Feedback summary and next steps of Daratus

After some discussions we came to a conclusion that Daratus is incentives based p2p network for getting web data on demand.

Can you remember the excitement just before opening a box of presents? Last week it nearly felt the same for us, when we shared our ideas about our project. We unwrapped quite a wide range of valuable comments: from nearly ready to invest and to those who didn’t get the point.

In this blog-post we summarize the feedback and comments about our article and discussions:

• Medium article
• Discussion on Ethereum subreddit
• Discussion on Ethtrader subreddit

Feedback analysis

All comments were beneficial in shaping the project’s vision and mission. Additionally, it helped to identify specific needs and pointed out challenges of the data industry.

• As an advantage it was expressed that project could provide better access and scaling of resources such as internet traffic, big pool of IP addresses, computing power and storage. Long term project vision, architecture and design stands together with decentralization values, it will not have a single point of failure (SPOF), and will work as a DApp lowering the risks in comparison to centralized services.
• Daratus was welcomed for its mindful usage of resources in comparison to repeated calculations of cryptographic hashing which is widely used in proof of work applications. This resource usage approach lead to a comment where we were asked to explain how the system is going to deal with cheating when data is mined. Long story short — to solve cheating issues we will need to: identify how critical the accuracy for data is; apply data double checking if needed; apply penalties for nodes which provide inconsistent data. Additionally, node trust index will be measured. More technical details of the solution will be covered in the white paper.
• Few were concerned that service could be used to launch DDoS attacks and that hackers could manipulate miner’s computer. Threats are prevented by system features like load balancer and data scraping tasks. Load balancing prevents data sources from being DDoS’ed, and scraping task scripts prevent miners from executing malicious code.
• How this service is different from Golem, Sonm or from AWS? Platforms mentioned above are universal and dedicated for almost everything. Daratus platform specializes in data scraping solutions: data extraction from the WEB sources, structured data storage and data aggregation. Focusing on one goal ensures that platform can perform best in its niche.
• One reader indicated that idea is not relevant and it is on the edge of legality. Our market research shows that web data extracting is used widely by number of companies in many use-cases and we support position that public data must remain public, no matter who owns. This approach also complies with the law.
• What niche it will fill or why it even needs to exist? Daratus is a service which helps to make data products on demand: such as simple data feed subscription, getting sophisticated insights from online data or learning from data when applying machine learning and many more use cases.

In conclusion, we are happy to see the demand and interest in the Daratus project. We are working on our project vision, mission statement, high level architecture, MVP, business model, white paper and other collateral materials. We are determined to gather a trustworthy team and build strong community.

Next steps

Currently we are a hard working team of professionals, dedicating our time for this project. Few of us are working full time and others supporting us part time and ready to jump on board any moment.

In the coming month we are focused on attracting investors for seed funding. It will allow us to continue working full time, manage community, sales team and experts to prepare legal aspects, professional presentations, marketing. Also, we need to attract more community members for running application nodes and QA. To earn community and investors trust, smart contract and project plan will be overseen by a third party. Finally, successful seed funding will be followed by token sale.

Let’s continue our discussion on telegram.

All feedback both encouraging and critical is highly valued. Don’t hesitate and drop us a line!