Whenever someone talks about cryptocurrencies, the two terms “blockchain” and “decentralized” always appears in any lecture. Most people will say that the blockchain technology attained popularity only because of its decentralized nature. What does decentralization mean? To put it simply, it is the process of distributing power to more than one authority. It is exactly opposite to the centralized system where everything is controlled by a single authority. Couldn’t get a clear picture? Let me explain with an example.
Have you heard about Subway? It is a popular chain of fast food restaurant in the USA. Let’s assume that someone wants to take the franchise of Subway for opening a new restaurant in Africa. Of course, they need to use the same logo and similar menu options of the original Subway restaurant. But they can run the restaurant on their own and there is no need to communicate or follow the instructions from the original restaurant in the US. For example, if some ingredients are not available in Africa, then they can use the alternatives available in that region. It is not mandatory to import those ingredients from the US. A Subway restaurant (franchise) located in India will function differently when compared with the one in Africa. This is called decentralization because each restaurant can function on their own as they are not controlled by a single authority.
COOL COUSIN: A New Community
Even though many ICOs are using the term “decentralized” in their project description, they are not implementing it correctly. But, the Cool Cousin platform aims to establish a decentralized self-governing community. What is CC (Cool Cousin)? CC is basically a travel platform that connects the travelers with the local people (called cousins) to help plan their international travel. The Cool Cousin ecosystem consists of two entities namely the Company and the Community. The Company takes care of the product development, marketing, business development etc whereas the Community is responsible for creating and maintaining the content on the Cool Cousin platform.
Cool Cousin platform aims to make the community self-governing by transferring all the authorities to reduce its overhead and make it truly decentralized. The Cool Cousin community consists the following participants:
Cousins: They are the local people who create their profiles on the Cool Cousin platform with the complete information about the sightseeing places in the city, tourist guides etc. The cousins are rewarded with CUZ tokens for doing various activities like answering traveler’s questions, content creation, updating their profiles and more.
Users: The travelers who communicate with the cousins for getting information about the tourist destination they are planning to visit. The users can also become contributors.
Contributors: Those people who help the platform’s growth by sharing information about Cool Cousin in various places, taking images for sightseeing spots etc fall under the category of Contributors. They will be rewarded with CUZ tokens for their efforts. CUZ tokens are special utility tokens based on the ERC20 standard.
Editors: Editors will earn CUZ tokens for reviewing the corrections made by the content creator.
Board of Representatives: The board consists of both members of the company as well as the community. Voting power is divided between the company (35%) and the community (65%).
Check out https://www.coolcousin.com/ico/coolcousin-whitepaper.pdf to learn more information about the participants of the Cool Cousin community.
Thank you for your time and feedback,
Jack Andrew