[Project Spotlight] — Primas
By: Cypher Core
Tags: Blockchain, Bitcoin, Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Project Spotlight

(Primas, 2018)

What Is Primas?

Primas is an open ecosystem on the Ethereum network that aims to restructure the content market, specifically in content production, selection and consumption. Being fairly new in today’s cryptocurrency market, Primas’ approach to integrate its ecosystem into consumers’ daily lives is not a common one you’d see in today’s blockchain projects.

Problems Primas Aims to Solve

Credibility Issues Caused By Information Overload

Most information on the Internet is contained in a single URL with only the information itself in it. Inevitably we as content consumers are faced with several pieces of information with similar content. Though accessible, information on the Internet can be easily distorted after several transfers. The distortions often lead to credibility problems where it’s extremely difficult for content consumers to distinguish between original information and tampered information.

Solution: Using blockchain technology, Primas introduces a Decentralized Trusted Content Protocol which creates immutable and traceable metadata to any content. The metadata is contained in Primas DNA (a globally unique fingerprint), and provides the users with author’s credit, original publication time and modifications made after creation. Along with Primas DNA, the Primas community can rate and validate if a piece of content is credible or not.

Plagiarism And Piracy; Indecent Content Quality

Rights of digital content are hard to protect in today’s market due to 1) poor content origin traceability, 2) a lack of automatic authorization mechanism, and 3) difficulty in infringement detection. Many content producers put out indecent content, even stolen content, just to gain attention and profits.

Solution: Primas DNA in combination with smart contracts and Proof of Existence on blockchain are implemented to ensure full traceability of content origin, build automatic authorization mechanism, and reduce evidence collection cost for infringement detection. Also a content evaluation system is built to measure content quality and reward content producers/contributors.

Content Manipulation By Centralized Platforms; User Data Abuse

Search engines manipulating search results by prioritizing certain sources while marginalizing others. Recommendation engines proactively recommending content to users by collecting their personal data in the background, and analyzing their characteristics.

Solution: The Primas network deploys a user self-governance system where the user groups (divided by interests) are governed by their own algorithms, instead of a centralized algorithm. In addition, Primas only records information that must be disclosed (e.g. author’s name) on the blockchain, leaving privacy-sensitive data (e.g. browsing history) off the main network.

The Primas Token (PST)

An Inflationary System

Additional Primas tokens will be issued annually at an inflationary rate that decreases gradually until reaching zero. All additional tokens will be used for rewards.

Token Locking

Some tokens will be locked for a period of time to restrict the amount of allowed operations that bring incentives. As the Primas community grows, the total amount of tokens locked will increase. Ultimately the circulating supply of Primas tokens will go down over time, and eventually diminish.

Payment Requirements

Primas tokens will be used to create payment requirements for transactions. As more payment requirements are created (i.e. more frequent operations), the tokens will eventually be running short. Not only will this value flow benefit the token holders by driving the unit price of PST up, it also strengthens the relationship between the token holders and the Primas community.

Uses In Specific Operations

Primas tokens are primarily used in following operations:

Account registration

Content creation

Founding, joining content groups

Content interaction (like, review, repost)

Content reproduction

Additional details on Primas token can be found in Primas whitepaper.

Remarks

Primas’ unique approach of bringing quality content to the public and ultimately rebuilding the content market is ambitious yet realistic. We particularly like the idea of turning digital contents into tradable digital assets as a way to protect and reward the content creators. The project also has quite a few advantages over other similar projects. The most obvious one being that the Primas team, consisting of the core members of the successful commercial blockchain project, Yuanben, is highly experienced on product level blockchain technology. The team has gained profound industrial recognition after working in the Internet media industry for many years. In addition, as most projects are facing serious challenges in product level applications, Primas already has its core functions implemented and tested in large scales. Alongside with the team’s previous experience in development and operation of a mobile browser, Primas is one of the most promising projects we have seen this year.

Author: Jay Jie

Co-author: Ken Trube, Liam Hodash