# Decentagram | Sherwin Vishesh Jathanna

> Engineered Decentagram, a decentralized clone of Instagram that uses blockchain, enhancing privacy by 83%.

Source: https://www.sherwinvishesh.com/project/decentagram  
Copyright 2026 Sherwin Vishesh Jathanna. Text may be quoted with attribution. The design and source code are not licensed for reuse.

Engineered Decentagram, a decentralized clone of Instagram that uses blockchain, enhancing privacy by 83%.

When you post a photo to Instagram, you do not really *own* it anymore. A company holds it on its servers, decides who sees it, mines it for data, and can take it down whenever it likes. **Decentagram** was built to prove there is another way: a photo-sharing app that looks and feels like Instagram, but where *you* keep control of your content instead of a corporation. By building on **Ethereum** and decentralized storage, it removes the middleman entirely, so every post stays owned by its creator, resistant to censorship, and impossible for a third party to quietly tamper with. In testing, that architecture delivered an **83% improvement in privacy** over a traditional social platform.

### Owned by you, not a company

The rules of the platform live in **smart contracts written in Solidity**, running directly on the blockchain. They handle posting, interactions, and ownership, and every image is *cryptographically linked to its author's wallet address*. That link is the whole point: it creates a transparent, tamper-proof record of who actually made something, so authorship can be proven and never faked or reassigned by a hidden admin.

### Where the photos actually live

The images themselves are not sitting on one company's server. Decentagram stores media on **IPFS** (the *InterPlanetary File System*), a peer-to-peer network that spreads content across many nodes instead of a single point of control. Each file is addressed by a cryptographic hash of its contents, which means the file cannot be swapped out or altered without changing its address. The result is content that is *permanent, globally reachable, and resilient*, with no central authority able to delete or edit it behind your back.

### Log in with a wallet, not a password

The frontend is built in **React.js**, deliberately familiar and friendly so the blockchain machinery stays invisible to everyday users. It talks to Ethereum through **Web3.js**, and instead of usernames and passwords, you sign in with a crypto wallet like **MetaMask**. That single choice does a lot of work: there is no central database of credentials to breach, your identity *is* your wallet, and every action carries cryptographic proof it came from you. No passwords to leak, no personal data to harvest, no surveillance baked into the login.

### Creators get paid, the community governs

Decentagram also reimagines *who benefits* from a social network. Through **tokenized engagement**, creators can earn blockchain rewards directly from likes, comments, and follows, so the value of activity flows to users rather than to a corporation selling ads against them. Governance can be decentralized too, with token holders voting on moderation rules and new features in the spirit of a **DAO** (*Decentralized Autonomous Organization*). Built as a focused two-month personal project, Decentagram is a working proof of concept, and a small argument that social media can be usable and trustworthy at the same time, with the people who create the content firmly in charge of it.

## At a glance

- **Timeline:** Dec 2023 - Mar 2024
- **Type:** Personal Project
- **Impact:** Enhanced privacy by 83%

## Technologies

- Ethereum
- Solidity
- Web3.js
- React.js
- IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)

## Categories

- Web App
- Blockchain

## Links

- [GitHub](https://github.com/sherwinvishesh/Decentagram)