Introducing ARA
The ARA Ethos and Origin
ARA is changing the way digital commerce is transacted, reinventing the flow of content and assets around the world.
The project was born out of the team at Littlstar, building technology to solve the problem of expensive and inefficient methods of distributing digital assets with value. The team had a vision that all digital assets could be more discoverable, secure, and decentralized. Books, movies, games, VR, AR, models, in-game purchases, research papers, music, archives, website bundles, and more. All on the blockchain.
This new platform leverages distributed computing, blockchain technology, and the sharing- economy creating a highly efficient and decentralized system on top of vast amounts of unused compute, storage, and bandwidth resources. It makes consumers’ lives better by giving them back control of their data, rewarding them for being part of the system, and providing a simple way to transact in all digital commerce. In parallel, it empowers developers, creators, and businesses of the future to build revolutionary marketplaces and communities on the blockchain, and takes power away from centralized authorities giving it back to the community.
So what does “ARA” mean? ARA is a constellation that represents the altar at which Zeus and the gods vowed to take down the Titans. Decentralizing the web, as it was originally intended, takes power away from the oligopoly on the internet today.
A New Pro-Creator Platform
The media landscape today is mired in outdated technology for selling and distributing content. Intrusive advertising systems try to monetize every step of the chain and monopolize our attention, and publishers and creators have had to turn to app stores and content portals that control their destiny. Centralized companies in this system artificially inflate prices for everyone and simultaneously sell consumers’ data in the quest for more profits. A similar paradigm of inefficiency and centralized power in the financial sector led directly to the rise of Bitcoin, and it’s a foundational principle of why blockchain and digital currencies are so important. As referenced in the paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”:
“Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on … trusted third parties to process electronic payments.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
A handful of companies have gained an oligopoly within the digital landscape, and they’re unilaterally abusing that power. Things are less transparent, more expensive, anti-consumer, and anti-creator.
ARA provides a way to store content, attach licenses to that content, self-publish, and sell that content while simultaneously owning the data and distribution around making it more widely available and discoverable. Assets have proof of ownership stamped into Ethereum, and even if content is discoverable through a third party or aggregator, the payments happen directly between the consumer and the publisher. The system has built-in transparency; consumers and creators own their data, and the blockchain acts as the trustless neutral party that provides transparency, autonomy, and rewards for participation.
“We will not be products of centralized services anymore.” — Michelle Phan
Distribution costs are significantly reduced for creators and publishers with ARA’s novel distributed file delivery system, which sits core to what makes the platform unique. The file sharing system reduces costs as the load is shared across the distributed network of nodes.
Privacy is Being Stripped and Data Stolen
In today’s society, privacy is being stripped away more and more every day. Not only do Facebook and Google know everything about consumers, governments have also been invading our privacy for a very long time. When consumers give their information and behavioral data to centralized services and systems, it creates the inevitable susceptibility to hacking and compromise. This was evidenced in the data breaches of Equifax, Target, and many others. Privacy is integral to Web 3.0 and inherent in how we can build better services using decentralized technologies.
How are we addressing this? A key component of the ARA platform is ARAid — a decentralized, secure identity for all users, publishers, applications, and content on this system. Because these IDs don’t require any central authority for control or creation, all users can truly own both their identity and data across every application in the system.
The Attention Economy and True Content Costs
The price of accessing content has continued to rise as file sizes and costs of delivering that content go up. 4K, VR, and AAA games are all contributors to this trend. Uncompressed 4K video is over 700 GB per hour of content, and Netflix just raised its prices to try to accommodate supporting 4K. Consumers are not only paying more for transactional content and subscriptions, but they have to deal with a complex and abusive system of advertising from the third parties to view free content. Facebook’s revenue in 2017 was $40.65 billion, and Google’s was $109.65 billion. This is a partial representation of how much advertisers are willing to pay for people’s attention, and how these companies offset their operational costs of delivering huge amounts of content to consumers. Consumers are desperately using ad blockers and other services to mitigate the poor user experience of the programmatic ad model. Not only is it a breach of trust, it wastes bandwidth and resources globally bringing the whole system down.
How are we addressing this? The ARA rewards system works very similarly to today’s other sharing economy businesses such as Uber and Airbnb. Consumers are able to rent out unused compute power, storage capacity, bandwidth, and even their attention, in the same way they can rent their home when they are not there.
Renting your computer out is easy enough to understand, but you can also rent out your attention. In an advertising model, this means that advertisers can reward users in the system for consuming the content, instead of paying a 3rd party to force ads upon people that they don’t want to watch. In this system, you can choose which ads to consume, because they might have larger rewards associated with that behavior. In effect, mining tokens using your attention. This creates a better experience for users, and makes each impression a more engaged and valuable conversion for the advertiser. Users earn rewards and use those tokens for purchases across the platform, resulting in a well-supported and decentralized system and ultimately, a thriving token economy. This not only means utility for the consumer, but creators use tokens to push content into the system, and developers purchase tools and modules with tokens to build their applications on ARA.
Keeping the Net Neutral
ISPs are now on the offensive to make it harder for consumers to access the information they want, with the ultimate outcome being that consumers will need to pay more for internet fast lanes. There is a constant attack on net neutrality, and there needs to be a community driven solution to combating these attacks.
How are we addressing this? ISPs in this decentralized system can’t throttle content like they can from Netflix or YouTube because it isn’t coming from Netflix or YouTube. It’s coming from a vast network of users in the system. This makes it tougher to target individual organizations with fast lanes, and even makes it possible to run ARA in a mesh network like New York Mesh. Since the packets are encrypted, there’s no way for anyone to inspect the content and treat it differently. Verizon is blatantly throttling video down to lower quality and poor experience, and no one can do anything about it. A decentralized system, potentially coupled with a mesh network, is a more attractive system for access to information given these dynamics.
We are excited about the future of distributed and decentralized systems, and the creative and powerful tools and applications that will be built on the ARA protocol.
If you are a creator, media publisher, or developer interested in maximizing your business and partnering with ARA, we would love to hear from you: hello@arablocks.io
To find out more, check out arablocks.io
