The Scale Network
What is The Scale Network?
The Scale Network provides an innovative opportunity to earn social rewards on Ethereum. Users can post or curate content for free and get rewarded in the SCALE token for their contributions to the network.
There are countless community-based platforms across the internet, but traditional platforms struggle to offer the curators and creators of content appropriate rewards for their efforts. Various projects, most notably Steem, have attempted to utilize token economic models in order to return rewards from centralized platforms back to the users that drive them. Scale aims to iterate upon this mission but with key differentiators that will make the difference between small time crypto adoption and mass adoption.
First, we’re making it as easy as possible for developers to plug into the Scale Network in order to build or grow their community-based apps. Building on Ethereum offers the most robust decentralized development ecosystem with tools that non-crypto developers are already familiar with. By doing so, the barrier to entry for developers to integrate the Scale Network into an app is lowered, resulting in a higher quantity and quality of dApps in the network. Giving developers these easy to use tools opens up a wide variety of different possible applications only limited by a developer’s imagination. An idea of the types of apps that developers could build are anything from Reddit and Twitter to something like GoFundMe. Basically, any app that has some type of user curated and created content has a place on The Scale Network (this is most of the internet).
Second, we’re working to ensure that communities are not overtaken by whales wielding large amounts of influence in the network through their SCALE holdings. We’re doing this by putting weight on the number of participants using their influence rather than just the absolute amount of influence used in interactions on the network (ie. likes, comments, posts, votes, etc.). This is a work in progress but you can read more about the ideas we’re implementing by checking out Vitalik Buterin’s, cofounder of Ethereum, paper here.
Third, and most importantly, Scale is built for mass adoption. We’re focused on making sure that anyone can use dApps on the Scale Network without the barriers to entry of traditional dApps. We’re able to do this by utilizing an Ethereum-based sidechain, which we believe is one of the key components to the future of dApps. This means that dApps powered by Scale can appear to users as completely regular applications; users do not have to understand how to use metamask or anything else crypto-related in order to use the app. In addition, normal dApps on Ethereum require users to pay for every transaction — which greatly limits the number of potential users.
Social Mining
The SCALE token is inflationary, meaning that new tokens are created every day. The way that the network is able to reward its users is through these new tokens, with various portions going to dApp developers, SCALE token holders, content creators, and users of the network. All these groups have one thing in common: their participation in helping further the network as a whole. We’re calling this participation-based rewards social mining. You can think of it in the same way Bitcoin miners are rewarded for their contribution to the security of the Bitcoin network; Scale participants are rewarded for their contributions to the network’s various communities! — A more in-depth article about the rewards distribution is coming soon.
Influence in The Scale Network
The SCALE token has a feature similar to many other tokens called staking. Staking is a way of locking up your SCALE for a certain period of time and getting influence in the network in return. This influence is called SCALE Weight (SW). Simply put, the more SW you have, the more power your likes, votes, and other social metrics have in all apps across the network. SW is the main mechanism that prevents the network from being taken over by a minority who hold an disproportional amount of SCALE, as SW is tied to individual users and the conversion of SCALE to SW is not 1–1.
We have an article detailing the underlying mechanisms of SW coming soon. In the meantime, we’ve built a really easy way for users to manage their SCALE and SW that you can find here.
Built for Mass Adoption
The problem plaguing many decentralized apps today is the inability for non crypto-educated users to interact with them in the same way they interact with the rest of the internet. This has been a key component in preventing mass adoption and is currently the most important hurdle to overcome for decentralized apps. The Scale Network makes this issue a first priority by utilizing advances in Ethereum sidechain solutions. This is big. This lets developers in the network to create apps that users can use without ever knowing how the underlying crypto mechanisms are working.
We’re just getting started!
We’re extremely excited to finally share Scale with everyone, and this is just the beginning. You can join the Scale community right now by joining our telegram or buying SCALE.
Stay tuned as we continue to build the next-generation influence network!
