Why does Kurate have chat?


What makes Kurate an interesting and compelling example / experience is that it shows three things:

A. Where private/public used to be orthoganal, it now becomes more blurry. With zk-proofs, we can have both: you can prove something publicly even though you keep it private.
In Kurate, this means you can suggest and post messages without having to reveal your identity, and at the same time earn reputation with it.

B. Through group membership, you can signal anonymously. Meaning, through a persona, you can post a message.

C. With Unirep, a system was developed to have reputation with privacy, Kurate uses this to let users curate content for a persona.

Three pillars:
1. I can have an identity without it being public
2. I can signal through a persona by suggesting a post and stake rep on it
3. I can interact / transact with users without revealing my identity but with the certainty the other party is indeed the one who posted (and thus is reputable)

For pillar one we have following features:
- Create an identity by signing a message
- Use the identity, earn rep and go tokens

Two:
- become member of a semaphore group (persona)
- vote / stake / curate
- Create a new persona

Three:
- Use my identity to interact / transact with other anonymous reputable actors
- >>> This is why we have chat.
- Basically the chat functionality is the first feature where you use an attest ("i can prove i made the post").
- Also, we want the users to be able to interact with each other privately and anonymous to stimulate the "social" aspect of our app.
- This is where interaction and later transactions happen

Without chat, or the ability for users to do something with their earned reputation, the experience (the ux flow) has an anticlimatic ending.

User journey:
- I register
- I am inspired
- I start voting (easiest contribution)
- I start posting (gameplay / staking/betting)
- I create a persona (harder contribution)
- I can interact / transact with a poster anonymously and privately
- I can prove I am the poster, thus i can show my rep and do something with it (sell an item, make a new friend, gain something)

"Now that I played the Kurate game, what can I do with it?"
"Meet new people, sell them items, co-create" > chat