Discovol: Discovering and Sharing Health Information Made Easy
Octopus Showcase Day 2021
Octopus Network has recently launched a series of introductory videos to the on the appchain network and the projects building on it. In one of the latest videos, John Xu, the founder and CEO of Discovol, a decentralized community for discovering and propagating science-based health information with a distinctive token incentive mechanism, gave a presentation on the project’s value.
For those of you that speak Chinese you might want to check the presentation given by John on Discovol. Otherwise just keep reading this post to learn more about this new project and its value proposition.
Discovol Value Proposition: Making Access to Reliable Health Information Easy
When it comes to health, the internet is the first tool that people resort to in order to decide the first approach to their issue, or simply satisfy their curiosity. It is a great place to find all kinds of information and opinions on a wide range of topics, and it provides guidance and value to those interested in making informed decisions. However, it is also a place where trustable information gets lost or buried by the incredible amount of content, making it difficult for users to find what they are looking for.
Discovol was created with the aim of addressing this issue by making it easier for users to find, access, and share reliable health information. The value proposition of the project is straightforward:
“From the perspective of community members, Discovol.org is a decentralized autonomous co-op, which shares the mission of discovering and propagating science-based, high value health information across the internet. From the perspective of users, Discovol DAPP is an efficient service tool to discover and apply science-based health content, to predict personalized health risk, and to find a reference closely related to their own health concerns. From the perspective of a life science researcher, Discovol is an invaluable online treasury to maintain the most valuable health content, algorithm, and life data perpetually”.
Discovol’s aim is to contribute to the sharing of science-based health knowledge across the internet to help people in the arduous task of making informed decisions about their life-styles and health. But it’s aim does not stop there, Discovol also helps researchers get access to valuable information for conducting their research.
The Market for Non-Medical Healthcare is Growing and so is the Need for Reliable Sources of Health-Related Information.
The market for non-medical healthcare is growing and by 2024 its market size will be over $3 trillion in China alone. Personalized product and service recommendation based on consumer health data is an important part of this and it constitutes a great opportunity to tap into.
High value health information is in demand because there is a growing mistrust among consumers who often doubt the neutrality and the authority of health information published on social media and recommended by marketers.
“It is estimated that by 2023, the number of practitioners in the social e-commerce market will reach 330 million. And over 40% of health products and services will be achieved by direct selling and social e-commerce groups”
-iResearch, 2021.
Marketers of health products and services are expected to be the most active users and participants in community activities of discovery and propagation. While publishers of health information are expected to be the main incentive providers. A project like Discovol can provide incredible value to these two categories and to consumers as well.
How Does Discovol Deliver Its Value?
As all protocols Discovol has its own token, $DISCO, a non-monetized functional token of Discovol community that functions as a record of stakeholders’ contribution and a medium of exchange with other members.
When valuable content is discovered and voted, there will be a prediction bonus pool set for it. Predictors could stake their tokens into the pool and predict the final score of the current round. Till meeting the votes threshold, each voting result will be stored in a secure network based on private computing. When the smart contract is triggered, the voting result will be announced. A fixed percentage of bonus in the prediction bonus pool will be allocated to discoverers and voters. According to the prediction contract, the rest of the bonus will be distributed to predictors depending on the proximity to the final score.
For accelerating community propagation, discoverers (i.e. beneficiaries) of health information assets could stake more $DISCO into the bonus pool in order to ignite activities of voting and prediction.
Discovol Appchain & Smart Contract
Discovol community autonomous collaboration is supported by a set of decentralized tech facilities, crypto protocols and open source tools. For appropriate security protection of the community activities and more flexible upgrade room, Discovol developed a separate application chain based on Substrate framework.
Discovol will access to NEAR ecosystem through the Octopus Network, a cross-chain relay service platform, so as to acquire security support of POS validation nodes. Through NEAR’s Rainbow Bridge, Discovol will connect to Ethereum. At the same time, the Substrate framework will still make it possible for Discovol to integrate into the Polkadot ecosystem as well. On top of this, a set of smart contracts developed on Discovol Appchain will support more enriching community activities of discovery, voting, prediction, token incentive and governance sustainably.
To facilitate use, Discovol will supply open source tools & API to DAPP developers, so that the DAPP users could discover and apply health information assets effectively. These tools will support discovering high value health information by displaying multidimensional leaderboard, by tracing social relationship atlas, by searching smartly associated tags, or by personalized recommendations through risk analysis of gene and health data.
Discovol Roadmap
LaDevochka is a writer for 4NTS Guild. You can check out their Medium for more content or follow them on Twitter.