Jonathan Brown

Acuity Index

The theory behind disintermediation is that we replace our institutions with autonomous dapps so that people can interact with each other in a transparent, rules-based framework.

Posted May 7, 2025 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 3 min read

Acuity DEX Now Beta Testing On Mainnets

The recent collapse of FTX reinforces in the heaviest way possible the importance of the work we are doing building the Acuity atomic swap, peer-to-peer, cross-chain, fully autonomous, noncustodial, decentralized exchange.

Posted November 18, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 4 min read

Acuity DEX Launch Procedure

The Acuity DEX is very nearly ready to launch. It will begin cross-chain trading of ACU, and coins and tokens on mainnet EVM blockchains.

Posted November 3, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

DEX Pre-Launch Architectural Changes

It has been 21 months since then initial announcement of the Acuity DEX. While the core concept of the atomic swap has remained the same during that time, the rest of the system has been re-designed many times. This can be see both from the blog posts below and from the GitHub activity.

Posted September 17, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 6 min read

Acuity Atomic Swap DEX Launch Update

The Acuity Atomic Swap Substrate pallet has been updated to the final design of the DEX. This means that ACU (and any other Substrate chain that deploys the pallet) will be able to be traded on Acuity DEX.

Posted August 17, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

Acuity Atomic Swap DEX begins public testing

On July 11th 2022 the first cross-chain trade on Acuity Testnet occurred between Estonia and Vietnam. 0.02 Rinkeby was bought with 0.002 Ropsten. The Acuity Atomic Swap DEX is ready for general testing.

Posted July 14, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 5 min read

DEX Development Update

The Acuity DE will be a fully autonomous and decentralized atomic swap cross-chain cryptocurrency exchange. It will support ACU, and both base coins and ERC20 tokens on all EVM compatible chains. It has a number of advantages over other cross-chain exchanges & bridges.

Posted June 15, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 4 min read

ACU is becoming a DeFi-only coin

As detailed in the earlier blog post below "Acuity Atomic Swap DEX - the future of interchain trading", centralized exchanges are not only a risk to those storing their coins on such exchanges. CEXs are actually a systemic risk to the trading price of coins that are traded on them. It is a security vulnerability for a project to have its coin listed on a centralized exchange.

Posted June 2, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

Social Trading

The Acuity Atomic Swap DEX is a spin-out project from the broader Acuity Decentralized Social Media project. Acuity is a rebuild of the MIX social media platform from Ethereum to Substrate.

Posted April 18, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 4 min read

Architectural changes to Acuity Atomic Swap DEX

The Acuity DEX has been making a huge amount of progress towards launching an MVP, as can be seen from recent videos.

Posted February 6, 2022 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 4 min read

Hard Spoon Completed

The hard spoon announced in the previous blog post has now occurred. At block #3276706 a snapshot was recorded of all ACU balances and unclaimed MIX => ACU.

Posted December 14, 2021 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

Acuity Atomic Swap DEX - the future of interchain trading

First a little back-story on the history of Acuity... Acuity (previously known as MIX) was started in 2015 with the goal of creating on-chain social communities. These have many useful properties that are not available on centralized platforms.

Posted December 4, 2021 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 8 min read

Acuity DEX Alpha Testing

The Acuity DEX is approaching minimum viable product. To begin with it will have a simple pair ACU / ETH. It will be possible to trade ETH stored in Metamask for ACU stored in the Polkadot browser extension. The Solidity smart contracts and the Substrate pallet are both mature. Development of a Rust-based off-chain worker to index the order book continues. Basic UI is coming together.

Posted July 21, 2021 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 1 min read

May 2021 Project Update

In line with the previous blog post and video, a new Acuity Substrate node implementation has been released.

Posted May 5, 2021 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 3 min read

Acuity Parachain Strategy

The Polkadot ecosystem is evolving rapidly. Kusama will soon have parachains and Polkadot itself will follow. Parachains are a means of connecting together different blockchains in a hierarchy for shared security and asynchronous communication. Acuity will be a hierarchy within this hierarchy.

Posted March 19, 2021 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 4 min read

ACU / ETH atomic swap exchange under development

I'm currently working on a very simple atomic swap exchange for Acuity. This will be implemented as a Solidity smart contract and deployed on both the Ethereum and Acuity blockchains so ACU can be traded with ETH in a fully decentralized manner and without any counterparty risk.

Posted December 3, 2020 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

Acuity hard spooned!

Due to the cessation of block production of the proof-of-authority nodes (see previous blog post), it was necessary for Acuity to hard spoon. A snapshot of blockchain state was taken at block 1049095 (the last finalized block) and a new genesis block was created.

Posted November 26, 2020 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

Acuity Social November 2020 Project Update

There are a number of major Acuity announcements.

Posted November 19, 2020 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 7 min read

Let's enable staking on the new Acuity Polkadot blockchain

The Acuity blockchain uses standard Polkadot consensus and governance.

Posted September 25, 2020 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 3 min read

MIX Acuity Decentralized Social Media 2020 Update

MIX Acuity is a decentralized publishing platform in development since 2015.

Posted May 13, 2020 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 56 min read

Decentralized Browser MIX Acuity 1.0 Released

MIX Blockchain has been in operation for more than 2 years. It was created as a platform for uncensorable publication.

Posted August 5, 2019 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 8 min read

June 2019 MIX Update

Online censorship is accelerating. The need for a stable release of MIX Acuity — the MIX desktop browser for Mac, Windows and Linux — grows by the day.

Posted June 16, 2019 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 44 min read

Paying content creators on MIX Blockchain

As the Acuity browser is nearing completion, users will soon be able to post content on MIX.

Posted December 26, 2018 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 7 min read

How illegal and immoral content will be handled on MIX Blockchain

There are certain kinds of content that you do not want on your device because it is against your morality, can land you in jail, or is just not socially acceptable.

Posted May 1, 2018 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 4 min read

Announcing dWeb / April 2018 MIX Update

dWeb will be the first dapp built on MIX Blockchain. It will take the form of a desktop application installable on Mac, Windows and Linux. The package will include:

Posted April 18, 2018 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 17 min read

January 2018 Update

I thought I would give you a short update on what is happening with MIX Blockchain over the next few months.

Posted January 17, 2018 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 4 min read

Introducing MIX Browser

MIX is a content publication platform, therefore a key component is a browser to be able to view any item and to serve as a reference implementation for other software to follow.

Posted December 19, 2017 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 10 min read

Introducing LINK Blockchain

LINK is an uncontrolled linked data ecosystem living on the blockchain. It is fully public. It cannot be censored and no one can be prevented from participating. It is fully programmable at every level. It is a development platform for interconnected distributed content apps that empower the individual.

Posted December 17, 2016 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 9 min read

BlobStore: immutable storage on Ethereum blockchains

BlobStore is an Ethereum smart contract I have been developing on and off for about a year. In January I wrote a blog post about the properties of various decentralized storage technologies. BlobStore specifically targets Ethereum log storage. The premise is simple — store a blob (Binary Large OBject) and get an identifier for it (blobId). For the rest of time that blob can be retrieved using that blobId.

Posted November 19, 2016 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

Federated Ethereum Blockchains

In the aftermath of the DAO fork it occurred to me that there might be a better way for large Ethereum projects to exist on the Blockchain.

Posted July 25, 2016 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 6 min read

Text publishing technologies for Ethereum dapps

Building something like a Reddit or Twitter dapp (distributed app) on Ethereum is certainly an attractive idea, but the obvious question is "where do the messages get stored?" If an autonomous Git or Wikipedia were built on Ethereum the storage requirements would be even greater.

Posted January 18, 2016 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 13 min read

Storing compressed text in Ethereum transaction logs

There are a lot of good reasons to store blobs of text in Ethereum. For example, a decentralized Reddit clone could store all the messages in the blockchain. These messages would be uncensorable and archived for eternity. In theory IPFS could be used, but it does not guarantee the availability of the messages unless someone is actively storing them.

Posted October 29, 2015 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 5 min read

Using Dapple to test Solidity with Solidity

As the Ethereum eco-system is still very immature it can sometimes be very frustrating to develop on this platform. Gradually more tools are being developed that make it much easier, such as Browser Solidity.

Posted October 20, 2015 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read

Introducing Glofile

Glofile (Global profile) is essentially a clone of Gravatar for Ethereum.

Posted September 18, 2015 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 5 min read

SMTP can be replaced by a 19 line Ethereum contract

One of the advantages of the blockchain is that, unlike conventional Internet services, you do not have to maintain a backend in order to offer a service. You do however need to pay to write a transaction onto the blockchain.

Posted September 12, 2015 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 3 min read

VersionedBlob: a poor man's Git built on Ethereum

One of the potential use-cases for Ethereum is to create a fully decentralized Git. Git is already decentralized in many respects, but you still need to push/pull with a specific server. If something like Git was implemented on Ethereum you just need to connect to another Ethereum node on the network.

Posted August 19, 2015 by Jonathan Brown ‐ 2 min read