Inspiration
Fake news is increasingly a big problem nowadays - powerful individuals and state actors manipulate the truth to push for their own personal agendas. It could be used to subvert democracy and democratic processes like elections and judicial proceedings. The market has been slow to come up with a solution. We thought a blockchain solution to the problem would be the most effective and we set out to build a solution.
What it does
We intend to build a verification layer over the traditional web, with users highlighting sentences and adding comments to pages that they browse. Think of us as a tokenized rapgenius for the entire web. To vote or add content to the layer, users will need to stake tokens (kind of like a prediction marketplace). The democratically-voted upon opinion would obtain rewards, while users that push for falsehood would be penalized by losing the tokens they stake. Tokenization allows us to incentivize good behavior and punish bad behavior + deter attacks on truth.
How I built it
We used dev tools provided in Ethereum - Truffle, Remix IDE, and we drew inspiration for our token design from numerous projects - Steemit, Augur etc.
Challenges I ran into
One of the big challenges was learning how the decentralized stack works in tandem with each other. For example, how do we run a private blockchain and ensure the integrity of those transactions on the browser with Metamask was most of the challenging feats. Thankfully, the Ethereums developers tools has allowed us to overcome these challenges in a shorter period of time.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Proud that we're able to get a decentralized annotation app prototyped on a private blockchain within 36 hours.
What I learned
Howy - learned + wrote unit tests for the smart contract
What's next for vopo
Timeline wise, We intend to run an alpha test with the crypto community. This makes the most sense - users have a lot to gain from accurate financial information and these users would be most familiar with a blockchain system. Tech wise, we will continue building and improving our platform. We will also explore off-chain scaling solutions and incorporate privacy into the states of the smart contract
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