Building the future of knowledge sharing — How does Lunyr work?

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Lunyr

5 min readMar 14, 2017

Lunyr just announced its crowdsale and many people are wondering how the platform works. If you haven’t heard of Lunyr yet, check it out here.

All sensitive financial logic and data is located on the blockchain to ensure transparency and fairness.

Let’s walk through the diagram. Users start by submitting content (new information, or edits to existing content), which is then reviewed by other contributors for quality. If the content passes review, then the contributor must review other submissions. This results in an reward of contribution points (CBN) and honor points (HNR). Advertisers advertise on the Lunyr platform by participating in an auction where they bid on ad-space using Lunyr tokens (LUN). The ad-space is allocated based on the relevance of the ad and the size of the bid, similar to how Google AdWords works.

What are CBN?

CBN are rewards for successful content submission and peer review. They earn you a portion of the LUN in the LUN pool at the end of the two week reward period.

How do I earn LUN?

To earn LUN, simply accumulate CBN by the end of each two week reward period. At the end of each reward period, CBN are used to calculate the number of LUN you will receive. The number of LUN you will receive is proportional to the number of CBN you’ve earned for the current reward period. Lunyr receives 15% of the CBN each pay period.

For example, if:

You have 1 point at the end of the current reward period

There are 200 total content contributors who have each earned 1 point

Ad revenue + Newly created tokens= 600,000 LUN

Then there are 510,000 LUN in the LUN pool (600,000 * 0.85) for the current reward period.

And you will earn (1 / 200) * (510,000) = 2550 LUN.

Where do the LUN in the pool come from?

The LUN comes from the advertising proceeds used to purchase advertisements and new LUN created according to the LUN issuance model. Advertising proceeds go to content contributors to reward them for their hard work providing value to readers.

Scrooge McDuck is happy because he has LUN

Why are LUN valuable?

Advertisers must acquire LUN to purchase ad-space. This creates a demand for LUN, and the supply is controlled by the Lunyr smart contracts. This raises the price above zero, making the tokens that are paid to contributors valuable in the real world.

What are HNR?

HNR are rewards given at the same time as CBN for successful content submission and peer review. HNR may be spent on proposing and voting on disputes. Holders of HNR also hold CBN, which ensures that the people voting on the proposals have an economic incentive to vote in the best interest of the platform. HNR are not transferable.

Where is the content stored?

Since storing data on the blockchain is expensive, it is instead stored on IPFS, the interplanetary file system. We intend to migrate the data to Swarm when it’s ready. Since all of the content is on IPFS, anybody can host the content, and its integrity is ensured by cryptography. We want to ensure decentralization as much as possible so that Lunyr as an organization does not become a focal point for censorship. At the same time, we want a high degree of reliability and convenience, so that the Lunyr knowledge base is always just a click away.

Neural networks are amazing. We use them to pick good peer reviewers for content and ads and also to match ads to documents.

How does the ad system work?

Advertisers submit ads, which are first reviewed by contributors to filter out inappropriate material. Then we use machine learning to give the content a vector that encodes its semantic relationships. This vector is measured against the vectors of the platform’s pages to determine the ad’s relevance to those pages. This relevance score is then combined with a bid amount to determine a rank for the ad.

How are peer reviewers and content submissions matched?

We use machine learning to determine the similarity between a contributor’s previous submissions and the submission awaiting review. We also use this technique to match peer reviewers with ads.

Look at these monkeys yelling! Aren’t they beautiful?

What is dispute and resolution about?

Let’s face it, humans argue a lot. In the event that there is an important organizational change that someone wants to make to the content, such as annotating the content for bias or combining pages, a contributor can spend HNR to submit a proposal and then other contributors can spend HNR vote on the proposal. In this way, the Lunyr platform can be self-governing, making cancerous information-monopolies harder to create.

How do you prevent people from gaming the system?

The reason contributors are only allowed to peer review other submissions after their content passes review is that we want to have a natural obstacle to Sybil attacks, in which an entity creates multiple accounts and peer reviews itself to bypass the peer review system. This approach makes the cost of such an attack increase linearly with the scale of the attack, since it costs time, attention and gas to make submissions. Additionally, we insert an element of randomness to the peer selection so that it will be difficult for an attacker to control which content they will be selected to review, similar to Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). We also give a slight economic incentive for users to post all their contributions from one account by making the reward scale slightly non-linearly.

So there you have it, this is the basic structure of the Lunyr platform. Stay tuned for more details.