Current — A Platform That Will Pay You To Listen To Your Favorite Music & Other Streams

You know all those annoying Youtube ads that you must sit through when watching your favorite videos? What if you could be paid to watch them? Enter Current, the platform that aims to reward you for listening to and creating the media that you want — on your favorite media platforms such as Youtube.

What Is Current?

At its essence, Current brings together all the various media streaming networks (such as Youtube, Spotify etc) into one central platform. Users will be able to search for media from all these networks with a single search query on Current. That means if you’re looking for a specific song that’s on your mind, you no longer need to search Soundcloud, Spotify, Youtube and other song streaming services separately for it, instead a single search query on Current will do that for you. It may also bring up movies from movie streaming services that are related to that query — all of which you can of course filter depending upon the specific type of media you’re looking for.

In essence, search queries are executed globally over all media networks. Current doesn’t just restrict your media to songs and videos however, you can use the platform to search for audiobooks, educational material, TV shows, practically any media-type that you can think of. You can also upload your own media via the platform and it will be distributed to the specific platforms that you wish. The best part of all this is that you actually get paid to do all this.

This may sound too good to be true, and initial skepticism is warranted. After looking into the Current project, its team and its whitepaper however, I kept nodding my head at how game changing and disruptive it will be to media networks everywhere. You see, all media networks make their income from advertisers. By watching media you are exposed to ads in one way or another. The media platforms all receive huge amounts of money from these advertisers. It may sound like a fair trade — you get free media in exchange for watching ads, but as consumers we can take it a step further and demand some of this ad revenue as well, since we are the ones watching the ads after all.. and why not? This is what Current will do — it will use advertising revenue that the networks receive to pay participants on its platform for the media they watch, upload, and contribute.

The CRNC Token

Payment on Current will be in the form of CRNC tokens. This token will be based on the Ethereum blockchain and transferable to others, or be sellable on exchanges. The Current platform itself will be both partially centralized and decentralized whereby the main Current interface and connected media networks will be on hybrid servers that will connect to decentralized data storage protocols such as IPFS or Storj to store data. Decentralized Ethereum smart contracts will be used for all important functionality and storage and handling of CRNC tokens. This means the token remains tamper-proof from central manipulation, and its supply and issuance can all be verified on the blockchain and stored off the network.

So what will the CRNC token actually be useful for? It turns out, a lot of things. CRNC can be used to purchase various products and online services, and even to fund your own advertising campaigns on the Current platform. If you don’t plan on doing any advertising of your own, you can be certain that CRNC will be in demand by advertisers who do, and will hopefully be looking to pay you a pretty penny for your tokens in order to do this. But for the actual utility? The token checks out as useful for both users looking to buy online services, and promoters looking to advertise their product/services. A token that is good for both the small and big guys — I like that!

Airdrop & ICO Details

What if I told you the current cost to receive CRNC tokens before the platform launch is.. well.. free? You see, the private ICO of Current has already concluded whereby it reached its Hard Cap too easily. Interest in the project is immense. There will be another main, public crowdsale scheduled for March 14, however some 250,000 people registered to take part in this already! So it’s almost certain this will sell out instantly. As a reaction to this interest, the Current team has decided to airdrop $4 million worth of CRNC tokens for free. I almost fell out of my seat reading that one!

Since demand is so high for Current, and they have the funds they need to proceed, the team has been very generous by not wanting anyone to miss out. They have done something quite unprecedented here with this free airdrop — it’s essentially a free ICO! It certainly helps build a lot of trust and confidence in the ability of the Current team to launch something great.

Details on how to participate in the free $4 million airdrop are all available on their Medium post here: https://medium.com/current-crnc/4-million-of-crnc-airdropping-4c0a01808575

Their main crowdsale is schedule to launch from March 14 to April 4. So in case your airdrop isn’t enough and you really do insist on investing to get more CRNC tokens (and why wouldn’t you?) then this will be a proper ICO. But you’d probably need to act fast since as I say.. the interest is very high.

Conclusion

Current aims to bring together all the various media streaming networks into one platform, and to pay users a share of the advertising revenue of the media they watch, and contribute. This is one of the few large-scale projects with this sort of vision that has a solid team that could pull the idea off. They have a wealth of experience between them which makes me confident that such an ambitious project has a very real chance of succeeding. And with a free airdrop, what risk is there? Although for me, I’ll certainly be considering their main ICO as well — If I can get in on time.

Links
Website: https://current.us/
Whitepaper: https://cdn.current.us/whitepaper.pdf
One-Pager: https://cdn.current.us/onepager.pdf
Business Deck: https://cdn.current.us/deck.pdf
BitCoinTalk ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2829644.0

(My BCT username: JainaVsUther)