The Everything Token Curated Registry
I used to work for a company called Amazon — widely known now as The Everything Store. Although massive and global as it is today, it all started as an online bookstore. As Jeff Bezos grew his technology stack to support thousands of transactions a day, he built upon it a platform that would soon conquer internet retail and expand far beyond just books.
Today, Token Curated Registries (TCR’s) are being custom built by Blockchain companies to create curated lists of specific types of content, be it Products, Memes, or in our case, Crypto Against Humanity Cards. For most of these types of content, you don’t need a specialist to curate. I imagine that the person curating a Meme could also help curate a list of good snack foods, and could definitely curate a Crypto Against Humanity card. So why are we duplicating all this effort for each blockchain project? Do we really need another hundred ICOs and air drops to support these curated content lists? Is there a better way?
I believe we can learn from Amazon’s approach. Today Amazon has curators (customers) that number in the hundreds of millions and their purview span across all of its products, not just books. One site instead of one hundred, a million products instead of one, and one curator list instead of one thousands. Perhaps we as a community could learn from Amazon and build an Everything TCR that contains near every type of content, with one token, and one list of token-holding curators who can curate across all types of content.
How Would it Work?
Although I have just started delving into Token Curated Registries, and there are many implementations, making a generalized TCR, in concept, would not be that big of a leap from current implementations. Take the simplified TCR listed above — turning this into a generalized TCR could be as easy as adding a ‘tag’ field to the propose method. When a user wishes to add an item to the Global registry, they can now tag it. A user could propose ‘Cheetos’ with the tag ‘good_snack_foods’. Now when a website wishes to list good snack foods based on the Globally Curated Registry, they can just iterate over entries with the tag ‘good_snack_foods’ and find ‘Cheetos.’ (assuming it hasn’t been curated out of the registry) Now let’s say another blockchain startup comes around that wants to create a curated list of the best CryptoKitties, they can easily add to the same TCR as before. A user could enter ‘kitty 1’ with the tag ‘best_cryptokitties’ and now it can be curated by the entire community of TCR token holders.
The Benefits of The Everything TCR
There are some obvious benefits to having a globally curated registry rather than individual TCRs for each different type of content…
- Companies could easily plug into the Globally Curated Registry and immediately have access to a large community of curators, without spending time launching their own TCR.
- Token holders are likely to be more active in the TCR because there are types of content in which they are passionate about or have knowledge in.
- Attacks against the TCR become more difficult as the cost of an attack increases and the number of curators is larger.
- Users who hold the Globally Curated Registry token can now participate in new projects without needing to buy into a new token.
The Disadvantages of The Everything TCR
Now having an Everything TCR is not all rainbows and butterflies, and is not always going to be the best solution to every blockchain organization looking to implement a TCR. It’s possible you only want top brass curating your list, licensed doctors for instance or verified authors. In this scenario you would want to be very calculated on how you distribute your tokens. This would be a terrible scenario in which to use an Everything TCR, where literally anyone could be judging whether a picture of a mole is or is not indicative of skin cancer. However, for many projects, access to this supply of random internet curators would be beneficial, not a disadvantage, and it would be down to each project to determine whether an Everything TCR fits their needs.
What’s Next?
Token Curated Registries are still being ironed out. Our team is researching how best to implement our own Token Curated Registry for Crypto Against Humanity, but want to explore the idea of a more generalized TCR. We hope to build an Everything TCR that supports our cards, but can be used for any type of content going forward so that other teams can save time by:
- Not needing to develop their own smart contracts, or even deploy copies of contracts others have developed.
- Not needing to spend undue amounts of time figuring out token distribution or air drops
- Already having access to a community of curators.
That’s all for now. Please reach out to me with thoughts, ideas, and critiques on The Everything Token Curated Registry!
Thanks For Reading!
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