Lunyr - Steemit meets Wikipedia

If you like the concept of Steemit then you will probably also like the concept of Lunyr coin.

This is the latest currency that I have been investigating. I find the concept intriguing and I have invested a small amount into the coin itself. I have also enrolled in the alpha testing phase and am exploring the merits of this project from a number of angles. Today I will discuss it purely from an investment point of view, as I’ve not been involved with the Lunyr community long enough to have formed an opinion on the sustainability of the project from this perspective.

What is Lunyr coin

Lunyr Vision

Lunyr is an Ethereum-based decentralized world knowledge base which rewards users with app tokens for peer-reviewing and contributing information. We aim to be the starting point of the internet for finding reliable, accurate information. Our long-term vision is to develop a knowledge base API that developers can use to create next generation decentralized applications in Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and more.

As mentioned in the intro, I think the best way to describe Lunyr coin is Steemit crossed with Wikipedia. Lunyr coin aims to create an online database of information (an encyclopaedia) to compete with Wikipedia, but aims to do so in a way that rewards authors for the provision of content, and incorporate a peer review system to make the information more reliable than that which is currently online.

The Lunyr concept is simple:

The future of knowledge sharing Earn rewards for contributing and peer reviewing knowledge.

This is why I think that Lunyr is a project that should naturally appeal to members of the Steemit community. In the same way that you can be paid on Steemit for the contribution of quality blog posts; on the Lunyr platform you can be rewarded for the contribution of Wikipedia style articles. You also earn rewards for reviewing and commenting upon other articles that have been submitted, in the same way that you earn curation rewards on Steemit for curating other people’s blogs.

The concept is simple. You write a Wikipedia style article and contributed it to the platform. This article is then reviewed by three other members of the community, and if it is believed to be of sufficient quality (it must be scored an average of 3/5 across the three users who have reviewed it) then your contribution is eligible to be posted to the online database. In addition to submitting an article of appropriate quality, you must also peer review a number of other articles that have been submitted by other authors, prior to your article being finally approved for publication on the site.

The project has several different drivers. The most obvious is to incentivise people to submit quality, factually accurate articles, on relevant topics, to be posted in an online encyclopaedia. Should authors do this, they will be rewarded in a Lunyr coin for doing so. In order to ensure quality control, each submitted article must be peer-reviewed by three other users prior to being approved for final publication on the database. In order to incentivise authors to peer review other articles, it is mandatory that you must peer review other articles prior to your own article being posted, and thus for you to be paid. The payment mechanism works very similar to Steemit in principle. For the submission and review of articles you earn credits which are cashed out for Lunyr coin from a pool at the end of each two weeks. To my mind this equates to the seven-day waiting period for payment of author and creation rewards on Steemit.

A second aspect of the project is their aim to make the information censorship resistant. Currently anybody cannot log onto Wikipedia and change or amend an article. They can even upload fictitious articles should it should suit their purpose. Prominent individuals, and large businesses are well known for carefully curating their Wikipedia profile. The peer review system employed by Lunyr will effectively stop this behaviour from being possible.

The third aspect of the Lunyr project is advertising. Lunyr plans to sell advertising space on their website in exchange for Lunyr coin. This will create a demand for the currency which will give it value, such that they can use it to reward contributors. In essence, the encyclopaedia is simply a means to draw users to a website so that they can be advertised to. Assuming the website is able to attract sufficient viewers, then advertisers will wish to purchase advertising space from the Lunyr team. This advertising space can only be paid for in Lunyr coin.

To increase demand and uptake, Lunyr has plans to enable its information to be incorporated into a variety of 3D and virtual reality projects. They are vague on detail as to what exactly this means, but I did see one other reviewer give a good example. If you imagine a schoolchild in the future engaged in a virtual reality simulation where they are walking across the surface of the moon. The commentary accompanying that simulation could come from the relevant article on the Lunyr database. There is a heavy focus within the Lunyr development team to ensure that their database is compatible with evolving virtual reality technology. If one thinks of the pace with which virtual reality and similar systems are being adopted, then this is potentially a significant point of difference for this project.

The Project Team

It was difficult to find any information of significance about the project team. Their profiles are listed on LinkedIn, and they list the usual succession of information technology and software engineering based backgrounds. The team is very small, but I’m comfortable with this, because the project is very simple. The vast majority of work to get the database established will be done by those submitting of the content. Whilst there was nothing in the team that blew me away from an analysis point of view, there was also nothing there that alarmed me.

The Competitors

Wikipedia is the elephant in the room. It has a clear first mover advantage and has an enormous existing online database of information. Whether Lunyr coin is able to attain sufficient scale to overtake Wikipedia remains to be seen. That said, Wikipedia is not currently a profitable enterprise, as evidenced by the fact that users are asked to donate to the project to enable its continued existence. Lunyr coin will not require donations from users, and will be fully self-funded from advertising revenue should the project be successful.

Points of Difference

The most significant point of difference for Lunyr in comparison to a competitor sites such as Wikipedia is its peer review functionality. If this is successful, then the quality of information on the Lunyr database should be significantly superior to the quality of information contained on Wikipedia. This should lead to Lunyr becoming the first port of call for online information in the future.

The other point of difference is the design of the system to be interoperable with virtual reality systems. The actual technical aspects of this are outside my area of expertise and therefore may be being oversold by the team. It seems to make sense to me however, that if an information database is easily able to be integrated into a virtual reality system, then this would be a selling point for that database as virtual reality systems gain greater and greater adoption.

Business case

Opportunities

I think that Lunyr coin is a natural landing place for many of the existing users of Steemit. The concept is essentially the same as the Steemit concept, with authors being paid to contribute and curate quality content. If you enjoy contributing to the Steemit community, and have an academic mindset, then there is the potential for you to make additional crypto currency online by contributing to this platform. I think the peer review feature is a clever way to distinguish this platform from other competitors such as Wikipedia.

From a contributors point of view there is an enormous opportunity to contribute to the project. The database is in a fledgling stage at this point, and covers a very small amount of information. This information is predominantly focused on major crypto currencies. For any would-be contributor who has an area of subject matter expertise, it would be very easy to find a topic that has not yet been written about. To give some examples of some of the topics which are not currently covered I will list the following:

• The Seven Continents
• The City of New York, London or Paris
• Elephants
• Psychology
• The Amazon Jungle
• The Battle of Waterloo

There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of topics that will need to be written and submitted to the database over its evolution. If you had an interest in writing the type of material that was required, then there is an enormous opportunity to be a part of this project and earn Lunyr coin in the process.

The actual Lunyr website is also beautifully designed. A significant amount of effort appears to have gone into designing the website to be visually appealing and I think this is a significant strength. It is a requirement that articles are supported by appropriate graphics and pictures, in order to make them visually appealing to the reader. Assuming the quality of information was the same, it would be a significantly more pleasant experience to read information on the Lunyr database than on an equivalent Wikipedia website. It should be noted that there is no advertising currently on the website, so how they will incorporate advertising into the experience without compromising the aesthetics’ remains to be seen.

Another advantage of this project is that is incredibly simple in concept. Whilst I do not have the technical background to assess the coding and cryptographic requirements that will go into maintaining the block chain that sits behind it, in concept this project is exceedingly simple. It is currently in Alpha testing phase and Beta phase releases on 30 January 2018. So as opposed to the vast majority of crypto projects, which are in the development phase, and offering nothing but the potential for a profitable product in the future, Lunyr has an existing product which it will be taking to market this month. This seems like a good short-term trading opportunity if nothing else.

Risks

One of the risks I see with this project is its reliance on advertising funding. The first question I would ask is, if advertising is the way to support a project of this nature then why isn’t Wikipedia profitable based on advertising. Many of the dot.com era bubble projects that subsequently burst in the year 2000 were based on the assumption that if a particular website was built, then advertising dollars would be sufficient to make the project profitable. This was demonstrated to be largely untrue. There seems to be an element of ‘if you build it they will come’ in this sentiment. The developers would argue that their project is significantly superior to Wikipedia in terms of factual accuracy and consistency, and that they also have the ability to be incorporated into other technological innovations such as a virtual reality. The fact remains that Internet advertising has proven to be a very difficult market to enter profitably and very few businesses are able to do so. There is a reason most newspaper websites have paywalls. The ability of a micro project like Lunyr to crack this nut has to be questioned.

The second point that I would raise flows from my involvement in the alpha testing phase of this project. It is the amount of work required to submit article. The articles required for Lunyr are not simple 600 - 800 word blog pieces as one might produce for Steemit. The writing guidelines that have been issued stipulate that articles should be between 2,500 and 10,000 words. They must also be appropriately researched and referenced in order to pass the peer review process. Having sat down over the weekend and attempted to put together my first piece for submission, I can assure you that this is a significant task. I do not at this point understand what the rewards will look like if your article is accepted, but there are many hours of work to be put into developing one article. In order to achieve widescale adoption I would suggest that the rewards would need to be reasonably significant. That said, a counterpoint to this argument is that many people spend the time to produce these styles of article for Wikipedia already, and they do this for free. Therefore, if people are willing to do it for free, why would they not do it in return for payment. It remains to be seen whether this will be successful.

My third point also flows from my experience with the alpha testing phase of Lunyr. It is what is the quality of the peer review process? The first thing that I did upon being granted access to the alpha testing phase was peer review an article. The quality of the article was quite poor and as I moved through the process I determined that I did not feel that it would be suitable for publication on the database. I think it’s important that if Lunyr is to be successful then the articles must be of particularly high quality, otherwise some of the projects points of difference come into question. The above notwithstanding, the peer review process was not particularly comprehensive. It effectively amounted to ticking and flicking a number of boxes and rating a series of criteria on a scale of one and five. An author needed to receive an average score of three or above in order to be published. I’m not sure if there are any additional quality assurance features built into the system, but it seems to me that given authors are being paid to peer review articles, the robustness of the peer review process is particularly important. You are currently able to complete a peer review without having even read the article, which calls into question the integrity of this system. If the peer review process breaks down than the entire system breaks down.

Conclusion

It’s very difficult to assess the merits of the Lunyr project at this point in time. It is the type of project that will require wide scale adoption in order to achieve success. I also have some reservations about the robustness of the advertising feature. As mentioned above, internet based advertising has traditionally been a very difficult market to crack, so Lunyr will face the challenges of all of the businesses that have preceded it in attempting to generate revenue from internet advertising. The robustness of the article submission and peer review process also remains to be tested. There is only a limited amount of information currently published on the Lunyr database, but it does appear to be of reasonably high quality. Whether they can maintain this standard throughout the development of the entire database remains to be seen.

The above issues noted, the project also has some fairly compelling advantages. Firstly, it is actually a working product that is about to be put to market. As at 30th of January people will be to commence accessing this database and using the information contained therein. As the database grows with additional contributions, you would expect that use of the database should also grow. From a purely speculative investment point of view, you would also think that the transition from alpha testing phase to beta release, should provide a catalyst for a potential short-term price movement.

The concept is very simple and easily understandable by all both contributors and investors. The total supply of the coin is also very small, so if there was any significant interest in this project or uptake of the advertising aspects of it, then you could expect a significant appreciation in the coin price as the coin is quite scarce.

Overall I have made a small investment in Lunyr. In the short term I think the release of the Beta phase at the end of January 2018, should be a positive catalyst for the price. Longer term it will depend on the number of articles submitted, and the quality of his articles as to whether the project gains mainstream acceptance. It also remains to be seen if the advertising revenue model can be made to work.