50 MILLION users on our blockchain! And, we are ready to attract more.
As blockchain tries to make its way from Satoshi’s paper into the real market, the nascent distributed ledger, just like all the early-stage technological innovations in history, is faced with a tough challenge: to persuade a sufficient number of people to become its users.
The user base of major public blockchains is too tiny to generate sustainable revenue. For example, on Ethereum, a popular blockchain carrying over 1,300 decentralized apps (Dapps), only about 20 have more than 100 daily active users. The lack of users can create a vicious cycle on any public chain: Dapp companies are reluctant to deploy their products on a platform where they have a hard time attracting real customers, while users are unwilling to come to a blockchain without high-quality Dapps.
However, for TOP Network, gaining users is never a headache. We have already attracted 50 million global users on Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN, three communication apps we built prior to the blockchain project. Upon the launch of TOP Network in 2019, these apps will migrate to the decentralized cloud communication network on our public chain, saying goodbye to their centralized communication layer. TOP token will replace fiat money and reward points as the tool of in-app payment and incentive plan. The apps will become the first line of Dapp products in the TOP ecosystem, with 50 million users seamlessly transferred to our blockchain.
As our apps become decentralized and blockchain-facilitated, our users will reap the biggest benefits, even though they may not notice the transformation taking place in those apps’ backend infrastructure. On the blockchain, data privacy protection is significantly improved compared with centralized networks. When CoverMe, an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, moves to the TOP Network-enabled peer-to-peer network, all the user contents will be handled on nodes owned and operated by numerous individuals or groups independent of each other. CoverMe users no longer have to worry that one company has the centralized power to peek at their messages or track their app usage without their consent.
The concept of peer-to-peer network emerged in the late 20th century but hadn’t seen the hope of mass adoption until lately. Without a centralized authority, it was impossible to hammer out uniform standards across the entire network to verify transactions, measure workload and most importantly, reward participants. The problem can be perfectly solved with today’s blockchain technology.
Take the decentralized SkyVPN as an example: Following the sophisticated consensus mechanism on TOP Network, any individuals or organizations worldwide can contribute proxy servers to the decentralized network and provide VPN service for users without dealing with any intermediaries. A suite of immutable algorithms monitors service providers’ performance, calculates their contribution fairly and distributes TOP tokens to their wallets transparently.
On centralized VPNs, all the servers handling sensitive user data are deployed in a limited number of geographically centralized locations. Hackers or governments can, almost effortlessly, pinpoint where they are going to attack, just like many eggs in merely one or two nests are particularly easy to be found by predators. Once hackers or governments find a tiny bug on a few servers, they can quickly broaden their attack to the entire network and seize every user’s ID. But such data breaches will be impossible on the decentralized SkyVPN, because:
No one can figure out who you are on SkyVPN. Your ID is stored by independently-operating nodes across the globe.
No one can track down which websites you are visiting while using SkyVPN. Your online records are handled by multiple randomly-selected servers, making it difficult for hackers to pinpoint their specific targets.
No one can shut down SkyVPN. The peer-to-peer network is so large that even one node is down, there are still hundreds of thousands of nodes to back it up and keep your data safe.
The migration of Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN to the blockchain not only brings new value to our apps and their 50 million users but also invigorates the ecosystem on TOP Network. There are two major types of miners on our blockchain: the ledger miners, who verify financial transactions and execute smart contracts, and the service miners, who provide services for Dapps. Both of them rely on an ample amount of real business to stay active and earn TOP tokens. The social and VoIP app Dingtone, alone, generates one billion minutes of voice calls annually, delivers billions of messages monthly and handles huge volumes of user-generated photos and videos. The throughput on Dingtone creates solid demand for VoIP, messaging and storage services as well as frequent transactions between service providers and app operator, keeping miners busy doing their job and gaining big token rewards.
Building the world’s first decentralized cloud communication services, TOP Network is creating a tokenized platform where anyone with qualified resources can join the network transparently and offer various decentralized communication services including messaging, voice/video, VoIP, VPN, streaming/CDN and IoT data sharing. With 50 million users and three Dapps to bootstrap TOP ecosystem and drive strong demand for services and transactions from day one, we are expecting to see robust growth in the number of service providers and ledger miners. The more miners to process and protect user data and verify transactions on our network, the safer, cheaper and higher-quality the cloud communication services can be, which will motivate more companies to deploy their Dapps on our network to utilize our cloud resources, and ultimately, attract more new users to our blockchain.
“Users don’t like a blockchain without Dapps, while Dapps don’t want to run on a blockchain without users,” said our CEO Steve. “This is a chicken and egg issue. But for TOP Network, we have both the chicken and the eggs in the beginning. That is why I know for sure that TOP Network will be successful.”
