Executive Summary
Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian cultural practice interpreted as a sport, tradition, and art form is practiced around the world. Capoeira players form a circle and at the center, two players engage with one another while other players around the circle chant, clap and play percussive instruments. It comprises of masters, counter-masters and disciples. This cultural practice, thought to be originated in the 16th century, has been nominated “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO in 2014 and despite its recent title, still suffers with loss of traditional practices and symbols, relying mainly on the passion of its practitioners and their oral tradition to survive.
Intangible cultural heritage is an important part of our shared culture, but it is often vulnerable to loss due to human activities, natural disasters, and other factors. This can lead to the marginalization of certain cultural groups, the perpetuation of forms of discrimination, the reinforcement of stereotypes and the perpetuation of false narratives about certain cultural practices. The safeguard and preservation of intangible cultural heritage for future generations is therefore of extreme importance to help with intercultural dialogue, encouraging mutual respect for other ways of life and contributing to a better society for future generations.
This primer proposes a decentralized application (dapp) that takes advantage of the tamper-proof security, transparency and censorship resistance of the Ethereum and Filecoin blockchain networks along with other decentralized technologies, to protect, preserve and transmit intangible cultural heritage practices around the world.
The solution will be composed of three main layers: (1) A Data/Storage layer using IPFS protocol and Filecoin storage network, allowing the dapp to store historical records in a series of content-addressed blocks that are distributed across the network, with no single entity controlling the access and distribution of the data; (2) An Application/Consensus layer powered by Smart Contracts on Polygon and Ethereum blockchain networks, offering the distributed computational resources required to tokenize these historical records and securely trace their data curation state transitions to guarantee tamper-proof credibility and censorship resistance; (3) A Consumer layer, using SWARM the distributed storage and content delivery protocol for hosting, keeping the entire application censorship resistant and been the layer responsible for handling the interactions from contributors, curators and consumers with the historical records through the application/consensus secured at data/storage layers.
To address the “last-mile” problem of historical data curation, a “tokenized” rewards mechanism will be implemented to help promote contribution (upload and curation) and consumption (transmission) of the historical records, incentivizing desired behaviors to help achieve optimal balance of supply and demand for tokens.
APIs for interoperability with existing traditional applications will also compose the final vision, supporting the ingestion, curation and consumption of the historical records. This will allow interested institutions, such as UNESCO, governmental entities and archival organizations to make use of the platform’s content to augment their own initiatives.
By making use of blockchain technology, decentralized public networks provide a secure, reliable, and tamper-proof way of protecting and transmitting intangible cultural heritage historical records. Data is stored on a distributed ledger and storage that is secure and resistant to censorship. The data is also immutable, meaning that it cannot be altered or deleted. This makes decentralized applications an ideal candidate for preserving and protecting valuable historical records of intangible cultural heritage for public access.