#BuiltOnDAPP: Yup
Tags: Blockchain, Builtondapp, Eos, Bitcoin, Ethereum

What is Yup and what was your inspiration for creating it?

Yup is a social consensus protocol. It taps into the curator economy, rewarding and recognizing quality likes and ratings. This achieves a liquid and well-priced marketplace for online influence. Yup is platform-agnostic, integrating with your favorite sites and apps for a universal accounting of reputation.

The idea for the project began in 2017 after meeting Vernon Johnson, Yup co-founder and CTO, through mutual friends in the crypto circle on Columbia’s campus. While others were focusing on the inflation of fiat, we were studying inflating social capital and social metrics (the price). That, along with the growing power of online influence and deteriorating institutional trust, gave us the motivation to try to solve these problems ourselves.

We took a very academic approach to this during our time at school before working on it from a project standpoint. Vernon wrote his undergraduate thesis on utilizing IPFS as a second-layer storage solution for data-intensive blockchain applications, which led to our work with vRAM. I wrote my thesis on the economic shortcomings of crypto social networks like Steemit and have been writing on this subject since 2017.

Describe your technology stack and why you chose the DAPP Network?

The Yup Protocol and YUP token launched on Ethereum and EOS, using the former for liquidity and the latter for scalability. This means that YUP is initially emitted on EOS and is redeemed on Ethereum by LP’s. Yup also uses the DAPP Network for the EOS-ETH bridge and IPFS for distributed file storage.

We’ve had experience using LiquidApps tech before with our implementation of vRAM. We love the team and the work that they do and, although a lot of the bridge related code is still super new, we felt confident launching the first mainnet implementation of the bridge, which we believe will push other projects to do the same.

Can you go into more detail about your EOS-ETH bridge and why was it important for Yup Protocol to be multi-chain from the beginning?

Yup believes that the future is cross-platform and cross-chain. Like microservices or packages, organizations will use different distributed ledgers for different parts of their stack. Yup’s offering requires that YUP remain liquid and easily withdrawable to cash. At the same time, transactions and signing must have a web2 feel for a smooth user experience.

Together, the two chains provide the necessary infrastructure for the Yup Protocol to function at scale. This is the first of its kind. We have yet to see a launch of a token that is dependent on two separate public layer 1s for different aspects of its protocol. Multiple nodes from reputable organizations run this bridge. In this CoinTelegraph article, we talk a little bit about our feelings towards tribalism or loyalty to a specific layer 1.

Yup solves these inefficiencies by rewarding according to social consensus; influential users provide their likes and ratings while staking their reputation, and in return they get their fair share of distributed tokens and influence. “Influence Mining,” as we refer to it here, will massively expand the online influence market and provide P2P pricing that outperforms traditional curation/moderation systems. The YUP token and its influencer assets will play a significant role in providing diversity and access to decentralized finance long-term.

Can you go into more detail about what influence mining is and how Yup users participate?

Mining is work. But that work isn’t limited to finding nonces, as shown by the DeFi boom and liquidity mining. With ‘influence mining’, users risk their existing influence while engaging with digital content. They earn YUP and more influence if their sentiment is confirmed by other members of the Yup platform. If other influential members disagree with their sentiment, they lose influence and therefore their earning potential on their next engagement. Similar to Bitcoin mining, the larger the whole network is in terms of users/influence, the more accurate the measurement of influence. Influence mining has other similarities to PoW too; money can be earned without holding any initial money, and the outcome achieves a form of consensus.

How does Yup tie together influence mining with more traditional DeFi components?

DeFi protocols may find a variety of use cases for robust reputation systems — influence curated registries, influencer tokens, verified pseudonymous identities, and insurance, for example. But the YUP token itself can become a strong asset to include in CDPs and indices, to farm, lend, or borrow. Influence mining can provide robust and stable dividends for social/personal/community tokens such as $RAC or $AKOIN in the form of creator/curator YUP rewards. DeFi composability in turn provides incentives for liquidity and credit for YUP.

With the US elections behind us, what do you think the future of social media looks like in the context of politics?

We’ve known that social media platforms were too powerful long before the COVID-related disinformation and censorship. This time around, though, feels like an inflection point for trust — in our government, our media, and our platforms. What we’ll do about it will define the 20s. We think Yup will play a critical role in accurately measuring the madness online, helping users identify ‘truth’ through their own eyes and tastes. By clearing away the noise and empowering users with the tools to properly value things, we can ultimately find political common ground.

What does the Yup roadmap look like over the next year? What are you most excited about?

In the next year, we’re planning to collect over 50m opinions and discover a universal influence score for 10 million entities such as users, content, and organizations. We’d like to add more integrations: overlays, OAuths, embeds. By the end of next year we hope that influencers will issue social tokens directly on Yup with passive income and solid fundamentals.