ArtY

Bring the power back to content-creators online. This project is about decentralizing the ownership of content online and making communities independent from traditional big online platforms.

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Inspiration

The number of independent online creators is growing and the available online platforms that are suitable to host and serve their content are becoming more and more fragile. The latest events at Twitter proves this idea to be correct. Hence, we wanted to find a way to give the creators more independence and control over what they create and how they distribute it.

What it does

The project makes any type of content available online regardless of the big platforms such as YouTube, Meta products etc. It also makes the process of following and be part of the community of a creator not linked to a specific platform. A creator can then choose freely where to host its content, and move it around very easily. The community can choose the location from which they access it.

How we built it

The backbone of this product is the block chain technology. We register the ownership of some content in a block chain and maintain a distributed database in a peer-to-peer network to store information about the followers of the artists. For this, we implemented a simple block chain from scratch in java: The transactions register the creation of a new content and link it to the creator. Blocks will contain transactions from multiple artists.

Data in the P2P network is based on a DHT to maintain information about communities and meta-data of the content. The content itself is stored at the peers and/or on the servers of centralized online platforms if the creator chose to do so.

In this way, people can either be directed to the central platform of their choice to watch a specific content, or simply requested to the network (slower but it keeps the content absolutely available). Hence creator are in full control of how, where and when their content is accessed.

The only little problem to the concept is that it requires to make a change to the already existing hosting platforms to be compatible with the pipeline of authenticating and proving the ownership of a content and linking it to a certain community.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we ran into are essentially related to the security aspect of the project. A lot of adversarial thinking was required in order to come up with a usable solution. For instance, there is the common problem of flooding a blockchain to deny the service to others, typically prevent artists from creating content in our case. Our solution to this was to exponentially increase the cost of mining for a peer in case of repeated request in a short period of time.

Another problem was the cost of mining (with a little focus on the environmental cost). Rather than having each artist mine its own block to own its content online, we group artists together and elect one miner that would mine a block for everyone. The election criteria could be based on the available computational speed. This system will avoid making everyone to race for mining a block, there is no reward apart from having protected content online.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The final product is an example of usability for one peer (The backend we implemented in 24 hours cannot really handle more than that). But the design is scalable and can surely be continued.

We really went from the idea and tried to find which technologies are available to implement it. None of us had implemented blockchains or networks in the way it was done for this project, and we managed t learn how to do it and have a working example in just 24 hours only. This is extremely satisfying. But the most important thing is that we believe that this concept can drastically change the way content is made available online for the good and we're proud of being part of that change.

What we learned

The learning outcome is huge, especially for everything related to what's under the hood of Block Chains. We had to dig so deep in this notion in very little time in order to be able to implement it and we somehow succeeded which shows that we're starting to understand the concept in a very extensive way.

What's next for ArtY

As stated above, we believe that the ideas that were tackled in this project will be necessarily part of the ongoing web revolution and that they will inspire a lot more similar ideas that will make the web a better place. We'll definitely look into scaling the project, making it robust, secure and usable.

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