Gawapaji

Inspiration

The inspiration came when we were asked to use the benefits of blockchain for an application. We thought about copyrights for the immutability of the system and after observing the fact that today streaming services are taking a lot of money as intermediaries when it comes to copyright management.

What it does

This mobile application offers to a client some music and movies, he can pay a subscription to skip ads or unlock contents. A content like a movie or a song is represented by two distributions, a "financial" distribution and a "decisional" distribution. A financial distribution is a list of beneficiaries, each of them mapped with a percentage. A view of the content by one user remunerates instantly the beneficiaries on blockchain using a token, with respect to the proportion described by the financial distribution. For example : Content X, Financial Distribution /50 % for label A / 30% for label B / 20% for label C / when the content X is played once, let's say authors are remunerated 10 tokens, thus label A will get 5 tokens, B 3 tokens, C 2 tokens, all of this instantly. The decision distribution is analog but represents the decisional power over the future of the creation. When posting a content on the network, all entities mentioned in these distributions must sign a common contract. The list of all parts involved in a content through those distributions is public. The token issued is indexed 1:1 on USD and serves to transfer value on the network. Users can denunciate a content as illegitimate (after consulting the list of people participating in it and noticing that an artist misses for example), claiming to whom the content was stolen, the "victim" artist gets noticed when there are a lot of denunciations. An artist can complain about his work being stolen, which automatically puts the regarded content into the "sensitive list", away from the main network, (the complainer must pay for this procedure, gets refunded if he finally wins). Users then decide the judgement of the contents in the sensitivity list, confirming the copyright issue or not. When a content is published, it first passes through a moderation network, where users decide if it is publishable or not. In the three cases where democracy is used : denunciations, sensitivity list contents, moderation network : the users participating to those votes get rewarded in tokens when the vote is closed, only if the outcome of the vote corresponds to what they voted, i.e if they were right. The app offers a mini exchange where an user can buy or sell tokens (sell functionality is not 100% definitive).

This architecture benefits to every party using the network : artists are paid when their work is reused and keep a real power on it. User enjoys a quality service based on democracy where he can get rewarded for his contribution. Those mechanisms aim to lower the price of the infrastructure, deleting invisible hands of today's streaming services, thus facilitating access to culture.

How we built it

The blockchain infrastructure is developed in Go, as a Chaincode for the hyperledger fabric blockchain. Producers, Clients, Contents, Denunciations etc... are structures and all the features are represented by functions that can or cannot be called according to whom tries to do it. The information is stored and queried on/from the ledger, insuring the transparency and the immutability of the procedures. The code we provide is a beta beta version of our infrastructure, we were not able to finish it due to technical problems during the saturday-sunday night.

Challenges we ran into

We never wrote a line of blockchain development or a line of Go before and we didn't know what json was so it was really challenging to learn the whole theory while developing the infrastructure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We discovered a fantastic environment where development perspectives are gigantic and we proud of the code we started to write in spite of the server problems we had to cope with. We are proud to have reached a deep understanding of the blockchain and of the immutable ledger technologies. We are also proud of our business idea since we think it is not a totally dumb case and can have real use cases apart from StartHack challenge.

What we learned

We learned hyperledger, Go, json, we learned to work and develop on something unknown 2 hours before and we learn to attack a big problem of conception in terms of programming for the first time.

What's next for Gawapaji

We will probably improve our skills about blockchain development and finish the implementation of the chaincode (or maybe try it on the ethereum blockchain as a smart contract) and we will develop the UI in Swift.

Built With

• go