What is Snax and is it Safe?
If you head over to the #snaxbountyprogram tag, you will find hundreds of posts written on Snax. Being curious, I went on to learn more about it.
What is Snax?
According to the team,
Snax is a blockchain platform. It was created for people to receive rewards for their social activity (tweets, Instagram posts, and so on) and to make instant free micropayments without leaving their favorite social platform. Developers can use Snax blockchain to create decentralized social applications (social dApps).
Snax is built on top of EOS and just like Steem, they believe that there is value in content created on social networks and users should be rewarded for them. However, instead of creating a content creation platform, they decided to use an overlay and integrate with existing social networks instead. Over in this article, they compared themselves head-on with Steem.
By connecting to existing social networks, Snax reward authors with SNAX tokens for the value the author provides. "Value" is determined by attention rate which the team defines as,
Attention Rate is a metric that being calculated for every post separately. It shows how much attention this post has received and can be calculated on the basis of interdependent factors:
- quality of the audience of your social media account
- amounts of interactions with the post (likes, comments, reposts)
- quality of interactions with the post (who made a comment, and/or reposted)
So far, Snax has only integrated with Twitter and they will be integrating with Steem on 14 May.
Is Snax Safe?
To register on Snax, you need to make a Twitter post. Once done, you will need to create your wallet which requires a Chrome extension. After that, you will just need to unlock your wallet in order to login to the site and see your earnings.
While everything seems to be easy and simple, I am particularly concern about the fact that a browser extension is required for this to work. Browser extensions are very powerful applications. With the right permissions, they are able to intercept all your web traffic and even access your clipboard. Snax is not a well known name yet and it is always wise to read deeper into the extension I just installed.
Using CRXcavator, I found that there are no known vulnerabilities on the extension. However, the permissions required did get me slightly concerned.
First, the "webRequest" permission is required. Chrome webRequest permission allows the browser to intercept and even modify your web traffic. However, this permission is only requested for the Snax website and Twitter. While I can understand that this permission is perhaps required to login to the Snax website, I am baffled by why it is required for Twitter.
Next, they also requested for the "clipboardRead" permission. I also find this puzzling as I do not see any functions which the extension offers that require this. Having this permission will allow the extension to read what is in my clipboard, which may contain sensitive information such as passwords.
Conclusion
I have yet to read Snax's whitepaper in detail to understand what they are trying to achieve. But based on their roadmap, I supposed they want to be a platform where social influencers are rewarded for their content and advertisers can make use of SNAX tokens to get these influencers to write about their products. It will be some kind of a decentralized social media advertisements marketplace.
Overall, I think Snax is an interesting project. The cool part is that they did not conduct an ICO and they are distributing their tokens through various airdrops and bounty programs. Just like the one they are running for Steem right now. However, since they are a relatively unknown project with an anonymous team, we need to be really careful when it comes to using things that provided by them (e.g. the Chrome extension). While I see no harm in signing up, I recommend to disable the extension when you are not logging into their site. Just to be safe :)
Thanks for reading and do let me know your thoughts on Snax.
This article is created on the Steem blockchain. Check this series of posts to learn more about it and start writing on an immutable and censorship-resistant content platform:
My primay concern is that SNAX gains access to post on my Twitter and Steemit accounts and upvote/downvote using my Steemit weight. Not sure I like that at all! I don't want SNAX spamming my followers or using my Steem Power to vote for what they want.
I have to question what is their profit/business model by herding all these people with followers? Could it be to send out paid marketing messages from the accounts of their followers to reach large numbers of people and benefiting from the reputation of those accounts?
If so, then this is just a marketing pyramid scheme that undermines the reputation of content creators who have organically built up a following. I hope that is not the case and they will clearly state they will not do this, but I haven't seen it posted anywhere though.
First of all, Snax do not gain permission to post on Twitter on your behalf. I verified that on Twitter. They shouldn't need to post on Steem on your behalf as well. The linking of Steem account to Snax, as it seems, only requires the account registration post and you do not need to grant them any permissions to your Steem account.
Their business model seems to be as such,
That's what I understand so far. However, I have not read their whitepaper in detail. If @snaxteam is reading this post, it will be great to have them reply to your question :)
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Look at the permissions for the extension. It clearly states they will be able to "Read and Change your data" on twitter.com
In their Privacy Policy (https://snax.one/privacy-policy), it states they will capture, among other things, PASSWORDS. (see Section 2). In Section 4, it states the purpose will be for Snax to manage contacts and send messages, interaction with external social networks and platforms, etc.
Further on it describes integration with Mailchimp but does not state if it is only for the subscribed user or if they are harvesting the emails of those you connect with.
Too much going on out there. Too much for my simple mind. I will just file this for reference later, and stick with what I think I know. :-)
Haha.. that's certainly a wise thing to do
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I am looking forward to seeing how influencers adopt this and what it could mean for Steem as it provides a great way to monetize our attention economies as they continue to grab interest from social networks and their ecosystems! Thanks for sharing!
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You're welcome. The concept is interesting but the success of it will be highly dependent on how the team market this
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Cool eye opener.
Thanks @Culgin
You are welcome! And thanks for dropping by
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So the only market for selling these tokens is going to be companies that want to pay influencers to pimp out their products? I have serious doubts about the potential value of a hundred billion coins that are being given out for free.
Why the hell are they anonymous? The English on their site is terrible.
The worst thing is I one hundred percent believe tokenization of existing social media platforms by 3rd parties is going to be huge. I just question if this project is is going to viable.
Haha.. for now the project does seem a little sketchy. However, I don't see much harm trying it out. Just have to make sure we don't divulge too much personal info
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Hi @culgin!
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I don't understand that authorization post I have to make here on steem ? Do I just create a new article with that text ?