Relevant Development Update

Slava Balasanov

Published in

Relevant Community

5 min readSep 25, 2020

A recap of the last 4 months, what we’ve learned, and where Relevant is heading.

Summary:

Accomplishments: Beta Phase 1 — building a stable network

Relevant saw a huge spike in growth
We scaled our servers and improved app performance
We validated our core Reputation and Economic mechanisms
We patched a number of high-level vulnerabilities
We improved UX to make Relevant resistant to spam attacks and manipulation
We made it easier for small token holders to earn curation rewards

Next steps: Beta Phase 2 — a path towards self-governing communities

Finalize token allocations
Update and audit token smart contract
App: beta version of admin elections
App: beta version of user-created communities
Initial version of the Reputation module on the Cosmos blockchain

Eternal September

Relevant has undergone a significant transformation in the past 4 months. In May of 2020 we had a few hundred daily active users who were mostly there to share niche content that wasn’t easily accessible elsewhere. These users were already earning REL coins but it wasn’t their primary motivation for using the app. This early community was integral to seeding the initial ethos of Relevant and many of those users are now community admins.

This all changed in June 2020. $REL got some attention in the crypto community and new users flooded the platform. In a span of a few weeks we went from a few hundred to over 10K daily active users! Needless to say this changed the dynamic of the app quite a bit. This was Relevant’s ‘Eternal September’ moment — a term that’s used to describe a continuous influx of new users that are not yet familiar with the etiquette of an existing online community.

Relevant’s Reputation System

In a traditional Web 2.0 social app, an influx of new and sometimes malicious users would destroy the existing community. Add economic incentives to the game and you’ll end up with thousands of bots upvoting one another and boosting random clickbait to the top of the feed just to earn some coins.

The Relevant Reputation system was designed to counteract such a scenario and it was finally put to the test.

On Relevant, new users simply don’t have any power to impact rankings until they have earned reputation by learning the existing norms and preferences of a given community. This system counteracts herd mentality and puts admins in control of the qualitative aspects of community networks.

We saw a few users try to game the Reputation mechanism by creating sybil accounts and upvoting one another. This kind of attack doesn’t work on Relevant because the attacker simply ends up spreading their voting weight among all of their sybil accounts, with the net result remaining the same.

The Reputation mechanism has huge implications for the future of social media. It shows that it is possible to have a fully decentralized, p2p social network that facilitates public discourse. This mechanism can also solve many issues faced by Web 2.0 social apps including bots, spam popularity metrics, and manipulation.

Economics

In the past few months we were able to see the Relevant economic mechanism play out at scale. In May there were 100K REL tokens in circulation. As of Sept 23rd there are over 523K REL in circulation as a result of distributed curation rewards.

Early on, we saw some users abusing a loophole in the staking mechanism that allowed accounts to double-stake REL coins by moving them to new Ethereum accounts. This was an easy fix and was quickly patched by implementing a 3-day power-up period for new Ethereum accounts.

Finally, we recently fine-tuned the staking mechanism to limit how much whales (early users with lots of tokens) can stake on a single post. By default they now stake only 1K REL on each post with a max of 10K REL on each post. This provides a much better opportunity for users with only a few REL to earn curation rewards.

Airdrop Exploits

One of the things we did not get right was the airdrop mechanism. Our airdrop system was poorly designed and users were able to create multiple accounts in order to receive more airdrop tokens. Even though airdrop tokens could not be cashed out, they could be used to earn additional curation rewards using multiple accounts. We saw quite a few users exploiting this weakness. As a result, we have paused all airdrop rewards and are actively removing airdrop tokens from users with multiple accounts.

In the next few months we will be removing all of the airdrop tokens. We understand that this is not a great user experience but we believe this is the best way to eliminate multiple account holders and account resellers. We are now actively exploring ways we can resume the airdrop program securely.

Next Steps: Beta Phase 2

We spent the majority of phase 1 fixing problems and responding to new dynamics. This was a very challenging time because we have a tiny team and we hаd to adjust to extremely drastic changes. We were able to step up to the challenge because the core mechanisms of Relevant proved to be extremely robust and provided a sound foundation for improvements. With the app in a solid place, we feel that we are in a great position to focus on the long-term vision of the project.

Token Allocation and Smart Contracts

Some aspects of the REL token allocation have not been finalized yet. We plan to tackle this task in the immediate future. The core token parameters will remain unchanged, with most of the tokens being allocated to Relevant users.

What to expect:

Vesting contracts will be implemented for all tokens allocated to early users, the dev team, and investors
Core aspects of the contract will not be upgradable
All contracts will be audited for bugs and security vulnerabilities
We will add an interface for examining token contract parameters

Self-governing Communities (Beta)

The long-term goal of Relevant is to enable users to create self-governing communities. We will be starting work on the admin election system that will allow users to nominate admins, deliberate on their viability, and vote to add or remove them from their post. The existing Reputation system will be used for voting, but we will need to build out UX to facilitate this.

Once the admin election module is in place, we will begin experimenting with user-created communities.

Decentralized Reputation System (Beta)

As announced in a previous blog post, we are starting work on building a decentralized version of the reputation system on the Cosmos blockchain with the help of a grant from the Interchain Foundation. This work is still in its very early stages and will not be implemented into the production app for some time.

Conclusion

Finally I want to thank the Relevant team, admins, users, and even the scammers for helping us take Relevant to a whole new level. We are extremely excited to have accomplished what we have so far and to start on phase 2.