Information is the most important resource of the 21st century. Our morals, habits and even worldview are formed exclusively by the information we receive from completely different sources. The formation of our personality directly depends on the information that we receive throughout our lives from parents, friends, social networks and everything that surrounds us. In the era of large-scale information wars, the idea of KurateDAO becomes even more relevant.
What is KurateDAO and what are the benefits?
KurateDAO is the first community curated blockchain-based database for Web3 applications.
The benefits of a community curated on-chain database:
- Allows contributors to natively monetize content. KurateDAO has monetization built in from the ground up, to pay curators and scouts for their work. Once participants have assembled these on-chain databases, they can leverage a suite of API’s and applications to build scalable user facing web3 applications.
- KurateDAO establishes an immutable social contract between stakeholders. KurateDAO databases are minted with by-laws. These by-laws are similar to Terms of Service (ToS) of a Web2 app. Unlike Web2 ToS, by-laws are immutable. Immutability gives stakeholders certainty that later on the ToS will not be changed to benefit a different stakeholder.
- Democratizing scalable content moderation. Instead of one person having to do everything, KurateDAO widens the parties that can participate in the curation process.
In the traditional world, curating means choosing, organizing and caring for exhibits. The project developers want to expand this concept and cover as many areas of human activity as possible.
Where might it apply?
Almost in any field of activity. The idea of the KurateDAO team can change not only Web2 applications and the crypto world, but even our daily routine. The technologies that underlie this promising project can also help government agencies achieve their goals. Let’s take a closer look at each item:
1. Web2 applications and services:
News (Fox News or CNN): A better approach to achieving informative news would be to understand the bias of different news organizations. Curated databases of news with ToS that delineate the type of news that is included allows newsreaders to know how their news is chosen and how it is potentially biased. Much in the way food is labeled with nutritional labels, this will allow user to better understand the source of their news before they consume it.
Reviews (Yelp): Curate a databases of good restaurants in the area. Remove systems that incentivize paying Yelp platform for improved ratings and exposure to users.
Product Reviews: Curate a set of good products for the home. Consumer Reports is centralized. With KurateDAO, curators create their own versions of consumer reports, following their own criteria (ethically sourced, best value, hypoallergenic, ecofriendly, etc). Curators competing with each other to be “the best” consumer reports source.
It can also be applied in improving the Google search engine, curating databases of scientific articles and even databases of investors and companies they funded.
2. Crypto and NFT:
App Store: Curate a set of blockchain apps that have audited contracts or that a person finds useful.
Venture Capital: Venture capital firms look at a large number of companies and curate a list of ones that they will invest in. Lead generation and curation can be done in a distributed and more egalitarian way using KurateDAO. To use KurateDAO as a VC, the VC would be the curator and companies would be the scouts. Validators would stake on which companies seemed promising. The ultimate decision to invest in a company would come down to the VC/curator.
Museum: Curating large NFT collections to figure out what to include in the drop.
Distributed NFT News: Curate a list of rumors and news about top NFT projects.
Trusted DeFi Staking Pools: Users do not have a good sense of what are trusted pools for staking or yield farming. Curators can give users a level confidence on pools where they can park their cryptocurrencies.
3. People curation:
Bar Exam and Medical Exam: Top X% get added to the guild.
Judicial: Based on laws, curate identities that are innocent or guilty.
Who’s Who: Generate a list of the most important people of the year but in a distributed way. Examples include: TIME 100 The Most Influential People of 2021, Forbes 30 under 30, or Nobel Prize.
Countries: Curate a set of citizens for a country or DAO.
Voting Guides: Curate a set of politicians that have no history of involvement with corruption.
Some countries are already thinking about introducing blockchain technology to government agencies to organize information and create immutable databases. One of these countries is Ukraine. Doctor of Legal Sciences Pashkov V.M. suggested using blockchain to improve the healthcare system. He recommends using this technology in several ways:
First, to store patient data. To date, records, for example, of vaccinations and, in general, all medical information are stored, as a rule, on paper, and in some cases in electronic databases of healthcare institutions. At the same time, patients do not have any mechanisms to control what is happening with their personal data, which are stored in various medical documents. Theoretically, they can be transferred to unknown recipients or simply lost due to system failures. But if the information is transferred to the blockchain, the situation changes fundamentally. It is possible to implement a program with the help of which the patient himself will temporarily provide access to his data to the attending physician or research organizations. He will be solely responsible for the access of third parties to his accounting records. Access to the patient’s personal data for the patient will be completely transparent.
Secondly, to monitor the supply of pharmaceutical products, including medicines containing potent substances. If all information is stored in the blockchain, starting from the moment of clinical trials, production, subsequent storage and delivery to a pharmacy or its structural unit, including a medical institution, then the entire path of the drug can be tracked.
Roles in KurateDAO system:
There are three different roles in KurateDAO. Each is paid or pays depending on the amount of value that they provide.
1) Curator
A curator mints a database and comes up with the rules to determine if content should be accepted or rejected. The curator is also the final adjudicator in determining if a row should be accepted or rejected when it cannot be resolved by the scouts.
The role of the curator is a black box that can be filled by different entities including:
• An individual
• A DAO
• An AI like GPT-3
• A black box that is able to output “accept” or “reject”
2) Scout
Scouts find and contribute content that aligns with the by-laws of a database. If a scout’s content is included into the database they will earn proportionally to how much it is viewed. Scouts monitor a database and stake if they think that a row will be included or excluded from the database. Scouts earns based on their ability to accurately predict the future adjudication of a curator.
3) Viewer
A viewer pays a token to view the content of a database. The tokens are paid to the DAO treasury and split between the curator, scout, and network. Viewers can explicitly pay to view content. Alternatively they can pay through viewing ads. Ads can be displayed alongside content which can be deposited to the treasury instead of the user paying directly.
In a slightly different version, viewers can also be paid to view content in a “pay to learn” scenario. Here the flow of value is reversed. Scouts or curators pay to have their content in the database and viewers are paid to interact with it. Examples of this would be fellowship that paid people to learn to code with the goal of making money by placing them in a programming job after they finished learning.
Conclusion
The one who owns the information owns the world. KurateDAO can make this world easier and more transparent. The project will become more and more relevant every day, as it touches on one of the main problems of today’s world. Confirmation of these words is the attraction of more than 6 million dollars of investment, most of which was donated by Polychain Capital. What the KurateDAO team is doing can become revolutionary. They have invented a whole new way of database curation that is user-centric. Their protocol is transparent and rewards users according to the value of their contribution. After two phases of the testnet in which I participated, I can say with confidence that they will succeed. I look forward to the full launch of the project and continue to participate in its development.
