Lunyr, the decentralized knowledge base source, is set to launch their crowdsale on March 29th, 16:00 UTC.
The team behind Lunyr consists of ten people with various skillsets from business development to marketing to legal counsels. This is a great sign for accomplishment to have a well rounded team in terms of keen skills. These members are Arnold Pham, Andrew Tran, Ben Bamberger, Christopher Smith, Steve Yu, Holly Hernandez, Duc Pham, Dr. Greg Colvin, Alex Leverington, and Grant P. Fondo.
The crowdsale will begin the 29th, and last for four more weeks, or until the max amount of LUN tokens are purchased. Initial distribution of these tokens will be set at the rate for 44 LUN per Ether. There will be maximum of 11,000,000 tokens to be released in the crowd fund. LUN are purchased by sending Ethereum to a token contract that will be included in the instructions, which will be available a day before the launch. After the crowdsale, you’ll be able to transfer your LUN tokens to another address of your choice.
The coin’s purpose is to purchase ads with them, functioning as part of the incentive platform Lunyr has designed. The concept is publishers get paid in LUN tokens to create and review content, and then given the choice to buy ad space for their articles to increase traffic, or to hold as an investment.
To gather an idea of this platform, Lunyr is a decentralized and crowdsourced encyclopedia that is ran entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. It will always be available to everyone for free like any other encyclopedia, such as Wikipedia.
As with an online knowledge source people use on a daily basis, it’s important that the information remains consistent to the reader at all times. There seems to be a problem with information in relation to what users are looking for. Authors can be biased, articles may be change numerous times, intentional vandalism can happen, and a bad list of sources can be used. Lunyr uses Ethereum’s underlying technologies in order to solve these main issues for a real-world knowledge base center.
The data is stored using IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). This system is designed to distribute high volume of data with high efficiency. Basically, it aims to make the web faster, safer, and more open. However, they plan to go with a better way of storing data such as Swarm coin. Because this platform is ran on the Ethereum blockchain, you can accept zero down time.
To ensure the security for its users, every product release on the Mainnet will be followed up with a security audit including both internal and external reviewers. There will also be a bug bounty program rewarding any developers who can find security bugs or flaws throughout the platform.
Current problems with today’s online knowledge sources are exactly what Lunyr aims to have a solution for. There seems to be three major obstacles. They include centralization, censorship by a central authority, and inaccuracy of content.
Lunyr’s platform is completely autonomous, meaning there is no central authority to make decisions. Actually, the content that get’s published and reviewed are all done by people like me or you. The ones who publish will be the only ones eligible to peer review other articles. And to make sure that Lunyr’s content will be trustworthy and resourceful, machine learning is applied to match reviewers with specific articles that best suit the field or topic they already write about and are relatable to. With it being autonomous, this means for no single point of failure, where a site like Wikipedia still obtains.
The content itself will be censorship resistant, allowing for publishers to avoid being oppressed by a central administrator. There still has to be a process to avoid inaccurate content, so everything you’ll see on Lunyr when it goes live will have gone through a mandatory peer review to filter out any unreliable or malicious content. Being censorship resistant, there is no central government or authority for us to be given what type of information we can take in.
“We take advantage of the unique features of Ethereum to create a sustainable and transparent ecosystem.” - Lunyr
They have a dispute and resolution system that exists to fix any content or quality issues that passed through the peer review system. This makes sure that the information published will be as refined and reliable as possible.
Readers will be be given more accurate content as resources, since peer-reviewing will be applied to the process of submitting an article to the public.
For publishers, you will get paid in LUN for creating and validating information. You can also advertise your own articles on the platform.
Developers have the option to use Lunyr’s API to create their own applications if they wish. Their long-term vision is to develop a knowledge base API that developers can use to develop their own next generation applications in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
Here’s an example of the API”s uses in next generation apps for developers. Say that someone has a pair of augmented reality glasses. They’re outside and want to know more information about a flower in front of them, so the API reaches into Lunyr’s knowledge base and retrieves the information needed. That was an example given by Lunyr in their white paper.
A roadmap of 2017 and the next year have already been created. The crowdsale is to be launched to the public. In quarter two referred to as Stardust, there will be development of a content submission editor and a basic peer review system for content and ads. In the third quarter for the year called Celestial, Alpha will release on Testnet and basic advertising will be created. The last quarter called Interstellar, Beta will be released on Testnet and a basic dispute and resolution system will be planted.
The team already has a roadmap for 2018 as well. This is when the work really comes together and Mainnet is released to the public.
The first quarter of 2018 is when Beta will release on Mainnet. The second quarter will consist of a peer review system upgrade. Third quarter is also an upgrade and is for the dispute and resolutions system. The last quarter is yet another upgrade which has to deal with the advertising system. FInally, in 2019 is when they release Lunyr’s API for developers to work with.
To wrap it all up, Lunyr is an Ethereum based encyclopedia that plans to make information more accurate, increase content for more resources, and expanding readership. They are backed by a wide range of skills to support proper growth. It’s censorship resistant, has zero down time since it’s ran on a blockchain, and also incentivized for the publishers who create and revise articles. Not only that, it allows developers to build next generation of applications like virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality.