Crypto NYC hosts Ara
On Tuesday, August 7th, Crypto NYC hosted Sunny Atwal for our weekly Tuesday lunch. Atwal is a Product Engineer at Ara Blocks. Ara is building the Ara protocol, which will allow for the disintermediation and decentralization of content distribution, currently running on the Ethereum blockchain. Ara was spun out of Littlstar, a technology company co-founded by Tony Mugavero, Matt Collado, and Dominic Giglio. Tuesday’s presentation was held at Crypto NYC’s HQ in Tribeca, with roughly twenty-five members from the city’s blockchain community in attendance.
Atwal began his presentation with the story of how Littlstar’s team ended up creating the Ara protocol. Littlstar currently has a team over twenty-five strong composed primarily of engineers. Atwal described how the firm’s culture is centered around hackathons and decentralized development projects.
Littlstar began as an global discovery platform for premium VR, AR, & 360 Video experiences, and is now building amazing products and technology for all types of media including consumer apps, transcoding, rendering, and analytics. Littlstar works with a roster of well-known content producers, including National Geographic, Sony and The Economist. They provide a variety of services to their partners, including transcoding VR and AR experiences across a variety of platforms and devices.
As Littlstar grew, the company struggled with absorbing the high costs associated with transcoding VR and AR content and was searching for a cost mitigation strategy. The genesis for the Ara project and the resulting Ara protocol emerged from a P2P file sharing solution that members of Littlstar’s engineering team created during one of their hackathons.
The Littlstar team initially envisioned the P2P tools that emerged out of their hackathons as being useful primarily for lowering Littlstar’s content distribution and cloud storage costs. The firm’s engineers had also been exploring using blockchain technologies to more effectively monetize VR and AR technology. The Ara protocol was created by combining these disparate pieces of technology that had been developed independently by Littlstar’s engineers.
“With Ethereum, we realized that we could create immutable content licenses with both flexible and transparent attribution models. With modern P2P technology, we found interesting ways to distribute files in a cost-effective manner while rewarding our users,” Atwal explained. “With Ara, we have combined these two technologies to aid in the creation of new digital marketplaces. We believe these marketplaces will provide new and interesting ways for content creators to produce and monetize content. Consumers are provided with a broader range of content and an incentive to share their resources.”
The Ara Protocol will provide a decentralized mechanism for the creation, distribution and consumption of content. By disintermediating online content distribution and consumption, the Ara protocol will remove the single point of failure present in many of today’s content platforms. The Ara team believes this disintermediation will also help to lower the cost of streaming content online. Unsurprisingly, Littlstar will be the first content producer to begin using the Ara protocol post-launch.
Content aggregators will link content producers and consumers. Anyone who wishes to establish their own aggregator platform will be free to write to the Ara protocol and begin distributing content. The Ara team has built several Ethereum smart contract templates that aggregators can use to compensate content creators who contribute to the Aggregators content pool.
Atwal stressed that the Ara protocol will not include a standardized system through which content aggregators will display content to consumers. Aggregators will be free to develop their own unique interfaces and platforms for their audiences. This freedom should encourage experimentation and creativity as aggregators experiment with their content distribution platforms.
Atwal envisions the smart contracts that underpin Ara allowing for more flexibility between content aggregators and consumers. Content aggregators will be able to set differing fee structures, allowing consumers to pay smaller amounts for content they only partially consume, as an example.
Most online content currently flows through highly centralized systems. These systems and companies frequently operate with near monopolistic power, setting standardized rates for the compensation of content producers. More worryingly, content distribution networks such as YouTube are increasingly policing content along political lines.
Atwal highlighted content producers who have struggled with YouTube’s de-monetization policies as a community that would derive benefits from Ara. Ultimately, Atwal and his team envision unique communities emerging to serve discrete sets of interests with Aggregators emerging to serve networks of producers and consumers that share interests or values.
Littlstar announced their Ara protocol creation project in the first quarter of 2018 and Atwal expects their full suite of developer tools to be released to the public by the end of the quarter. The Ara Blocks developer tools will be available at no cost for any developer who wishes to contribute to the network.
Atwal explained that the Ara protocol is currently running on the Ethereum blockchain, but the Ara is blockchain agnostic. Members of the community suggested various alternatives to Ethereum, with several members in attendance suggesting Atwal and his team consider running Ara on EOS rather than Ethereum.
If you are interested in learning more about the Ara Blocks project, you can read more here, or follow them on Twitter.
On Tuesday, August 14th, Crypto NYC will host Aaron Steinberg from SingularDTV. You can register for the lunch here. Steinberg’s presentation will take place at the Crypto NYC headquarters in Tribeca. Please follow Crypto NYC on Medium or Twitter to receive updates on our community member’s exciting projects.
