An Analysis of Token Curated Registries
By: Ben Sparango
Tags: Token, Tcr, Cryptocurrency Investment, Ethereum, Bitcoin

Coming Back to Earth

It’s very easy to get excited about about the potential of TCR’s. However, it’s important to remember that this is all still very experimental and there are plenty of hurdles that must be overcome in order for them to grow effectively. So what are a few of the things TCR’s need?

Order is essential to the usefulness of TCR’s

Order

As registry growth accelerates, it will be crucially important to have an ordering system. According to a January survey conducted by Netcraft, there are approximately 1.8 Billion websites on the internet. Imagine if the adChain registry grew to even a fraction of the total domains on the web. It would be virtually impossible for advertisers to sift through the list in order to figure out where they want to deploy advertising dollars. In fact, it would most likely deter advertisers from using the list.

In a recent post by Achill Rudolph, he addresses a few solutions for the ordering dilemma. The most promising of the solutions is a separate voting system within the registry in which you give weighted endorsements to registry listings. Each user can give as many endorsements as they want, but only one per listing (i.e. can’t vote for google.com twice). This allows every curator of the registry to rank the listings based on their own personal preference and point of view. Now, aggregating every curator’s personal ranking, the registry will arrive at a collective general consensus on order. Implementation of this mechanism has promise, however curators probably won’t put forth this extra effort out of the goodness of their hearts. This will require an additional incentive system for the users so that they are motivated to rank their personal preferences. One way to do this is to introduce some kind of rewards system in which users are compensated if the rank of that listing trends in the direction of their weighted endorsement.

One issue with this approach, as Achill mentions, is that it could give way to bribery. Listed parties hoping to climb the ladder could bribe token holders to rank their listing higher on the registry. However, I do not believe this to be a substantial issue. If ordering of the registry becomes obviously corrupted, then users can easily fork the code and continue the registry elsewhere. Those who rely on the quality of the registry for their businesses will therefore flock to the more honest and useful registry and, consequently, so will curators in pursuit of maximum profitability.

Competition

As I mentioned previously, the token curated registry space is still in the very nascent stages of development. As the space evolves, there will be an growing need for competition between similar TCR’s in order to ensure the highest quality registries. For example, we need to create more registries that are also trying to curate the best publisher domains like adChain. By doing this, you create competition between registries to curate the most useful list; thereby improving the overall quality and usefulness of these registries for advertisers.

More Curators

Last, but certainly not least, we need more people to curate these lists. The only way TCR’s and their underlying tokens are going to accrue value is if we can create lists of high quality. In order to do this, we need millions of individuals with different perspectives providing their unique input. If we only have the blockchain community curating these lists, we get a very siloed result that will be of little use to entities like advertisers.

We all, collectively, need to do a better job of educating our neighbors on what this technology is and how it can be useful for them, too. So, instead of getting into fights with people on Twitter or trolling those who ask beginner-level questions, try to understand where they are coming from, foster intelligent conversations, and help further their knowledge. The success of projects such as TCR’s may depend on it.