FamilyPoints’ Blockchain Ledger

Technology has the ability to profoundly change virtually any industry that it touches. These changes can not only make those industries more efficient and profitable, but also more secure. Take the transportation industry as an example. Services including Uber and Didi have revolutionized the taxi industry across the globe. Millions of people are using taxis more frequently than ever before because these services have made them cheaper and safer. Uber, for example, has a system in place where not only are both passengers and drivers identified, but they can rate each other within the platform. This creates a system of trust within Uber’s ecosystem and ensures that passengers are protected from drivers and vice versa.

Our Problem

Today, the reviewing system on the internet has become so corrupt in China, that more than two thirds of Chinese parents do not trust ratings. 68% of parents in China refuse to purchase products online because of fake and sponsored reviews. How can we create trust for parents?

Our Solution

The answer lies in blockchain technology. Using secure, decentralized, proof of care communities, FamilyPoints solves the problem of providing trust in online shopping and for education services. As a general rule, FamilyPoints is technology agnostic. At the present, we believe that blockchain technology will be able to deliver the vision we have for a world with safer and more informed parenting.

The blockchain ledger that we are creating will eventually become more than just a record of transactions conducted on the FamilyPoints platform. We want it to be a source of trust and valuable information that cannot be influenced by outsiders or advertisers.

How it Works

The first version of the FamilyPoints blockchain ledger will be based on the HyperLedger project. We have chosen Hyperledger primarily because it is an open source effort of a group of companies (Baidu, IBM, Intel, and Xiaomi, to name a few) to create secure, fast, and stable blockchain platform available for anyone who wants to innovate using decentralized storage.

To maintain the network of nodes and make it 100% trustful and open, we will locate a few nodes on our partners’ premises (big baby manufacturers and/or educational centers). By doing this, we will guarantee the non-changeability of the decentralized storage.

Our goal is simple — make a platform which puts the interests of parents above everything else. There will be many types of information publicly available on the system:

• Points balance and transactions
• Upvotes
• Reviews
• Comments

Using all this information, we will develop open algorithms which will be implemented as smart contracts on blockchain but not limited to it. These algorithms will control how the platform works. We believe that the algorithms will achieve the following goals:

• Control how rating is calculated for products, brands and educational service providers. There are many factors that must be taken into account in order to calculate meaningful and trustful ratings. Trustful ratings are very hard to fake, buy, or alter in any harmful way.
• Control how products and services are suggested to parents. We believe in personalized experience and our website won’t be the same for two different parents. Algorithms will carefully select and suggest certain products and services to parents basing its decisions on open source implementation.

For example, one of the more advanced smart contract features we are implementing concerns reviews and how they are weighted. When the ledger and the platform are mature, our smart contracts will ensure that individuals who have a track record of “positive” actions within the platform, will have an increased weighting on reviews. This is important because reviews should reflect the opinions of people who are genuine and have spent time doing their research and formulating their opinions. This will prevent good products or services from being tarnished by single reviews or by people who have not spent time building a good reputation within the platform.

Positive actions include buying products and services, leaving photos, videos, reviews, ratings, and upvoting others. Users who actually use the platform to its maximum extent and contribute to the betterment of society can potentially become influencers within FamilyPoints.

As an example, let’s look at a stroller review on the platform. If user A gives it 1 star and user B gives it 5 stars, you would expect an average rating of 3 stars. However, if user B is an influencer, and user A is a new shopper, then the product rating could be 4 stars. In this case, user B’s rating is more heavily weighted because he/she has more influence within the FamilyPoints ecosystem.

The blockchain ledger can also create a whitelist of goods and services as dictated by shoppers and their reviews. Our ledger is capable of sorting products and services by their review scores. This allows us to tailor our offerings and remove products and services that don’t meet a predefined minimum score. So if a service has a rating of 3 stars or lowers, parents will see the low scores and understand why the smart contracts have blocked those products and services from being sold on the platform.

The ledger helps move from advertisement-driven communities to value-driven communities. Shoppers will be able to also upvote other users’ reviews. This is important because it motivates users to give ratings, write reviews, and collect upvotes from other parents. Upvoting a review will require reward points that are transferred to the reviewer. In this case, key opinion leaders can earn reward points from the upvotes and not have to resort to selling advertisements on the platform.

We will also develop an API which will let other services to consume accumulated open data stores on the FamilyPoints platform. It will be easy to find quality service providers, manufacturers, or nannies by just calling an API endpoint. We envision that our API will be greatly valuable in many business models beyond parenting.

We will invite developers and students to participate in blockchain hackathons to make these algorithms and smart contracts behave in the interests of parents. We want parents to be offered with the best products and services.

Benefits of the Ledger

This is especially important in today’s day and age. China has experienced some exceptional cases where products and services have been tampered with or have been proven to be very poor. Take the very recent scandal involving kindergartens. A series of kindergartens were found to have been abusing the children in their care. Children were fed mustard, beaten, and emotionally abused. While this is an extreme case, our ledger could have prevented the systematic abuse of children by eliminating the kindergartens from our platform and network.

With a system that incentivizes good products and services, and therefore, has a huge reputational impact for manufacturers and service providers, the ledger will be treated as the gold standard for all products and services related to children and their education. Once it is accepted as such, we anticipate that this kind of ledger can and will easily be adapted to other consumer facing industries.

Impact on Blockchain Communities

Blockchain today is seemingly more concerned with finance and transactions rather than with building trust. While we recognize that blockchain is a powerful tool that will usher a new age in the finance industry, we also believe that it can be the foundation for building a new era of trust on the internet.

For parents, especially, this is tremendously important because they are some of the most sensitive users of the internet. They want to find communities and sources of information that they can trust so that they can use the knowledge gained there and apply it to raising their children.

The Familypoints ledger will be one of the first proper examples which shows the real potential of blockchain and what it can deliver to the world by generating trust. We truly believe that the future will be much better when the internet adopts blockchain technologies. Mass blockchain adoption will be a crucial indicator for the blockchain community. The way blockchain has thus far been represented around the world has been severely limited. We need to show the full potential of the blockchain and invite thousands of companies, governments, and developers to use this technology. We hope our vision in Familypoints and how we will use blockchain technology will be an excellent example for other industries.

Impact on FamilyPoints

The blockchain ledger has significant impact on the value of FamilyPoints Tokens. The larger and more comprehensive the ledger becomes, the more valuable subscribing to the FamilyPoints platform becomes. Parents and shoppers alike will want to leverage the information within the ledger to ensure that the products and services they are buying are highly rated.

Our ledger is the link that unifies our platform with our users, manufacturers, and service providers. Users will want to know what products and services are rated the highest, while companies and service providers will want to work with our ledger to get access to the data that it aggregates. This is why we believe that users will want and need the FamilyPoints tokens to have access to the ledger.