Review.Network User MVP Is Now Live!

Published in

Review.Network

4 min readAug 27, 2018

Last week at Review.Network was all about the User MVP app. The team worked very hard and we are happy to announce that we released the first public version of the app on schedule! You can find it on the Google Play Store, or download an APK from our website.

Review.Network’s User MVP is a fully decentralized application — this means that it does not rely on centralized back-end servers to function. All of the functionality is implemented through the combination of a client side React Native Application and Ethereum Smart Contracts. Coming next will be the public release of the Review.Network Research MVP application, we’re working around the clock to make it available as soon as possible!

Features

We have successfully implemented the core set of functionalities, and are now continuing the development to add more features one by one.

Authentication

Registering on the application is simple — just provide your email, username and password, and a new wallet is generated for you. Your email or password are not transmitted over the network or stored in any databases. They are employed locally for authentication, with the password being used to encrypt your wallet before saving it to your phone’s storage. Passwords are not stored anywhere.

Usernames are used to establish new users on the smart contract, and are displayed publicly on the reviews you write.

During registration, we will seed your new account with ‘test ether’ to make it easier to try out the app.

Reviews

After you have registered, you will see the main reviews feed. That’s where you can browse through categories and subcategories, look at products and services, and read their reviews. It’s important to note that the app displays only the reviews that have passed validation.

You can leave a new review by going to a product screen and clicking the ‘+’ button. After you submit your review, it is saved to the IPFS and within the smart contract. This process can take some time, depending on the current state of IPFS and Ethereum Rinkeby testnet. After it’s been successfully submitted, the review will go through the validation process.

The smart contract chooses validators randomly from an approved user list. The problem of randomness in deterministic systems is always an interesting one to solve. In the MVP implementation we use the block.timestamp which has its well known disadvantages, but is quite effective for the current implementation, as we are continuing research into solutions for a more reliable source of randomness. In our specific use case, the miners don’t have a strong incentive to manipulate the block.timestamp because the review validation rewards are minuscule compared to, for example, a decentralized lottery system with large payouts to randomly selected users. Manipulating the system by a miner to choose oneself as a validator for a specific review would have to involve significantly changing the timestamp, which would lead to his block being rejected by the rest of the Ethereum network. As the number of validators and users in the system grows, the difficulty of such a manipulation rises.

At the forefront, Review.Network will handle the validation of reviews, with the next step being users who amass a high enough reputation score to become validators.

You can follow the validation status of your reviews in Profile > My Reviews.

Surveys

Here, you can see the surveys published by companies, fill them out, and receive a payout in REW tokens.

Profile

The profile section shows your current REW and ETH balance, as well as a stream of activity related to that balance. Right now, that means the survey rewards, but as we move forward, it will also include a detailed analysis of all REWs in and out of your account.

Also under profile, ‘My Reviews’ shows you a list of the reviews you submitted, and the status of each of them.

Conclusion

It was a very productive week. Publishing the User MVP on the Google Play Store and seeing our first users take it for a spin is an amazing feeling, and we are very thankful to the community for sharing their feedback with us.

Our next step is the Company MVP which is scheduled to be published on September 1st.