BYOF

• Name: BYOF (Bring Your Own Friends)
• URL: https://github.com/enricobottazzi/BYOF
• Category: offchain social-graph portability prototype / DID-based follow-list registry / crypto-social infrastructure experiment
• Tags: ethereum-ecosystem
• Summary: BYOF is an early offchain follow-list prototype, not a social-graph anchor. It stores an address plus following list in Ceramic-era DID tooling, so the point is portable graph data without onchain ownership. Useful mainly as the thinner historical branch beneath later Ethereum account-graph systems that made ownership, management, and client interpretation more explicit.
• What it does:
  • Proposes a portable social graph where users follow Ethereum addresses and carry those relationships across web3 applications
  • Describes two product surfaces: a dashboard for inspecting followed addresses and an open API for integration into apps that depend on social relationships
  • Uses Ceramic, 3ID Connect, Self.ID, and DID tooling to authenticate and store graph data offchain
  • Publishes a minimal BYOF data model whose schema stores an address plus a followingList array
  • Emphasizes gasless writes by keeping follow operations offchain rather than on an L1 or L2 registry
  • Frames portability as the main value proposition: applications can import an existing web3 social graph instead of rebuilding contacts from scratch
• Key claims:
  • The README’s central claim is straightforward: centralized platforms keep social graphs closed, while BYOF tries to let users carry follow relationships between crypto-native apps.
  • The most revealing primary-source detail is how minimal the published schema is. The durable primitive is not a feed algorithm or reputation system; it is simply a user address plus a list of followed addresses.
  • The architecture matters because identity and storage are delegated to Ceramic-era DID tooling. That means BYOF’s trust model is much closer to portable profile data than to onchain registry ownership.
  • The prototype is explicitly offchain and gasless, which is analytically useful when comparing it to later systems like Ethereum Follow Protocol that push ownership and management authority into onchain objects.
  • BYOF mixes together product ambitions that later stacks often separate: a storage layer for the graph, an API for reuse, and a dashboard for discovery. That makes it a useful historical example of an early attempt to unbundle a social app into reusable identity data plus interface layers.
  • This entry belongs in the corpus not because BYOF became a dominant protocol, but because it captures an early design fork in crypto social: offchain DID/Ceramic portability versus later onchain list ownership and downstream client interpretation.
• Whitepaper: No canonical BYOF whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official repository README, the model-creation script, the published schema, and repository metadata; see ../whitepapers/byof-primary-sources-2026-05-10.md.
• Sources:
  • https://github.com/enricobottazzi/BYOF
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/enricobottazzi/BYOF/master/README.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/enricobottazzi/BYOF/master/create-model.mjs
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/enricobottazzi/BYOF/master/schemas/BYOFGRPH.json
  • https://api.github.com/repos/enricobottazzi/BYOF

Internal linkages

• Stronger onchain descendant for portable Ethereum account lists: ethereum-follow-protocol

• Bigger onchain social-graph branch that keeps much more of the product surface inside the protocol family: lens-protocol

• App-level social network contrast where client and feed design matter more than bare follow-list portability: farcaster

• Last reviewed: 2026-06-06 UTC