and consent: Anything public on permanent storage cannot be truly deleted. Hard stories default to sealed and encrypted, consent is recorded before upload, and the public site can unlist an item even though the stored copy remains.

Privacy of the living: Stories mention people who never agreed to be named. Curators can redact names before publishing, and families can request unlisting.

Disputes and harm: Memories can be contested or used to settle scores. Versions are kept side by side, defamatory or hateful content can be unlisted by curators, and disputes go to the association, not the agent.

AI errors: Transcripts and translations can be wrong, especially for less resourced languages. Drafts stay marked draft until a fluent member approves, and faces are never auto named.

Key loss: Sealed memories can be lost if family keys are lost. Use several key holders and a recovery option held by the association multisig with family approval.

Storage cost swings: Token priced storage can change cost. The app shows the price at upload and the association treasury can cap monthly spend.

7.Build order

Association Safe on Base and member login with Privy
Record and upload flow with metadata stripping and Arweave storage
EAS schemas for vouch, credit, annotation and seal
Vouch threshold and curator roles
Archivist drafts with dialect detection and human review queue
Encrypted sealed memories with family key holders
Public archive site, search and weekly prompt

8.Where this is going

Now
One association, one shoebox, one Sunday at a time.
Next
Every family adds the photos nobody could name, and the circle names them together.
Later
Diaspora communities link their archives across cities, so a story told in Minneapolis meets the photo kept in Nairobi.
The world it builds
Communities that own their own memory, credited to the people who lived it, and not lost when an elder or a website goes.

Costs and tools are estimates at the time of writing. General information only, not legal or financial advice.

OWNER PLAYBOOK

Own it, then chart your voyage

Nine routes from one vessel. Tap a port to open its chart.

Why own Memory Commons

Community memories usually end up on a cloud drive one person pays for, or a Facebook group that can vanish. Memory Commons lets members upload stories, recordings and photos, others vouch for accuracy, and the archive lives on permanent storage owned by the community, with contributors credited forever. Owning it means you are the keeper of the archive tool: your brand, your relationships with associations and your fee for setting up and caring for each archive.

What’s stopping you?

“I can't code. Can I run a permanent archive?”

Yes. Upload flow, permanent storage pinning, vouching, curator roles, contributor credits and the public archive are built. You set curator rules and branding and deploy from your wallet with the guide.

“Permanent storage costs money. Who pays?”

Each upload has a storage cost, usually small. Communities can pay per archive or fund a storage pool. Budget it upfront and tell contributors.

“What about private family stories?”

Not everything belongs on permanent public storage. Let contributors choose public or community only, get consent from anyone recorded, and never upload something you cannot later remove unless the person agreed.

“Will elders use an app?”

Usually a younger relative uploads for them. Run recording days where volunteers help.

“Is it really ours?”

The contracts deploy from your wallet or the community's, storage is permanent, and credits are onchain. You can hand over ownership to the association.

The million-dollar ladder

Associations, diaspora groups, schools and towns pay a setup fee plus a monthly care plan for their archive, with storage costs passed through transparently.

$100

$4,000

$60,000

$85,000

First archive

1 association

$100 per month care plan

A handful of associations

40 associations

$100 per month

Schools, towns and diaspora networks

400 organizations