Project Atlas

this is output of program it simulates adding a few articles and views and calculating revenue for payday for each author

Inspiration

In my home country(Ukraine), for decades, oligarchs had a powerful lobby in the media because all major channels, newspapers, and online media were under their control. And, of course, they used them to influence society in the way they needed and promote parties they backed. If you are a journalist in Ukraine, you can not critique some person and must sometimes critique enemies of your boss. Some journalists opposed this by creating their own independent media, but it is very hard to become profitable, maintain your small media, and have enough money to invest in investigations and research. Some journalists paid with their lives for this, like Georgiy Gongadze in 2000.

What it does

It's just a model of the concept of a decentralized media platform to provide monetization for authors who want to work in the way they want rather than how editors want.

You can run it and publish your articles into blockchain(and this is not efficient, and it makes sense to store only some id or hash. but as a rough concept, it's okay). Also, it's supposed to be like NFT with the possibility to have multiple authors/owners/investors(someone paid for investigation/research and now have a right to use this article in any way). And in addition, the author may receive rewards for citations. But due to the lack of time, it was simplified to just creating an Article account into Solana and saving text there.

The next important thing is views. Blockchain keeps track of every view of every article, and then during the payday, we can calculate how much money the author will receive from the platform income based on a percentage of views on his articles for the pay period (he is like an owner of a share on our platform and his share depends on his quality of work).

HOW IT LOOKS LIKE IN THE PERFECT WORLD: The platform makes money not from mining but from selling services like subscriptions or ads or hiring writers or whatever. For each view, an author receives one crypto coin of the platform from the bank(the central account of the platform). Every month/week/whatever there is a payday, the author converts their coins into real money they can live on, like USDC. This conversion looks like this: our bank collects monetization money and stores it until payday. Some percentage from the bank will be used for the maintenance of the system and development, all other funds will be used to buy platform coins from the authors. At the same moment, our source of monetization(ads providers, subscribers) is "buying" these coins from the bank(technically, they do not owe them they are just pumping usdc into the bank for the next pay period in exchange for services the platform provides). So you can imagine this as the author sells skill and time to readers/ads providers/sponsors in exchange for money with a bank somewhere between them. So every time a new author joins the platform, we can issue more coins. Technically speaking, authors are like investors they hold their share in the platform income, and the size of this share is based on the number of views they have(it's not like youtube when you receive a fixed rate for each click on ads, and youtube income is not your business). +It can be anonymous, which is very important for journalists in authoritarian countries.

How we built it

The initial idea was to simplify the solution and code some blockchain for a demonstration on Go. But after Solana's workshop, it changed to write a simple program on blockchain and simulate publishing/views/payday using tests.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we were frustrated about how to work and what model may work for this industry, which is very hard given that we don't have a background in writing for media. And, of course, the lack of time. Learning from scratch about the Solana blockchain, how it works, and how to write programs on Solana using Rust and Anchor in one night is crazy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We developed a solution in our heads and delivered something to show in 24 hours.

What we learned

No one had experience with Blockchain in general, Solana/Rust/Anchor, too, so it was useful to make something with things you had never worked on before. Now we know how blockchain works and how to write programs for Solana.