In our popular culture, time capsules are often viewed as sci-fi movie gadgets and tools used to educate us about the distant past. Rarely does anybody think of them as products designed for everyday use.

TimeDAO is a platform that powers decentralized applications based on time-locking. One of these apps, known as the TimeCapsule, allows you to send data and digital assets into the future. The decentralized time capsule model is the first sustainable one that does not rely on a company, which is why TimeDAO and its apps have the ability to disrupt both physical time capsules and traditional digital time capsules.

Before we dive into decentralized time capsules, let’s have a look at the evolution of time capsules up to this day.

What Are Time Capsules and How Are They Evolving?

Imagining a time capsule probably brings to mind an old, dusty, physical relic. That is the most common type of time capsule after all. But today, a time capsule can also be both digital and decentralized thanks to blockchain technology.

Physical Time Capsules

Physical time capsules are collections of goods or information as a way of communicating with future groups of people, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists. They are often kept in secret locations such as safes or buried underground. Some of the earliest time capsules on record date back to the 1700s.

Naturally, when you think of a time capsule, you’re probably thinking about physical, tangible artifacts. A physical time capsule may include certificates of achievement, notes from loved ones, photographs, old journal entries, newspapers highlighting milestone events or any other meaningful item.

In the 18th century, time capsules were stored in cornerstones of buildings and other landmarks. Today, time capsules are stored anywhere the mind can imagine, even in outer space! According to TechCrunch and CNN, the KEO Space Capsule was a project sponsored by UNESCO to send messages into space for 50,000 years aboard a satellite in 2019.

Digital Time Capsules

In this day and age, you and I can do almost everything digitally. Time capsules now function that way too. Most of today’s digital time capsules allow you to store all kinds of data and personal messages for your future self and the people you care about. Instead of placing paper music partitions inside a buried box, it’s now possible to store music videos in digital time capsules thanks to cloud storage companies.

This new digital model sounds revolutionary at first glance, but it involves a major flaw. Digital time capsules are hosted by companies on centralized cloud storage servers. If the servers get hacked, your information is stolen, and if the business fails, your time capsule is lost.

Creating a digital time capsule is somewhat considered a gamble, because the user crosses his fingers for the company to last long enough to be able to receive its capsule back. That’s where decentralized time capsules make their appearance and completely disrupt the time capsule industry by solving this issue.

Decentralized Time Capsules

The decentralized time capsule is the first digital model that does not rely on companies for its usage. It is run by a DAO with the purpose to last eternally. Thanks to smart contracts, all the processes within the organization maintaining the time capsule service such as transactions are automated.

This new time capsule model is built with decentralized components. One of them is the decentralized cloud storage solution that breaks data into fragments and scatters them across a variety of cloud-based storage devices to increase its safety.

Decentralized time capsules do not rely on companies that risk failure, but they can still face technological challenges over time. When they do, the members of the DAO can vote for public system upgrade proposals to keep the time capsule service in good shape throughout the years.

How Decentralized Time Capsules Are Blooming the Industry by Disrupting It

Time capsules featuring physical artifacts are limited in terms of storage space and are susceptible to wearing away. That’s what happens when you store physical goods in a specific location for long periods of time. Also, physical capsules are hardly accessible since they rely on a location.

Traditional digital time capsules, on their end, face other drawbacks. First of all, the information within these capsules is stored on centralized servers owned by private companies that risk failure anytime. Secondly, the capsule users are not in control of their digital content, often private and sensitive. The company that stores the capsule’s content has access to it the same way Facebook has access to your conversations. Finally, centralized cloud servers can be targeted by cyberattacks, risking your personal information being stolen.

All of the industry problems stated above made time capsules risky to use until now. Decentralized time capsules are not only enhancing the features of the previous models, they are enabling the use of time capsules in a safe and reliable way for the first time in history. This safety improvement may directly increase the demand in time capsules the same way digital cameras changed the world from the previous analog cameras.

Examples of Decentralized Time Capsules You Can Send to the Future on Your Own Terms

TimeDAO allows you to create decentralized time capsules for whatever reason you find useful or meaningful to yourself. These capsules can contain all types of digital files, such as images, videos, audio, text, code, and more. The use cases are very broad, so here are some examples to guide you with.

First, you can use a time capsule to send messages to friends and family for special dates you would never want to forget, like birthdays and holidays. This use case is life-changing for victims of memory loss, and it can also be used to send messages after passing away.

Secondly, you can store sensitive information meant to be read for later such as journal entries, evidence, and even passwords. Remember that decentralized time capsules can’t be accessed by anyone except yourself.

Last but not least, time capsules can be used to store and relive childhood memories. Children often lose the precious memories of their very first years. These moments can be captured and stored inside a time capsule that opens when they become an adult.

As you may notice, the use cases for time capsules are both abundant, practical and meaningful. If you want to experience what it’s like for yourself, have a look at TimeDAO’s TimeCapsule app!

Now that you have found TimeDAO, you might be wondering what TimeDAO is and how it works. Rest assured, you will have answers to both of these questions in this article. To begin with, TimeDAO is a trustless and decentralized platform that allows you to send data and files into the future through a system built to stand the test of time. TimeDAO safely stores your most important keepsakes and assets in a decentralized format by providing a time-locking service that remains operational.

The end goal is to offer you apps with time-locking capabilities including TimeCapsules and time-locked crypto wallets, simply known as TimeWallets.

An Overview of TimeDAO

When we think about sending digital valuables into the future, our first obsession is to make sure we are able to access them once the waiting period is over. According to a McKinsey report, the average lifespan of a company is less than 18 years, and it’s decreasing over time. So how do we make sure to receive the video we send to ourselves 40 years into the future?

To resolve this issue, TimeDAO’s mission is to create autonomous products unaffected by business failure. In order to create an autonomous and self-serve set of products based on time-locking, TimeDAO’s ecosystem relies on a DAO to collect payments, manage funds, and to maintain itself in good condition.

You will find out further in this article how TimeDAO achieves to create this time-locking service that stands the test of time, thanks to the DAO. Now, let’s dive a little deeper into TimeDAO’s core principles and get to know more about the ecosystem, the purpose of the project and its governance structure.

The TimeDAO Ecosystem

TimeDAO offers a trustless and time-proof time-locking service integrable within apps. The platform itself powers two Dapps, called TimeApps. They are TimeCapsule and TimeWallet. The team is working on more apps that will be part of the ecosystem in the future.

TimeCapsule, the first TimeApp, will function through a web application. This way, users can access their capsules using a proper graphical interface, both storing and sending their digital valuables into the future such as pictures, text, videos, audio, music, and more. Users can maintain access to their capsules by login in the app with their TimeCapsule credentials at any time. These credentials will also enable the recovery of the digital valuables when the time-lock countdown ends. Finally, the stored digital content is shareable by passing the capsule credentials along.

TimeWallet, the second TimeApp, functions like a piggy bank. It enables us to safely send money into the future, more specifically cryptocurrency. The TimeWallet can contain various currencies and unlocks at the date we set it to open. Although the TimeWallet prevents us from withdrawing funds until then, we can always add more funds to it since we have access to our wallets’ public keys. This forces users to hold their crypto through emotional journeys and save money in a way that traditional saving apps can’t. Finally, the TimeWallet will be available through a web application, and the users will have credentials to access their own. To send the TimeWallet to someone else, the user may share the credentials with that person.

Both of the TimeApps mentioned above drive the TimeDAO ecosystem as the users of these apps will pay fees routed towards the DAO to sustain its operations and pay the service providers if necessary. Also, to add value to the ecosystem, TimeApps will be easily accessible to developers thanks to a robust JavaScript-based SDK. It will be available on the TimeDAO GitHub soon and allow for easy third-party integration of our resilient time-locking service within other apps.

Serving The Purpose of TimeDAO

TimeDAO has one explicit purpose. This purpose is to ensure that the ecosystem and its TimeApps will successfully deal with future unforeseen challenges and make sure the time-locking service continues to adapt in perpetuity.

Now that we understand the importance of resilience for TimeApps to last for decades, let’s have a look at the three key components required to send digital content into the future.

The Key Components of a Resilient Time-Locking Service

The first key component to send digital valuables to the future is the decentralized cloud storage. TimeDAO relies on providers such as STORJ to store the TimeCapsules’ content. Decentralized cloud storage technology breaks data into fragments and scatters them across a variety of cloud-based storage devices, rather than centrally storing in any one cloud. This process helps to insulate the data against center-level failures, which increases the service’s resilience for the long run.

The second key component is a Layer 2 blockchain solution. All information regarding the creation and recovery of TimeApps, including credentials, storage calling IDs, payment collection creation dates and opening dates registers forever on the Layer 2 blockchain, currently Dai. The block timestamp validates opening dates.

Finally, binaries, in this case a React app and a node.js server, will help bridge the gap between the TimeApp client and the previous components. They make up for the third key component of the time-locking service as they help drive the usability of all TimeApps within the ecosystem.

Governance

Storing your most important keepsakes and assets while ensuring that the time-locking solution stands the test of time is no easy task to achieve. As mentioned earlier, TimeDAO solves this challenge by automating processes using a Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

This DAO is in charge of multiple financial tasks such as collecting payments, paying service providers (i.e. STORJ), managing airdrops and liquidity mining rewards, rewarding the maintenance system, paying the team members, and accumulating funds in the DAO vault for other expenses. Upon request, all of the above tasks automatically execute an arrangement of code that defines them. This arrangement, known as smart contracts, can evolve over time through a voting process.

All of this sounds great, but what happens if, later on, TimeDAO requires maintenance actions unknown to the smart contracts? Keep reading, we’re getting there.

What Happens When TimeDAO Faces a Challenge?

Going through changes over time means responding to obstacles in the future that you and I can’t possibly be aware of in the present moment. So how does TimeDAO conquer unpredictable technological challenges in the future? By using the TimeCouncil, a group of members elected by the $TDAO token holders.

The TimeCouncil members are responsible to anticipate challenges TimeDAO might face, in exchange of rewards provided by the DAO itself. In other words, they will diagnose the situation, evaluate the viable options to upgrade the DAO with budgets, and finally submit these options to a vote through the DAO. Once the token holders agree on the favorable option, the TimeCouncil takes the responsibility to hire the talent that will carry out all necessary tasks to execute the upgrades.

Here’s a good example. Imagine that in 10 years, STORJ — which is TimeCapsule’s decentralized cloud storage provider — becomes obsolete and needs a replacement. The TimeCouncil members, rewarded to be aware of potential problems, would then step in to address the issue.

The TimeCouncil would then propose a set of new decentralized cloud storage providers that use a more modern stack. The next step would be to generate documentation including budgeting about these providers, and submit these proposals to a general vote among the $TDAO token holders. Once the token holders agree on the replacing provider, it’s on the TimeCouncil members to execute the voted option by hiring developers, validating their outcomes, publishing source code to the appropriate repository, transmitting payments for the completed work through the DAO’s funds, etc.

TimeDAO’s Complete Decentralization

By 2024, the DAO will be entirely community ran, which is the optimal strategy for fostering future development in comparison to using a centralized private company. Relying on the community guarantees longevity and makes TimeDAO much like a public service, as the community will own the products they use in a decentralized way. Finally, the DAO ensures an ethical and fair distribution, while it enables anyone to participate in the governance of the project.

Now that you understand TimeDAO’s core concepts and how its groundbreaking technology enables us to safely send information into the future, visit the TimeDAO website to discover the TimeApps!

It is Christmas 2031, Shawn is playing with the small 3D printed token he’s been dragging around for ten years, waiting for this exact moment to arrive.

When he turned 10, his grandfather gave him that token and told him to keep it safely, for it was the key to a treasure, one that would open on Christmas ten years from now.

That was the first time Shawn heard about Time Capsules, and although by 2031 Time Capsules were already a very common solution for parents and grandparents to store gifts for their children, he still remembers the sense of wonder he felt that Christmas while holding the token.

Shawn fires the Time Capsule Service App on his smartphone. The wait is finally over, he scans the plastic token and his time capsule opens. Inside he finds pictures, a note from his grandfather, videos of his grandparents and him when he was still a toddler and…a crypto wallet. His grandfather didn’t lie, there was indeed a treasure waiting…