Ever since the announcement of Voice Social Network on the EOS Mainnet by “Block.one”, there has been a lot of FUD spread around the mechanism of distributing Voice tokens with KYC (Know Your Customer). Irrespective of what FUDers have to say, we feel Voice platform will come out to be the leading platform for the blockchain industry and will take cryptocurrencies towards mass-adoption!
Although many details have been shared by Daniel and Brendan around the bigger vision of creating Voice, this article aims to connect the dots of information shared on various platforms to tell the world why VOICE really matters!
“Exploration and experimentation is what drives innovation. Innovation drives economic development”
First thing first, Why KYC?
Bytemaster has been dropping hints around the solution invented by him to tackle unique identity without the need of KYC, then why are we still moving towards the old age tech of identifying people?
Know your customer, alternatively known as know your client or simply KYC, is the process of a business verifying the identity of its clients and assessing their suitability, along with the potential risks of illegal intentions towards the business relationship. The term is also used to refer to the bank regulations and anti-money laundering regulations which govern these activities. Know your customer processes are also employed by companies of all sizes for the purpose of ensuring their proposed customers, agents, consultants, or distributors are anti-bribery compliant. Banks, insurers, export creditors and other financial institutions are increasingly demanding that customers provide detailed due diligence information. — Wikipedia
KYC is a lot more than just identifying users. It’s one of the ways which could act as a bridge supporting the banking services we have today and the blockchain tech services we will see in the future.
KYCing individuals and entities on Voice will help the founding company, B1, to be compliant with the regulation in different jurisdictions and stay out of bars or hefty fines. It would also help them in innovating the platform in numerous other ways without getting distracted of laws and regulations.
1. Social Media in itself!
Those who have been following the idea of a social media network from early EOS launch days would have a little understanding of the need for Unique Identity for the social media platform.
Voice tries to solve the reputation, bots, trolls and whales issues we faced on Steemit and other platforms. Also, disrupting the economics of data scrapping by Facebook. With unique identities, report functionalities many such problems are tackled quickly, and we could have a real social media platform.
No more data scrapping without your permission, instead content creators and users would be rewarded for their content, likes and shares. Even just your presence every week will help to earn a few tokens. Sounds impressive? Well, that’s not all.
Voice isn’t just a social media; it’s an entirely different layer created by Block.One team which could help to kick-start a lot of innovation using the unique identifies accounts. Let’s try to look through some of the ideas we could see developing in future leveraging individual identities.
2. A threat to Libra!
LibraCoin is one of the news which every individual or enthusiast in this industry must have followed. As per the reports, Libra will be introduced as a stable coin which would supposedly not only enable transfer with FB application suite but also outwards.
FB is targeting the Indian continent as one of the strategic markets to help the Non-Resident Indians sending money across the borders and vice-versa. FB allegedly is discussing the laws of several other countries jurisdiction to launch their currency soon. As they are not banks, we could expect them to follow KYC instruction, much like PayPal and Skrill.
Ironically, the company accused of scrapping data of its users and infringing privacy will either be doing KYC for LibraWallet or will partner with the banks who do.
Anyways, Daniel Larimer has been suggesting that proper implementation of a Stable Coin would help do wonders for the EOS Blockchain, in fact, he had shared the idea of the stable coin algorithm with the community which still is a pinned tweet on ByteMaster’s twitter profile.
With the launch of KYC and uniquely identified individuals on Voice platform, the Stable Coin(searate from Voice tokens) introduced on Voice platform will be one of the direct competitors to Libra. The idea of Uniform Basic Income added in Voice tokenomics will help to attract millions of users to use the financial services built on top of Voice Social Media Layer.
In short, we might see Voice competing with not only several social media platform but disrupting various financial industry giants like PayPal, GooglePay, and yet to be introduced Libra.
3. The Reviews!
Thinking of buying a product online, planning a trip, watching a movie this weekend, taking suggestion if certain way would help to solve your problem. What is the first thing you do? The majority of this generation googles before making a specific decision. We are heavily reliant on the data; reviews shared on the internet. The customers are getting smarter, and so are the marketers.
We all have listened to the news of paid/fake reviews on marketplaces, movie rating app, and so on. As the identities on such platform are not Sybil resistant, we see many reviews coming from a single source, mostly the marketing agencies trying to manipulate the rating.
Voice tokenomics completely disrupt the review industry and bring much-needed transparency. Not only it incentivises the reviewers helping others to buy the products but also keeps the paid reviews at bay. How?
Imagine a digital marketing agency asking a few users to put a paid review for a product. If some reputed reviewer shares his review for the same product and Voice it(Advertise it — PixelMaster Tokenomics), there would be high chances of reputed reviewers earning the top place on the review section, hence gaining more tokens.
Mirror a similar idea to the marketplaces like Amazon, IMDB, Google Reviews, Zomato, Uber Driver, TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, FaceBook Reviews, Hotel Booking Platform, Airbnb, and so on. All are heavily reliant on reviews from the customers. What if the VoiceReviews could be embedded in each of these platforms? Felt bullish?
Many of the platforms, as mentioned above, like IMDB, TripAdvisor, are just reliant on content and reviews by the community members. Shortly, we would see many dApps leveraging the identity layer of Voice to kickstart independent projects.
4. Coupons and Discounts.
We all receive the coupons or discounts (as UAC) from a new startup trying to acquire a new customer. Promo codes/referral codes/affiliate codes are shared with leads every day to promote one’s business, service or product. Customers easily game the onboarding strategy because of the lack of Sybil resistant solution.
With the unique identity and blockchain, codes and referral will find their way to the EOS/ Voice platform layer. We would either see platforms like Groupon, CouponDunia, Grabon shifting to EOS or new disruptive dApps taking the place of such businesses.
5. A new way to AirDrop tokens.
EOS disrupted the ICO market and made airdrop famous among the crypto-community. The problem with airdrops was that one could never know if the particular account belongs to the community members, exchange or is dormant.
Next generation dApps will leverage the unique identity accounts to airdrop tokens to the active members of the community. Airdropping tokens would help to bring only the active members onboard and still maintaining the tokenomics. It would help to keep the project decentralised and attractive, removing the very issue of exchange/dormant account dumping the tokens.
6. B1 DEX — the next generation crypto exchange.
With its very first dApp product launch, i.e. Voice and several other announcements like a partnership with YubiKey and CoinBase, B1 has made it clear that they are trying to make the blockchain tech easy for an average Joe.
If you go out the eco bubble of EOS, you would understand setting up an account and understanding owner/private keys is a lot of hassle for non-tech savvy users. With YubiKey, B1 is aiming for passwordless future in Blockchain space. Just use Yubikeys to approve a transaction without caring for scams and hacks.
Second, exchanging tokens and getting them into Fiat is another issue. People might need to transfer their tokens into two or more exchanges before finally turning them into FIAT. With CoinBase partnership and CoinBase smart card, the gap reduce significantly.
Now take the developments and fuse them with B1 next generation DEX. Not only the hacks would be the thing of the past, but we would see significant innovation in turning cryptos into FIAT. The selling of the tokens on DEX could be automated, and CoinBase Card could be used to buy groceries from the market.
7. New Consensus Blockchain- Empowering the reputed and the minnows, not just reliant on Greedy Whales!
Cabals, custodian voting, vote trading, vote buying, and so on. The majority of active participants understand that the mentioned issues are a threat to decentralised networks, but there is nothing one could do to solve such problems. Minnows, no matter how hardworking, are reliant on exchange and whales to vote for honest Block Producers.
With identities, we may see EOSIO based blockchains with an entirely different consensus system. New consensus methods would disrupt the exchange voting and hopefully will bring back the power to the honest and transparent ones. Such EOSIO sister-chain, if executed well, will be the most decentralised Blockchains in the entire industry. If we count the worse that EOS Mainnet gets corrupt (only possible if stakeholders get corrupt), Voice will take the lead!
8. Voice Verified Accounts.
With time the layer would help EOS users connect with all the accounts using a single verified Voice account. Many social network/content based dApp building on top of EOS might leverage the unique identity and reputation of Voice account, and bring them as Voice Verified account for transparency.
For instance, one of the Polling dApps Lumeos, on EOS could show another polling section coming from unique accounts leveraging Voice Identity layer.
Conclusion
#B1June had a lot more than just an announcement focused on launching Social media platforms. Social media and partnership with YubiKey and CoinBase have a very focused aim of fixing the major issues faced people outside this space and taking the crypto industry mainstream.
In a short period, we would see many projects built on top of Voice layer, which could potentially disrupt many industries including finance, content, review services, polls, voting platform and media giants.
In addition, Voice is a better product which could be promoted among the masses and B1 do have adequate funds to market the product globally. Also, B1, with its connections, is in the perfect position to build a strong team of lawyers, developers and marketers for taking Voice into many jurisdictions without violating the regulations.
If everything goes right, EOS Community might have their own Globalcoin, with better technology, experience and perks like Universal Basic Income, creating a networking effect. As Daniel says, Voice is just beginning!