How We Built myblogs: Wallets, Encryption & AI
How we built myblogs with wallet identity, encrypted account drafts, IPFS publishing and AI writing partners that leave you in control.
Most blogging platforms are generous right up until they aren't.
You write for years, build an audience, and then the rules change. Your reach drops, a paywall appears, or the platform shuts down. Suddenly, the place you made your own feels like rented space.
We co-created myblogs because we wanted writers to have more control over their work.
A place to share stories, build a personal space and invite a writing partner in when you need one. This is how we built it, and what using it taught us.
Three principles
Three ideas shaped the work:
Your writing belongs to you. Publishing should connect your work to an identity you control.
Unfinished work deserves privacy. Sharing a draft should be your choice.
AI helps; you publish. An assistant can offer pages. You decide what goes in the book.
Those ideas sound simple. Turning them into a usable product meant making some careful choices.
Your wallet is your identity
On myblogs, your identity is a wallet address.
You prove control of it by signing a one-time message that expires. That sign-in message doesn't authorize a payment or publish anything.
Publishing needs a separate signature. The host can pay the transaction fee and relay your instruction, but your signature authorizes the change.
Of course, most people come to a blogging platform to write, not learn about wallets.
Google sign-in is already live. It confirms your email; myblogs' own built-in wallet is created in your browser, with a recovery phrase.
Google sign-in doesn't replace wallet recovery. If you lose your recovery phrase, every passkey and every remembered device, the host can't restore your wallet.
Ownership comes with something worth keeping safe.
Private drafts, with clear boundaries
Drafts are local-first: they save on your device as you write.
When you save drafts to your wallet account, the browser encrypts them before syncing. It derives the key from a wallet signature and uses AES-256-GCM. The host stores ciphertext for those account drafts.
But “everything is private” would be too broad.
Local device copies are stored without encryption. Draft images aren't encrypted either. If you choose to share a draft with an assistant, that shared copy is readable on the host.
The host also sees information such as saved draft sizes and times, and it supplies the JavaScript doing the encryption.
So the claim is specific: account draft text is encrypted in your browser before storage. That protection doesn't cover every copy or every part of the writing process.
Publishing: a fingerprint and your signature
Publishing turns your story into a JSON document and pins it on the publishing host's IPFS node.
The document gets a content identifier, or CID, derived from its exact bytes. Think of it as a fingerprint for that version.
Your wallet then signs the instruction to register it. The registry records the author address, CID, timestamps and deletion status. The story's title and text live in the IPFS document.
myblogs currently uses Base Sepolia, a public test network. We're still at an early stage.
Readers' browsers fetch the story and check its fingerprint. A changed document won't match the registered CID.
There is an important limit: a fingerprint isn't permanent storage. The publishing host keeps a pinned copy. Other hosts may keep copies, but continued availability depends on someone retaining the content.
Editing creates a new CID. Removing a story marks it deleted in the registry; it doesn't erase its history or copies someone else kept.
AI writing partners, with a clear limit
myblogs has an MCP server, using the Model Context Protocol, so assistants can connect to your writing workflow.
They can draft stories and chapters, show your own story analytics, suggest profile and space updates, and search community stories.
The assistant never publishes. Its tools cannot sign publishing instructions or change the registry. Drafts and suggestions wait for your review.
Assistants can read drafts they created and copies you deliberately share. They can't access your encrypted account drafts through MCP.
A shared copy is available to connected assistants with draft access, so sharing means opening that copy to those assistants.
The assistant hands you pages. You decide what goes in the book.
A space that feels like yours
Every writer gets a space: a canvas of cards on their profile.
Notes, images, links and stories can sit together in a layout that feels personal. Mine brings together code, coffee, games and the things I write.
Spaces are live today. The redesigned canvas is still waiting for release.
The stack, briefly
Cloudflare and Caddy sit in front of the deployment. Inside, Nginx routes requests to Next.js for pages, a Fastify API backed by SQLite, and Kubo for IPFS.
The API handles sessions, encrypted draft storage, analytics, moderation and search.
Reading analytics use hashed browser identifiers and timestamps, so pseudonymous is more accurate than anonymous. Infrastructure access logs can also contain IP addresses.
What the first weekend taught us
Private drafts need deliberate sharing. My assistant couldn't see changes I'd made in Studio and kept reviewing an older copy. “Send back to assistant” lets me choose which version to share.
Images need a smoother workflow. I've been adding illustrations manually in Studio. Assistants can reference image links, but direct assistant uploads aren't implemented yet.
SEO needs useful defaults. Search checks flagged long descriptions and missing image descriptions. Meta descriptions and structured data already exist; better validation and broader alt-text support are the next steps.
What's next
Direct image uploads through the assistant.
Meta-description length validation.
Better alt-text support, including canvas cards.
The responsive canvas redesign.
myblogs is small enough that using it still shapes what we build next.
If you've been meaning to write, come claim a corner.
Start writing at myblogs.co.
What would make a writing space feel truly yours: control over your words, private drafts, a personal canvas, or something else? Tell me in the thoughts below.
A little conversation.
Be the first to leave a thought.