U°Community: based on UOS with its unique features, this platform is transparent, balanced, and less prone to abuse.
I would like to talk about a very promising project that I am actively following: U°OS. They created a blockchain protocol with reputation system. Their goal is to be the standard for evaluation of trustworthiness on the emerging decentralized web. The purpose of this post is to introduce you to the project.
I will also talk about U°Community, their first Dapp and a user-friendly interface for U°OS blockchain.
Before you continue, I would advise you to first read their whitepaper.
1. Problem statement
According to the study by Lene Pettersen, peer-to-peer platforms’ users consider rating score as the most important factor of making decisions on whether they would deal with strangers. However, the study also found that platforms control and change rating categories with subsequent consequences. Thus, existing evaluation systems are not fully reliable and not transparent.
They state there is a decision trilemma:
assessment of entities to deal with can not simultaneously be effortless, quick and comprehensive. The bottleneck of the digital economy is in collecting and processing the information to make a decision that requires trust. The absence of a universal and distributed reputation system makes this decision-making process slow and costly.
If we want to evolve to a more decentralized internet and digital economy, they definitely have a point. Everyone who is active online already asked the following questions: how do I know this platform can be trusted? Is that stranger on the other side of the screen trustworthy? Is this review written by a reliable person? There is simply no universal reputation system.
Think about health institutions. It may benefit the transparency of various non-commercial funds and organizations. U°OS can provide them with a reputation system and transaction infrastructure. For example, those foundations can run their fundraising campaigns via an offer system, collect funds on the platform via UOS blockchain, and manage those funds in a distributed manner, transparently. All the traction would be recorded on the ledger, suitable for annual reports to investors.
2. Solution
U°OS enables people and organizations to make comprehensive one-touch decisions that require trust.
The U°OS reputation system scores digital entities based on the network’s feedback. It translates connections between accounts into a unified reputation system using a modified NCDAwareRank algorithm.
U°OS Reputation System is:
Distributed
Operates algorithmically and does not belong to any centralized authority which makes it censorship resistant.
Universal
Can be integrated into any other existing application via robust API and OAuth. Itis open source and sufficiently flexible to be adjusted to a specific context.
Transparent
Transparency of blockchain-recorded data allows tracing causal links, which creates a holistic picture and increases trust to a digital entity (individual or organization).
Privacy-friendly
Although all your activity on a blockchain is traceable, U°OS does not require you to reveal your identity in order to use the reputation system. You can either verify your account through various authorization methods or stay anonymous.
4. Value proposition
Velocity and Cost Efficiency for Peer-To-Peer Interactions
U°OS reputation system can be effortlessly integrated with any service or application such as payment systems, value exchange services, social platforms,etc. U°OS integration augments user experience with competitive gameplay elements by revealing reputation of digital entities.
5. Technology
DPoI Consensus Algorithm
Delegated-Proof-of-Importance (DPoI) consensus algorithm integrates the concept of Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) with the idea that social interactions naturally generate economic activity between individuals or organizations. Consensus is achieved with the help of delegates. Delegates are elected by the network participants based on the Importance of each voter. Importance (and thus, influence) of an individual/organization for a network is achieved by the value they produce for others along with the amount of their stake in the network.
The DPoI, as opposed to PoS and DPoS, is based on the idea that not only account stake, but its incoming transfer and social activities both contribute to the overall value of the network, attracting new members and stimulating its growth. More explanation about this mechanism will follow later in this post.
If you want a more detailed explanation of the Importance° calculation, it can be found in the U°OS Yellow Paper.
6. What is done so far
U°OS Testnet
U°OS Network is currently in testnet stage with some of the major EOS Block Producers supporting it.
● Current Block Producer candidates
● U°OS GitHub Repository
● U°OS Block Explorer
U°Community
U°Community is the first DApp and a user-friendly interface for U°OS blockchain. It allows users to interact with each other, publish content and govern communities / organizations, powered by U°OS reputation system.
If you want to compare Steemit and the U°Community platform as a content platform, then the main difference is DPoI and dynamic emission. Because those two terms are so important, I will take a closer look at this. I do this based on information from a UOS Network AMA on the EOS discussion app. So these are not my own words. All credits go to the U°team.
Long after the network is live, U°Community lets active and valuable newcomers have a chance to earn their reputation
To begin with, U°Community is based on UOS with its unique features, that allow the dApp to utilize the DPoI algorithm and dynamic emission to rank users, content, and communities; it also allows users to run and govern the network itself, communities and organizations with their Importance score serving as their voting power.
Secondly, U°Community is not a mere content publishing platform, though it may seem so at first glance. They are using a casual social interaction mechanic everyone nowadays is used to, such as posting, upvoting, commenting, sharing and so on, so that their Importance° algorithm can collect social interaction data without the need to introduce complex models and manuals.
As for the user incentives/onboarding, the Importance° algorithm and, in its turn, the dynamic emission, are not rewarding the quantity of actions, but their quality, which is judged upon by other network participants. They do not boast content monetization, as the dynamic emission depends on the growth of the network, and if there is no growth, no new connections formed, there will be no emission for that timeframe.
They do not limit the content publishing features to microblogging only, but the length of your posts is up to you. You can publish huge longreads via a publication editor or drop direct posts right in your feed - as you see fit.
Users have no incentive to upvote any content but to display their own affection or provide feedback. It makes content ranking process transparent and less manipulated, as it has no follow-the-whale strategies.
As for the users themselves, their Importance° is based on their stake, incoming transfers and social transactions, such as upvotes. The weight of your upvote depends on your own Importance, time since the action, and the total number of your upvotes that haven’t yet decayed. This makes the system transparent, balanced, and less prone to abuse.
Due to the implementation of dynamic emission, an algorithmically predicted amount of tokens is issued each time network activity maximum is surpassed. This provides additional liquidity and mitigates token exchange rate spikes during network growth peaks, and is distributed among network members in proportion to their Importance, rewarding them for creating value for the network and attracting new members.
Thus the more value you create for the network, the more valuable it becomes for the world, the more users it attracts. This growth triggers dynamic emission, and you get rewarded for it. The trick is, your impact on the overall network growth is decided upon by other users, by their immediate feedback, which decays over time. There are no “dead whales”, dragging their long earned ratings with them. If you are not active at the moment, your social and transfer activity scores will be close to zero, and all that will remain is your staked tokens. This system lets active and valuable newcomers have a chance to earn their reputation, their Importance, and, as a result, stake, long after the network is live, which is hardly possible in most well-established systems.
If you want to give it a try, you definitely should. If you decide to register, I would be grateful if you use this referral link: https://hello.u.community/jR/alluncovered.
Later, you can provide your own referral link to your friends and gain importance from your referrals, registered on the platform.
U°OS Network mainnet is going live on December, 1, 2019.
At this very moment, there is also a UOS Token Sale (IEO). The offering started on August 8 and will end on August 14, 09:00 (UTC) as Initial Exchange Offering on Bitforex and p2pb2b platforms. For more information, you can read this U°Community post.