Introduction

The Web is in decline due to enshittification, a term popularized by Cory Doctorow. Although Doctorow does not know this, open source decentralized applications (dapps) reaching state consensus via the blockchain is critical to overcome this problem and for Web3 to succeed in its mission to save humanity.

The underlying reason why enshittification occurs is because popular web platforms are owned and controlled by centralized organizations that ultimately do not do what is best for their users. Real blockchains on the other hand are either fully autonomous (never change), or are governed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Ethereum is has evolved into a poor man's version of the original Polkadot. The next version of Polkadot (JAM) will push the boundries even further. This is why Polkadot is the ideal technology to build the autonomous infrastructure we need to run the world.

However, dapps need rich functionality beyond what can be provided on-chain in a fully decentralized manner, for example:

• searching data that is not stored in on-chain state
• pinning / searching IPFS content
• AI queries
• media transcoding

Currently dapps either utilize a centralized backend that will be subject to enshittification, or try to make do with only querying and verifying state directly.

The purpose of Acuity Index is to provide decentralized indexing for Polkadot dapps, starting with event log indexing.

Acuity Index was funded by 2 grants (1,2) from the Web3 Foundation.

It is one of the key technologies behind Acuity, the decentralized publication platform.