DAOrayaki Reserach |MINDS：The Anti-Facebook Social Network

DAOrayaki

9 min readAug 11, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant:

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount：200 USD

Category: DAO, Decentralized Social Media, Social Network

Contributor：Julie，DAOctor @Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/minds-bu-tong-yu-facebookde-she-jiao-wang-luo-ping-tai/

Financing:

current price：$1.14（2021.8.4）

Market Cap：$7,159,682

Trading Volume：$894,028.69

Max Supply：250,000,000

Token name:API3

Token type：ERC-20

1、Project Summary

Minds is an alt-tech blockchain-based social network.Users can earn money or cryptocurrency for using Minds, and tokens can be used to boost their posts or crowdfund other users.Minds was co-founded in 2011 by Bill Ottman and John Ottman as an alternative to social networks such as Facebook, which the founders believed abused their users via “spying, data mining, algorithm manipulation, and no revenue sharing”.A Facebook page affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous encouraged its followers to support Minds in 2015, and called for developers to contribute to the service’s open source codebase.

In 2018, over 150,000 Vietnamese users joined Minds after fearing that Facebook would comply with a new law requiring them to remove political dissent and release user data to the Vietnamese government.Beginning in May 2020, over 250,000 Thai users joined Minds after growing concerns about privacy on Twitter, which had been widely used for political activism.This led Minds to add Thai language support to its mobile apps, and upgrade its servers to handle the influx of traffic.

In January 2021, after YouTube and Facebook removed tens of thousands of Trump supporters and white supremacists from their platforms, Minds was among the alternative apps those users adopted.

2、Team members

l Bill Ottman — — CEO/Founder

Bill Ottman (born November 2, 1985) is an American Internet entrepreneur and freedom of information activist based in New York City, best known as the CEO and co-founder of Minds.Born and raised in Norwalk, CT, Ottman pursued English and music at the University of Vermont while working as a collaborative artist and event director in Burlington, VT. In 2010, he worked as Director of Marketing at Gathering of the Vibes Music and Arts Festival.In 2011, Ottman co-founded Minds, an open source social networking platform that is regarded globally as an alternative to traditional social media networks based on its dedication to radical transparency, monetization, digital rights, blockchain and equity crowdfunding.

l John Ottman — — Chairman and Cofounder

In addition to his role as Minds chairman and co-founder, John is Executive Chairman of Solix Technologies, Inc. and brings over 30 years of software industry experience. Previously, he was President and CEO of Application Security, Inc. (Trustwave), President of Princeton Softech, Inc. (IBM), and Executive Vice President, Worldwide Markets at Corio, Inc. (IBM).He also has held key executive roles at Oracle, IBM and Wang Labs and is author of the book Save the Database, Save the World!

l Mark Harding — — Chief Technology Officer

Mark is the lead developer and technical leader of the global Minds open source community. Prior, Mark was Founder and CEO of Kramnorth. He is an orchestral musician,graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and has been coding open-source systems for over a decade.

l Jack Ottman — — Chief Operating Officer

Jack is an Chief Operating Officer and joins Minds from IBM Software Group where he was a top sales executive in the Communications sector, focused on cloud and e-commerce.Jack graduated from Washington & Lee University with a BA in Business Administration.

l Peter Schwartz — Chief Financial Officer

Peter Schwartz has over 30 years of senior financial management experience in the software and technology arena. Pete has most recently served as CFO at Cloudcheckr, a leading cloud analytics firm. He has also been the CFO at Application Security (Trustwave).

3、Governance and Incentive mechanisms

3.1. Token Utility

The underlying principle is to fairly compensate community participants contributing the most to different aspects of the ecosystem through daily rewards. The hybrid on-chain/off-chain system enables scalability and easy UX while simultaneously empowering users with the option to transact with tokens via sovereign web3 wallets.

function：

1）Across the network for advertising

2）liquidity mining

3）Ad mining

4）Reward

5）Tipping

6）Unlocking memberships

7）Establishing decentralized reputation

3.2 Boost Offer

The smart contracts for the Boost system contain specific data disclosures for on-chain advertising on the platform.

l The Boost GUID (global unique identifier)

l The wallet address of both the sender and receiver

l Paid promotion tool

Boost Offers is a paid promotion tool, where users can send offers of MINDS tokens to other users in exchange for a guaranteed ‘remind’ (share) of that content to their audience. In other words, User A can offer User B any amount of tokens to share their post.

l Transaction

Every on-chain MINDS token transaction establishes a direct, peer-to-peer relationship between advertisers and content creators with a smart contract. This enables creators to autonomously own the relationship with their advertisers and minimizes risk of third party interference or demonetization. The Boost protocol is platform agnostic and may be implemented on other nodes beyond Minds.com.

l MD5 checksum to verify the integrity of the data

Minds will use a simple, yet effective MD5 hash of the following attributes (boost_guid, boost type (newsfeed, offer, sidebar), owner_guid, perma_url, message, title, time_created). Should any of these variables change in the future, it will generate a new MD5 checksum, indicating that the integrity of the Boost has been modified. While MD5 has been widely deprecated from use as a password hashing algorithm due to its chances of possible collisions, it provides a quick and inexpensive 32-byte hash for simple change validation.

3.3 Liquidity and Ad Mining

“Uniswap is an automated liquidity protocol powered by a constant product formula and implemented in a system of non-upgradeable smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.It obviates the need for trusted intermediaries,prioritizing decentralization, censorship resistance, and security. Uniswap is open-source software licensed under the GPL.”

Moving forward, token holders on the Minds network will be able to easily pool their MINDS holdings alongside ETH, USDC, USDT or any other supported pools in the future, to provide liquidity for the token and earn. Users who provide liquidity to the MINDS pool on Uniswap earn fees as well as benefits on the Minds app such as daily token rewards and the option for automated advertising of your channel.

Liquidity providers can opt-in to receive a share of ad space in a new featured ad slot on the main newsfeed based on their proportional share of the MINDS liquidity pool and pool token balance.

This will be one of the first liquidity programs to include such a degree of direct advertising utility where the liquidity provision acts as a passive form of payment to the ecosystem. Minds currently serves roughly 30 million impressions per month through the Boost system.

3.4 Minds Pay

Minds Pay (formerly known as ‘Wire’), any user on the network is able to send MINDS directly to other users, either as a tip for enjoying content or as a payment for a premium membership such as Minds+ or Minds Pro. Memberships enable Minds and its users to offer perks to fans in exchange for a payment, such as posting exclusive content behind a paywall. Minds Pay also supports Bitcoin, Ether and cash payments.

l Autonomous Peer-to-Peer Monetization

1、It can be used simply as a way for supporters to send a tip or donation on content they enjoy.

2、Creators can offer paid monthly subscriptions to their supporters which provide access to exclusive content and other custom rewards.

l Recurring Payments

For recurring subscriptions to be possible on the blockchain, pre-approvals must be made to the Wire smart contract so that funds are able to be claimed at later dates.

3.5 Contribution Rewards

Contribution to the success of a social network comes in many forms. Tokenizing the services that the network provides creates an innovative system for both measuring and rewarding different contribution types to properly align the incentives of both the platform and its community.

Forms:

l Development

l Content creation

l Moderation

l Curation and liquidity

l Beta Rewards

Minds will distribute an initial token reward to its Beta community for their participation in Minds’ development and testing processes.

l Ongoing Rewards

Minds will mint tokens on an ongoing basis to reward the community for their contributions to the network. The token supply is engineered to scale autonomously with the growth of the network. Tokens that are reclaimed for Minds services will be recycled into the reward pool or sold in order to help replenish the token supply.

3.6 Reputation

Spam is a never-ending challenge for social networking platforms that allow user-generated content and do not require invasive personal information to register. The MINDS token provides a unique way to measure user contribution which in turn can serve as a valuable data point to help understand the reputation of an individual.

Currently, the Minds platform requires a token balance history in order for an account and its content to be indexed by search engines and accessible to logged-out visitors. This has proven highly effective and has resulted in a notable reduction in inauthentic activity.

4、Contact Information

Official website — https://www.minds.com/

Twitter — https://twitter.com/minds

Github — https://github.com/minds

Welcome to submit your DAO research and send it to this email address:daorayaki@dorafactory.org ,Share the 10,000 USD grant pool!

Welcome to DAOrayaki official website:（daorayaki.org）