Viewly Distribution Game

Introduction

Most common ways to distribute crypto tokens today are ICO’s and Airdrops.

ICO’s are useful for raising funds for ambitious projects, however the tokens distributed through an ICO end up in hands of a few (usually less than 100) wealthy individuals and VC’s. Such distribution is prone to centralization of power (oligopoly) and usually comes with inherent mis-alignment of interests between major stakeholders and actual token users — making token based governance particularly challenging.

Airdrops do in theory create a larger, more democratic distribution, however in practice they lead to undesirable outcomes. Airdrops attract people who are not interested in the token’s utility and are highly unlikely to become actual users. They are here for their free tokens, ready to cash out at the first opportunity.

The Viewly Distribution Game is an attempt to create a fair and effective token distribution, where the tokens are earnedby actual Viewly users: content creators and their supporters. Because the users have to put in their time and effort to earn the tokens, they feel more ownership (endowment effect) as opposed to receiving tokens for free.

Users can make use of their tokens on the Viewly Platform, as well as contribute a healthy representation in a token based governance process.

Useful Proof of Work

Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains issue new tokens for proof-of-work mining, whereby scarce and expensive resources (energy, hardware and labor) are destroyed in exchange for a coin reward.

Viewly is hosted on Ethereum, and has no consensus protocol to run. Therefore we can bind the token emissions to less quanitifiable and somewhat subjective type of work: human effort.

The type of effort that is incentivized with the distribution game should benefit the network, and thus can be considered useful.

Objectives

The purpose of the Viewly distribution game is to bootstrap the Viewly network by:

• Onboard successful content creators and their fans to the Viewly platform
• Support high quality content production through VIEW Token emissions
• Distribute VIEW tokens to as many contributing Viewly users as possible
• Fairly reward skill and effort of the participants

Stake based voting

The stake based game is a content subsidy program, in which creators who publish high quality content compete for votes from VIEW Token holders. The videos are rewarded with freshly minted VIEW Tokens in proportion to the cumulative stake of votes relative to all videos within a distribution period.

Each vote is based by VIEW token holdings of the voter. Voters with larger stakes thus have more voting power (similar to traditional Proof of Stake systems). The stake based voting system is inspired by Steemit, however the actual implementation is different due to cheating concerns.

Try it out

The stake based game is now live.

If you’re a niche, yet high quality content creator, this might be the perfect opportunity for you to get started on the Viewly platform.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we will discuss particular mechanics of the game.