SOMA graphics competition

10 min readJul 25, 2018

We at SOMA are thrilled to announce two things: that we are releasing a new whitepaper, and that we are inviting our community to help us create it. We’ve written the text, and now we need accompanying graphics. We could go the usual route and pay a design firm to do it. But, we know that we’ve got some talented folks in our community — why not crowdsource the illustrations? This is your chance to make history. Or, if not history, at least a great-looking whitepaper. Plus, if your graphics are chosen for any of the winning spots (see the end of this article), you can win some $SCT. Potentially a fair amount.

The new whitepaper is much more detailed than anything that has preceded it. Not only does it better describe SOMA’s social marketplace value proposition; it also opens new vistas for a wealth of enterprise applications for our Heimdall Protocol. The following excerpts are just that — excerpts. The whitepaper in its entirety will be released sometime in August or early September. We’ve pulled out just enough to serve as prompts for the graphic competition.

So, read the following paragraphs, get inspired, and let the graphics roll!

Each participant can submit unlimited graphics for consideration.

Instructions

Below are ten paragraphs. SOMA is looking for a graphic to accompany each of these, as well as a header graphic for the first page of the whitepaper.

Now, pay attention: if you don’t follow the below instructions, your graphic will not be considered.

Entries may be submitted until August 11, 2018, 23:59 EST.

1. You must be following @SomaToken on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomaToken

2. You must be a member of the @SomaCommunity telegram group: https://t.me/SomaCommunity

3. You must make submissions by posting them on twitter with the hashtag #SomaGraphics and tag @SomaToken in the post.

4. For each submission, in your Twitter post you must state which paragraph it applies to, referencing the number given it below (1, 9, etc). For the header, just say ‘header.’

5. There is no limit to the number of submissions each participant can enter into the contest.

Rewards

SOMA will choose three finalists: 1st place, 2nd place, and 3rd place. Rewards for the three are as follows:

· 1st place: $500 in SCT tokens

· 2nd place: $250 in SCT tokens

· 3rd place: $100 in SCT tokens

Additionally, SOMA will choose anywhere from 1 to 8 ‘honorable mentions’ — graphics that are suitable for use, but which did not make the top 3 cut. Each of these will receive $50 in SCT.

Other graphics: For all graphics which do not make it into any of the above ‘Rewards’ categories: SOMA will reserve rights to these graphics. In the future, if SOMA chooses to use any graphic from this ‘other’ group, SOMA will gift the creator with $10 in SCT.

Contestants agree that their entry of a graphic into the competition grants SOMA the right to use said graphic for any purpose we see fit.

Entries

Graphics may be entered to accompany any of the following paragraphs, as well as for the main header on the whitepaper front page.

Paragraph 1

SOMA has the following principles and structure.

DECENTRALIZATION[I1] . SOMA’s decentralized social marketplace[1] allows users to trade securely, without any intermediary or centralized processing provider.

OFF-NETWORK FUNCTIONALITY. So long as a buyer and seller are on SOMA’s wallet — and their devices can communicate — they can transact. Even in the absence of internet access, buyer and seller can trade via shared Wi-Fi, mobile network, Bluetooth, or (coming soon) near-field communication (NFC). Once internet access is restored, their off-network transactions will be populated into the distributed system.

IMMUTABILITY & SECURITY. Because SOMA operates on a blockchain, it exhibits core blockchain traits such as peer-to-peer processing and intrinsic security (immutability of the distributed ledger).

PRIVACY. SOMA operates on zero-proof principles; the individual user decides whether to reveal her real-life identity. Credibility is established via one’s trading history and community confidence.

Paragraph 2

Basic architecture: SOMA has a 2-tier architecture. The first tier is the SOMA application itself, which users can run on our Android application (currently in MVP phase) or web client (pending). The second tier consists of a blockchain network node. (Since inception, SOMA has relied on the Ethereum blockchain as its hosting platform. In the future, SOMA plans to migrate to an alternative blockchain platform.) While technically-savvy users can run their own node, SOMA defaults to INFURA. INFURA is a managed node cluster, or node service. Apart from data encoded on the blockchain, SOMA stores accompanying information in our cloud API. Timestamps and critical documentation related to the Interactive Item Card remain on the blockchain, which points to the correct server destination for the supplementary materials such as photos, additional documentation, and other media. This hybrid approach offers lower latency and higher throughput by taking large media files off-chain, while still providing the core benefits of blockchain: security, decentralization, and immutability. Low-level processing of data is handled via the SOMA REST API — a common configuration, and one that is standard to the industry. A user’s OS communicates with the SOMA REST API using JSON message format over HTTPS; the user does not need to alter network settings or open a special port to use SOMA.

Paragraph 3

SOMA users benefit from the following blockchain traits:

Immutability: the blockchain tracks every transaction. Ever. Everywhere. By everyone.

Corruption safety: the database of transactions is distributed over all nodes in the network. Even if 51% of nodes were corrupted (a 51% attack — a remote possibility indeed), commit procedures would restore the original data.

Reliability: the network has 100% uptime. For some force to shut down the network, it would need to take every node. Even if such a coup were achieved, it would take only 2 isolated nodes to restore the network by committing all stored blocks and repopulating the network with all transaction history.

Contract-level security: smart contracts cannot be altered after they have been executed on the blockchain. Nodes will commit and validate automatically — no need for a 3rd-party commit or validation service.

Paragraph 4

The Heimdall Protocol is an enterprise-agnostic technology for binding items to a digital representation of those items on the blockchain. This digital representation can be viewed as an avatar of sorts, and it contains the item’s provenance and subsequent history, as well as any quantity of accompanying media to substantiate said provenance and history. Use cases for the Heimdall Protocol, then, are virtually unlimited; across almost any industry, recordkeeping and authentication can be streamlined and secured. The Heimdall Protocol underpins the SOMA marketplace via the Interactive Item Card (IIC). Heimdall, however, has enterprise use cases far beyond the SOMA ecosystem. In Scandinavian mythology, Heimdall was the operator of the Bifröst bridge connecting the worlds of gods and men. Similarly, Heimdall is a bridge between the digital and physical worlds.

Paragraph 5

Within the SOMA decentralized marketplace, Heimdall takes the form of the Interactive Item Card, or IIC. The IIC is a fungible representation of an item and may be bought, sold, and traded. Furthermore, the IIC contains an immutable record of an item’s history and provenance, stored on the blockchain. Whether a primary sale or a series of sales in the secondary markets, the IIC timestamps each ownership transfer and encodes all accompanying documentation as per the description in Section 4 (Basic Architecture) above. The IIC provides a digital ownership certificate. Every item traded in SOMA has an IIC. Users create the IIC when initially posting an item to the platform. Items’ IICs can be viewed and selected in ‘Your Wallet’ when one makes an offer on an item. The IIC contains information about the physical item, its condition, and its transaction history. More extensive information resides in an off-chain database referenced by a hash on the blockchain. Every transaction populates to an item’s IIC automatically and is stored on the blockchain.

Paragraph 6

The IIC participates with the social architecture of the SOMA platform, allowing community members to leverage typical social media functionality to interact with the IIC and with one another. These interactions may enhance the social profile of the IIC, and its enhanced social visibility may be reflected in the price of the underlying merchandise. Sellers can potentially increase the value of their IICs by gaining social acceptance for them inside the platform. Other community members can monetize their social influence by building the social profile of the IICs belonging to others — and be rewarded for the service. Through social interactions known from traditional social media platforms such as ‘likes’ and ‘follows’, an IIC can accrue social validation, which may be reflected in the price its underlying item can fetch on the marketplace. Users are incentivized to create high-quality content on the platform, as quality content will wield more social influence than its alternative — hence, the producers of quality content have greater opportunity to influence the social profile of the IICs they target (whether their own or belonging to another).

Paragraph 7

Heimdall/IIC allow multiple points of validation to be entered and attached to a transaction or item. These can be, but are not limited to: affidavits, expert certifications, photographic evidence, video, audio recordings, data from sensors and other electronic inputs, and official documentation. Individual instances of Heimdall may serve as inputs to other Heimdall records.

Paragraph 8

Like in a computer file system, too many files in a single container make organization and retrieval cumbersome. Heimdall Protocols can nest inside one another in a hierarchy. For instance, the IIC of an original auto part can become one of many validating inputs to the IIC of the car on which the component is subsequently installed. Similarly, other tracking protocols can serve as validating inputs to the Heimdall Protocol. Heimdall is not directly competing with other tracking solutions, such as those based on RFID technology. While RFID is far more scalable for large-scale logistics tracking, it lacks an ability to verify provenance and authenticity with any meaningful degree of certainty. RFID could easily be wrapped into an enterprise’s Heimdall repertoire; the RFID waypoints would be one of many inputs, all of which would substantiate one another.

Paragraph 9

Commerce does not occur in a perfectly free market. States and interest groups impact prices of products and commodities. For example, OPEC manipulates oil prices by imposing import volumes to achieve its own price targets. Institutions can underprice a commodity for marketing purposes (loss-leading, for example), or overprice for enlarged profits. Furthermore, the value chain becomes bloated with intermediaries. Multinational corporations tend to be the largest beneficiaries of value-chain bloat. Corporate ‘middlemen’ soak up much of the value, disproportional to the level of utility they contribute. For example, a handcrafted carpet from one region of the world may have accumulated extreme price increase — excessive of transport costs, duties, and other unavoidable expenses — by the time it reaches another market. In the process, the item will probably have passed through several brokers or intermediaries, each of whom will have made a profit on the transaction. In short, inefficiencies in the chain of distribution, combined with lack of transparency, siphon off much of the value from the two parties who should be receiving it: the buyer and seller. This siphoning of value tends to be most severe in so-called developing countries. Those at the beginning of the value chain — those whom we might call value creators: craftsmen, farmers and raw materials producers — often garner a pittance of the price a finished product. Attribution of value to the beginning of the chain has proven difficult at best and has required the dubious assistance of various intermediaries. To exacerbate the plight of the value creators, trade in goods is often blocked by customs duties or embargoes. Absent a technological solution, the presence of intermediaries and the lack of transparency have been a necessary evil. With the advent of blockchain and its associated technologies, however, peer-to-peer commerce and full transparency down the value chain are possible.

Paragraph 10

Humans have always constructed their identity, to some extent, from the types of items they own. People express who they are through their tastes. They express these tastes through owning specific types of objects — or curating objects they don’t own. In the digital age, curation platforms — Pinterest being the most notable — allow users to virtually ‘own’ items without actually possessing them. That is, they can fulfill the desire to display specific goods or lifestyles, even if those goods or lifestyles are out of reach. SOMA takes the ‘display’ functionality to the next level by allowing users to monetize these passions. Not only does SOMA allow one to curate the Interactive Item Cards (IICs) of other members, it also allows them to promote or resell them. An aficionado can build a community of followers and then — by agreement with IIC owners — promote and sell the objects of his passion to those followers. And, as noted above, the reseller can port the IICs to his personal blog or to any other online venue. In this sense, the aficionado can easily become a platform-agnostic retailer, operating his own distributed online store across multiple online sites but tracked and centered in the SOMA ecosystem.

About SOMA

SOMA is a blockchain-based marketplace and a protocol for validation and tracking of product lifecycle including provenance, ownership history, and product condition. Individuals benefit from a socially-integrated ecommerce platform that operates in a decentralized fashion and preserves value for the buyer and seller. Enterprise profits from the logistical efficiencies gained from an end-to-end tracking solution, from the market share gained back from forgers/counterfeiters, and from the data and insights gained from increased visibility into the lifecycle of their products.