Relevant ($REL) Research Paper by Crypto Console, next potential x100?

6 min readJun 16, 2020

Executive Summary

Relevant is a social news reader that values “quality over clicks”.
The REL token is a utility token which has 10% yearly inflation.
Extremely small circulating supply of 127,102 REL tokens, which translates to a $56,000 market cap as of now (at $0.44).
Investment possibility at the ground level alongside funds such as Coinbase Ventures & CoinFund.
Funded by Coinbase Ventures means they likely won’t run out of money.
Only around 140 small holders and no whales to manipulate the market.
In the desktop and mobile platform there’s a link to Uniswap, where you can buy REL tokens. It’s clear that the Relevant team is pushing the monetary value.
Advised by the founders of Augur and Ocean Protocol.
Listed only on Uniswap.

Project background

The Relevant news-sharing app uses a new kind of scheme, called Reputation Protocol, which allows to incentivize users for the quality of given information. The Protocol encourages everyone to provide information and various news of only high quality, because there is a reward to that. Content of poor quality is quickly identified and downvoted, meaning there is no reward for the author.

They have a working app for both iOS and Android:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/relevant-communities/id1173025051

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.relevantnative

Relevant is registered in New York:

https://crunchbase.com/organization/relevant-8d4e#section-overview

What is the Relevant mission?

Their mission is to create a token-backed qualitative metric for the information economy, making the human values of veracity, expertise and agency economically valuable.

Reputation Protocol

Community-based platforms, such as Airbnb, rely on reputation systems to mitigate counterparty risk and enable strangers to transact with one another. The score of content is based on an algorithm similar to PageRank.

There is a component of the system called Transitive Trust and Distributed Reputation. In layman’s terms, Transitive Trust spreads the reputation between a few trusted peers. That way, a global reputation is being distributed. This mechanism uses an EigenTrust++ algorithm.

Thanks to EigenTrust++ algorithm, it is very difficult for a bunch of non-verified accounts to Sybil attack the platform. The content-sharing bots can easily be flagged and/or downvoted by “real” users, which means their “distributed reputation” will be extremely low.

Sybil attack — the attacker subverts the reputation system of a network service by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence.

Source: Wikipedia

In the Transitive Trust internal system, users don’t earn reputation from sharing an article, but only from commenting on them. Experts confirmed by the system from various branches upvoting someone else’s comment grant them internal reputation. It’s called reputation flow.

Relevant team is interested in curating qualities that are not aligned with wealth, but with human values. This is why they have developed a non-transferable reputation metric that reflects the human values that the community holds in high esteem. Content ranking is determined via reputation voting only, where curators with the highest reputation make the biggest impact.

Incentive Protocol

The economic system of the Relevant platform is based on two goals: creating a stable currency reflecting the value of the network, which also appreciates in value when the platform grows. The team aims to balance the incentives to both hold and spend the coins.

This protocol is similar to Steem, but has an improved feature, the integration of a reputation system to facilitate a meritocratic redistribution of wealth. The team has a firm belief that the protocol will be able to facilitate both a store of value and a robust redistribution dynamic.

Because Relevant data is generated by users, the team believes that users are the ones who should reap its benefits. The more value users contribute to the platform, the more tokens they receive.

Initially, the Relevant Token will have a 10% inflation rate that will be gradually adjusted to meet the demands of the platform. In order to earn newly minted tokens, users will have to vest their Relevant Tokens. The more tokens one vests, the more one stands to earn. The vesting period — how long it takes to “withdraw” all your tokens — is 3 months. Once vested, tokens become Curation Tokens and enable participation in various aspects of the curation protocol. In the future, there will be more curation tokens

The team desires 3 properties to be used in the Incentive Protocol (taken from the Technical Protocol Overview):

Incentivise curation of quality information, where quality is defined by a given community.
Reward the curation of unpredictably relevant content (as opposed to a trending NYT article).
Limit ability to game the system / make gaming the system useful.

Prediction Market

There is a gamified component, where you can bet your tokens on whether the article successes or not. The market will determine what content is likely to become the most popular and curation reward payouts will be adjusted to account for predictability. This will enable the protocol to reward users for discovering and curating content that is unexpectedly relevant, but only in “serious” parts of the platform — that doesn’t include memes and short tweets.

Like in the prediction market, users rating posts can stake coins on their rating. This has no effect on the article rank, however does increase the users “share” in the potential reward payouts for the post. This allows the platform to rely on a non-fungible reputation system for rating and organizing posts and at the same time encourages users to hold Relevant Curation Tokens in order to earn greater portions of the rewards.

Currently, the withdrawal of tokens from the platform is very limited, which allows the project to have a very small circulating supply of 127,102 tokens.

Investors & Advisors

Coinbase Ventures (!)
CoinFund
Matt Liston, ex-CEO of Augur prediction platform.
Trent McConaghy, Founder of Ocean Protocol

Best investments of CoinFund are Dapper Labs (giants such as Andreessen Horowitz also co-invested), NuCypher, and lately the very successful Numerai coin sale led by Union Square Ventures and Placeholder.

When it comes to Coinbase Ventures, they have invested in trending tokens such as Reserve Rights ($28,055,538 market cap), Matic Network ($71,553,570 market cap)

Competitor analysis

Steemit, which has set an impressive precedent for the Curation Market business model. The Steemit market cap is approximately $75,000,000 as of now with 1M registered users. However, Steemit has a major flaw — the input of the prediction market (the prediction) has a direct impact on the outcome. This results in the Matthew Effect: the more tokens users stake on a piece of content, the higher its ranking and the higher the reward allocated to the staking parties. The circular nature of this stake-based ranking system is characteristic of most Curation Market designs. As a result, content rankings are only a measure of speculative activity and not any sort of curation criteria. This is observable on Steemit, as economic incentives drive proliferation of low-quality content.

Dtube was founded in August 2017 and can be described as a community powered video sharing platform where users vote on videos to reward creators, influencers, curators and viewers in cryptocurrency. In the last 6 months it has recorded a total of 700,000 views and currently owns almost 90,000 members. It is built on top of STEEM blockchain.

Now, let’s compare the market caps of Relevant, Reserve Rights & Matic.

https://i.imgur.com/wZFT5Cw.png

You can clearly see that Relevant token is heavily undervalued compared to other market participants.

Token economics, the growth potential and upcoming events

The team has just released a new comprehensive document about the tokenomics and you can find it here: https://blog.relevant.community/relevant-token-update-c55632f2b8ad

We also know that the team is committed to honoring the current token parameters, which means the tiny circulating supply of 127,100 will remain (at least for a while).

Source of circulating supply: https://coingecko.com/en/coins/relevant

It is also widely known that a new roadmap is coming up “really soon” (in Relevant team’s language the famous “soon” truly means soon — the Token Economics update took them no longer than a week).

The only place where you can buy Relevant now is Uniswap, which means that the potential of price increases with such a small market cap due to new listings is supreme.

It is also known that accounts with large following already follow the coin, but likely decide not to shill it yet.

https://twitter.com/Brad_Laurie/status/1270703025623977989

To sum up, the potential of growth is enormous.

GitHub commits

Relevant project has an impressive amount of GitHub commits for such a small market cap project — 4,182 commits. Comparing to top developed cryptocurrencies, it would be ranked as Top #3 in the GitHub based ranking.

Source: https://cryptomiso.com/

Uniswap purchase link

https://uniswap.exchange/swap?inputCurrency=0xb6c4267C4877BB0D6b1685Cfd85b0FBe82F105ec

Uniswap Info

https://uniswap.info/token/0xb6c4267c4877bb0d6b1685cfd85b0fbe82f105ec

Relevant website

https://relevant.community/

Whitepaper (Technical Overview of Relevant Protocols by Slava Balasanov)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tp2HG-jJrN2xO07s3V8O_Pfyk4zPMG3E/view

GitHub

https://github.com/relevant-community/

Relevant Blog