Scout Stork: Decentralization Personified.

Ledgerback Update: 05/13/2019

By Charles Adjovu, Scout and Researcher

Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative

Published in

Ledgerback Digital Commons Research Cooperative Blog

4 min readMay 14, 2019

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the official blog of Ledgerback, an independent research institution in the blockchain industry, organized as a platform cooperative.

In the past week, Ledgerback officially filed its’ trademark applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for “Ledgerback” and Scout Stork (our logo at the beginning of the post).

For this coming week, Ledgerback will focus on 1) Promoting and Advertising Greenback, 2) Planned Research on Bikechain and BlockLicensing, and 3) Website Redesign into Open Research Platform.

Become a Member

You can become a Member of Ledgerback (hereinafter “Scout”) by reading the Guide to Ledgerback, and completing the Membership Application Form and the Disclosure Statement.

As Ledgerback is updating its Bylaws, we are considering adding new types of membership. Specifically, we are considering adding the following types of membership:

Researcher (for members who conduct original research)
Peer-reviewer (for members who review member and non-member works)
Analyst (for members who analyze existing data)
Librarian (for members who specialize in finding and compiling information)
Supporter (for members who want to show support for Ledgerback without additional duties or responsibilities)
Contributor (for members who want to tap into Ledgerback’s resources but conduct research independent of Ledgerback)
Subscriber (for members who purchase Ledgerback’s goods and services)
Developer (for members who develop decentralized applications (DApps) for Ledgerback)
Writer (for members who write on Ledgerback’s behalf)
Coordinator (for members who coordinate activities between Ledgerback members, and between Ledgerback and third parties)

We would love your feedback on these new types of membership before we finish amending our Bylaws, which you may send to hello@ledgerback.coop.

Last Week

We officially filed for trademark protection for “Ledgerback” and Scout Stork (our logo at the beginning of the post) with the USPTO.

We want to prevent a “Nifty Trademark Incident” occurring with our name and our logo, so we decided to file trademark applications with the USPTO before such an incident could occur.

For more information on the “Nifty Trademark Incident,” please refer to our Collective Trademarks for Blockchain Communities? article.

Hopefully, we will successfully pass examination and be awarded federal trademark protection for “Ledgerback” and Scout Stork.

Additionally, our research on Bikechain and Blocklicensing (hereinafter “DeLicensing”) continued, but we did not make as much progress as exepcted.

We still need to replace our current test bicycle for Bikechain before we can move on with the eBike conversion.

DeLicensing is becoming more complex, but also clearer as we are getting a better understanding of the type of Decentralized License we will need to accomplish our goal of licensing musical works on a blockchain platform. Hopefully, we can put out a draft within the next 3 months.

Lastly, we *tentatively* expect to have both papers completed by Q4 of this year.

This Week

For this week, we will continue working on advertising Greenback Marketplace, our research papers, and website redesign.

First, hopefully, we can increase the digital presence of Greenback Marketplace to encourage more people to come to the exchange, and understand that we not only provide better rates and fees than Bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) or online USD to Cryptocurrency providers, but that we also provide the basic training and education needed to become an active and productive member of the local and global blockchain community.

Second, concerning our research papers, we also have two projects open to the public for anyone to become a *contributor* or *analyst member*.

The two projects are Project Historia and Statis, which were mentioned in an earlier post.

The newest project added to our development line is the creation of a Research Platform managed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Once we have a formalized paper on this one, we will open it to the public and allow for people to become *contributors* on the project.

All three project are centered on decentralized governance (DGov), and we welcome new contributors and members to work on one or all 3 projects.

Please send an email to hello@ledgerback.coop if you would like to join.

Third, we are still making templates for the redeisgn. Hopefully, we can have the website up within the next 2 weeks.

We are hoping to add payment options for digital assets and USD in the redesign so you have greater choice in your payment method once the redesign is finished and the research platform may be accessed.