How to bridge the gap between influencers and business.

As the gig economy takes a bigger piece of the traditional economic pie accelerated by social media, community organizers and other Key opinion leaders in numerous sectors often find themselves networking and getting more and more followers on all sorts of traditional platforms and this may be ample for community organizers geared towards social-political change however financially speaking not many are able to effectively monetize all the work that they do to the extent that it would pay their bills or replace their day job. While on the other side of the equation are numerous businesses that would love access to the audiences that these community organizers and opinion leaders have worked so hard to build.

Opinion leaders can more effectively monetize their work. Image by Andreas Klassen

GEMSTRA bridges the gap by creating a platform where the Influencers value can be quantified beyond the number of followers thus benefiting those opinion leaders with smaller but high-quality followings and connecting them to their preferred brands and businesses. This decentralization and democratization is all built on ASTRA an infrastructural foundation which presents an API and protocol. This system delivers Societal influencers, brands and businesses from the grip of social network algorithms thus allowing all these stake holders to interact like never before. Businesses can build a channel and choose who they want to influence their potential customer. While the community influencers or opinion leaders can connect directly with businesses. Not to mention the modules that make up the platforms broader ecosystem all powered using GEMS, the platform DRC-20 Token.

More tokens staked equals greater voting power. Image by Parker Johnson

Governance is another factor that sets GEMSTRA apart, a community that lacks a robust system of decision making, rights and reputation tracking often ends up in chaos as we have seen with many projects over the years, governance thus acts as a check and a balance on decentralization by the influencer and brand token holders staking a portion of their tokens with businesses and businesses in turn staking these tokens and those paid as fees with ASTRA.
Voting is then decided by the aggregation of staked tokens with the majority winning. So essentially you give power to whoever you pay your tokens to and whoever stakes the most tokens via a business or as a business directly on ASTRA maintains the most voting power.
The theory is that as more influencers and brands join this ecosystem, the businesses won't have as much sway because there will be a greater distribution of GEMS with higher activity and liquidity.
A rewards system for merchants to offer compensation to their customers and keep them engaged and most importantly the use of the GEMS token for exchange of value.

Some Amazon sellers have been accused of having dishonest ratings. Image by Christian Wiediger

Fixing the flawed review system on most platforms by developing a reputation-based review weighting system will ensure more honest reviews as businesses cant just bribe customers to leave deceptive reviews anymore, furthermore the reviews left are also subject to the opinion of other users for helpfulness or honesty. The more reputable the reviewer, the weightier the review so its not just about numbers anymore.
The boutique concept is another new concept on ASTRA, a boutique is essentially a store front created by an influencer who then invites businesses and other brands of his or her choice to sell their products in it by simply sending their catalogs over, talk of drop shipping being decentralized.
Participants in this ecosystem can access all their performance data and customer data via a private dash thus allowing versatility, removal of poorly performing products or better targeting making them largely masters of their own destiny.
Cross marketing through brand integration gives businesses the ability to share their catalogs across several networks and geographical regions thus giving their products visibility that algorithmic constraints on traditional social networks would not let them have.

Architecturally, according to the project whitepaper GEMSTRA consists of three layers, the logical layer handling all governance, actions, transactions, rewards and payments and built on top of this are the data layer that enables high throughput off chain transactions built on the Interplanetary File System, and the decentralized applications layer in parallel that will contain both internal and external proprietary DAPPs.

ASTRA layers as depicted in the GEMSTRA whitepaper

Wallet versatility and variety is another cool feature, the 3 distinct ASTRA wallets are geared towards the specific stake holders i.e. customers and influencers, brands and thirdly businesses. the customer and influencer wallet can be downgraded or upgraded by the user as they see fit.
In summary, the GEMS token has five major use cases, Governance via staking and exercising of owners` rights, voting and reputation. Rewards by businesses for customer loyalty. Airdrops, for the ecosystem community to stay engaged. Compensation for services rendered or interest earned and Payments.
GEMSTRA has a big, hairy audacious vision to decentralize the traditional market place and incentivize contribution while making all transactions user friendly and honest. For more information visit them at https://gemstra.com/

By @spinlobby