Announcing Cheddur 2.0 : An Incentivized Crypto Review Platform using a Steem SMT
We're launching a new Smart Media Token, CHDR, to help bring safety, order, and accountability to crypto.
Introduction
Two and a half years ago, I embarked on a mission to onboard as many people onto cryptocurrency as possible by helping them safely enter the market and navigate the ecosystem. In the spirit of this mission, the Cheddur platform was born.
Progress
Over the last ten months, our team has established 200 partnerships with cryptocurrency companies who have claimed and actively manage their Cheddur profiles. We've amassed over 2,500 cryptocurrency reviews on the platform. And most importantly —we've guided over 50,000 users along their crypto journey.
Challenges
Behind the scenes, it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows. Tribalism is prevalent among cryptocurrency communities and can cause users to be overly positive in their reviews of coins that they hold (5 stars), or overly negative in their reviews of "rival" projects (1 star). In addition, we suspect that several crypto companies on the platform have used astroturfing and vote brigading in order to drown out critical reviews and/or artificially inflate their popularity.
In a market where 80% of the ICOs are deemed to be scams, maintaining the integrity of the Cheddur review system is critical towards holding crypto companies accountable and enabling beginners to easily distinguish between high-quality and low-quality projects.
Philosophy
As a company, we believe that it is best to be neither the judge nor jury over deciding which projects are scams. When it comes to listing new coins and crypto apps on Cheddur, our goal is to instead be factually complete and to list new and interesting projects based on user demand and the facts that are available on the Internet. We believe that it is the responsibility of the cryptocurrency community as a whole — rather than a central authority —to collectively determine the quality of each crypto company.
Announcing Cheddur 2.0
I'm excited to announce that in 2019, we are tokenizing the Cheddur platform with our very own cryptocurrency, CHDR (Ʉ). The purpose of the CHDR currency is simple -—to help bring safety, order, and accountability to the crypto ecosystem by aligning the interests of cryptocurrency beginners (who need help), cryptocurrency experts (who can provide it), and crypto companies (who want to grow their communities, but also need to be held to a higher standard).
How?
In order to fulfill its purpose, the CHDR currency will:
- Establish a reputation system to designate each user's influence within the platform.
- Incentivize users to create and curate high-quality, unbiased reviews through rewards and platform influence.
- Determine the individual quality of each user-generated review using the Wisdom of the Crowd.
- Help us more accurately calculate the overall star rating and popularity of each crypto company by favoring reviews that are deemed to be high quality.
- Minimize the effects of tribalism, astroturfing, vote brigading, and other forms of malicious activity.
- Empower the Cheddur community to be self-policing and self-sustaining.
- Enable beginners to earn their way into the crypto market with little or no downside risk.
Benefits
Crypto experts can use the platform to share their wisdom, knowledge, experiences, successes, and failures — so that we can collectively learn from each other - and they are incentivized to do so in an honest way through our rewards system.
For beginners, it's like having a trusted expert right in your pocket, available 24/7 and ready to guide you every step of the way of your crypto journey. Beginners are also rewarded for up-voting high-quality content when they see it, and down-voting any malicious activity.
And for crypto companies, it's a platform they can use to not only list themselves, but to claim and manage their free Cheddur profiles, respond to user reviews, and use our premium tools and targeted advertising to grow their communities of users and investors.
Token Economy
We published a full, technical white paper on token.cheddur.com that explains the nuts and bolts of our token economy. It works like this:
Rather than individual users having to pay rewards and fees directly amongst each other (as is the case with most Ethereum-based ÐApps), Ʉ tokens will be awarded via the programmatic inflation of the CHDR supply. Inflation aligns the interests of each stakeholder as the Cheddur community as a whole — beginners, experts, companies, and the Cheddur team —collectively pay for the creation and curation of high-quality content.
A Smart Media Token
The CHDR currency will utilize the industry-leading Proof of Brain properties that were pioneered by the Steem blockchain and made available through the Smart Media Token (SMT) protocol. By using the Steem blockchain, Cheddur users will be able to enjoy the benefits of the blockchain without having to realize they are using one.
Concluding Thoughts
We Want Your Feedback!
We believe that the CHDR currency should be launched in collaboration with the community, so we are seeking feedback on the design of Cheddur 2.0. We intended to spare no details from our white paper, so if anything is unclear, missing, or doesn't make sense, let's talk about it!
Starting points for an open discussion:
- We are currently undecided on whether to do an airdrop or an ICO (using the built-in capabilities of the SMT protocol, as described in the white paper), so we'd appreciate feedback on that!
- We're considering burning some percentage of our quarterly profits in Ʉ tokens, but aren't sure if a) this is necessary, and b) what the parameters would be around this.
Seems like a solid plan! Can you give more details about the reputation algorithm you plan to use? The STEEM reputation is kinda bad, but there are alternatives like steem-ua
Anyway I hope you don't ICO for a project like this. Give yourself some tokens and create value and utility and I think it will be more worth it for you in the long run for your project.
Finally, the 80/20 split choice seems like a terrible one. Curation is actually very important, if you are going to 80/20 it, why even bother with the 20% as curation will never be an interesting thing to do anyway in your platform?
Hello, creator of DTube! Thank you for your comments. :)
ReviewScorefor each review, and averaging eachReviewScoreto determine an overall rating for each crypto project. Would love to get your thoughts on this!1- While this train of thought is right, it's only true when your whole community adapts at lightning speed. If it's possible to abuse, then 1 person discovers it, then the next day everyone does it, then the token value instantly crashes to $0.
In reality, adaptation will take time, and the early malicious users would profit at the start of the crash, while the people who acted good would just lose everything because they acted good. It's a bit similar to the problem of bid bots on steem. If there was no bid bot today, someone would make one because an opportunity exists, and as long as not everyone sells his vote, the token keeps on existing and being worth a little something, and the thieves keep on profitting, even if it's little, they don't care if it's automated.
Overall I think reputation is a complex problem and I think for a website like yours, trying something new wouldn't be a bad thing :D
2- The way you calculate the ReviewScore seems a bit prone to sybil attacks but considering theres only a *2 factor for the VotePoints part (which is the part sensible to multi-accounts spamming), it should be fine.
I'm not sure I understand, taking the average seems a bit silly. Shouldnt the overall score of a project be the sum of the review scores instead? I mean, if a little minnow creates a new review and upvotes himself for 0.001$, it will lower the average and bring the project down in the rankings?
3- I think it depends on what you want. I don't think curation is viable on steem at 25%, so at 20% it won't be. So in this case you should go for 100% authors. You'd get tons of reviews but then there would be no incentive for people to vote on reviews which kinda defeats the purpose. Anyone can go on your site and create a review and earn from it, without even putting a cent, but in order to make money with curation you need to invest, so I think they need to have a better incentivization than 25%. I'm not even sure 50% is enough, I run an experiment on DTube where we redistribute our beneficiary rewards to increase curation rewards, and while it has a bit of effect, I don't think it's enough.
4- In my view, doing an ICO is just a way for you to give a discount on your tokens. If you believe in your token and it's future utility and use, then it's probably better to do like Steem did. Keep your tokens, then sell a % of it every year to fund the development and so on.
I'm glad to see a real website working on SMT implementation, instead of new steem projects popping, it's a breath of fresh air :D
1 - Got it! Are there any other rep systems aside from Steem-UA that you'd recommend we investigate?
2 - Agreed on Sybil attacks; we're trying to strike a balance. If we don't give enough weight to up-votes in the
ReviewScore, then an honest minnow's up-vote would have 0 impact. So we figured we would give a 2x factor onVotePointsand see how it behaves in production. If we notice it's not working, we can always adjust the algo later and re-calculate because it's all run and computed off-chain.Check out the examples on page 17 and 18. In traditional review systems, an entity that gets a 5-star review and a 1-star review would have a net overall rating of 3 stars because there is no differentiation between each review, they are treated equal.
(1 + 5)/2 = 3. We attempt to differentiate between high and low-quality reviews via theReviewScore, so a crypto project that gets a 1-star review and a 5-star review is likely to not have an overall score of 3, as one review may carry more weight and therefore skew the overall rating in its favor.3 - Got it. I'll do more research on the author / curator split. Are there any other steem-based dapps that you know of that are struggling with the 75/25 ratio?
4 - Our view on the ICO is mixed. We'd like to inject capital into the project ASAP to accelerate development, but we also fear selling 55% of the token supply to a small pool of investors who's primary motivation is to dump. We're considering an airdrop to STEEM hodlers, but we also don't want to airdrop tokens to a bunch of people who are fundamentally not that interested in crypto / will never use the platform. Lastly, we're also considering starting the supply at literally 0, like Steem, and "pre-mining" some for the founders to establish initial influence in the network, and then opening it up to the public and letting the supply grow entirely through rewards.
Thank you again for all of your feedback. We're big fans of DTube, so it's an honor talking to you about this!
We just published an updated version of the white paper that describes the token distribution I mentioned in my previous comment. Rather than doing an ICO, we think we will "pre-mine" a small pool of coins for the Cheddur team to establish initial influence on the platform. From there, rewards will be distributed out to the public via the Rewards Pool (for high-quality content, with the help of our voting) and the Bounty Program (for completing valuable actions).
We anticipate that after the first year of operation, influence on the platform by the Cheddur community will supercede the influence on the platform by the Cheddur team. This sounds like the right amount of time for us to vote and funnel CHDR tokens into the hands of a large enough set of valuable community members.
To accommodate this new design, we also reduced the starting supply of tokens from 100M --> 5M, and ramped up the inflation schedule from 4% starting with 0.5% annual decline, to 20% starting with 2% annual decline.
Would love to get your thoughts on this!
Ok I understand the average thingy, its weighted based on the rshares of the comment so yeah it will work. Did you think about the issues of people buying votes on steem? Theres a public list of the biggest bidbots, and you should clearly not count their votes in your ranking algorithm, you don't want a bad crypto project being 'promoted' on your website because they bought votes on steem.
I have absolutely nothing against the 'creators' of a token keeping a large % of the supply for them, especially if this % lowers with time. I believe it's a good model, as you will have good incentive to keep working on your token and product to make your own tokens worth more. Also it makes sense that you need to keep a certain degree of control while things are unstable and you reach a good ranking algorithm, it's hard to tell how things will behave for chaotic system like steem currently. Alike steem, you should also be clear with your community about how and when and how much of your tokens you will sell every quarter or year on the markets so that if people want to invest in your token, they know what they are getting into.
Yes, I think Steemit has proven that account size is not necessarily a guarantee that someone will act in the platform's best interest. They act in their own best interests over that of the platform, which is why the content on Steemit's trending page is junk, fueled by bidbots, fueled in turn by large stakeholders selling their votes for maximum self-interested return. The same economics will work but will progressively create a bigger mess. Account based voting is probably better than stake-based. I'd agree that higher curation rewards might help prevent some of the negative effects.
If you need the funds, you can ICO it or raise funds over time on Steemit by posting good content that gets voted up. The latter could be combined with an airdrop, which is sure to get you some fans.
Got it - looking into Steem-UA now. Thank you for your feedback!
Best proposal for an SMT I have heard yet, I think I will resteem so I remember to join your platform. I'll try to resist shilling shitcoins on it if reputation really matters there.
Thank you for the positive feedback! We're currently live in production so you can join today if you'd like. :)
It's free: https://www.cheddur.com/join
Tokenization will follow once the SMT protocol is ready!
Wings on ethereum already does it.