Akasha is a decentralized, blockchain-based social network to be launched on top of Ethereum in Q3/Q4 2016. Sounds like a big deal, considering the existing traction and enormous capitalization of the Ethereum platform.
Will it be able to effectively compete with Steem? Let's find out.
It seems that Akasha is going to offer a similar user experience to Steemit. This is what they say regarding things you'll be able to do:
You can publish, share and vote for entries, similar to Medium and other modern publishing platforms, with the difference that your content is actually published over a decentralized network rather than on our servers.
The concept of Blogging is the new mining also looks familiar:
The votes are bundled with ETH micro transactions so if your content is good you’ll make ETH from it – in a way, mining with your mind.
So far it appears alarmingly close to Steem, doesn't it?
But let's take a look at this statement:
In the first phase ETH will be the native token used inside the AKASHA ecosystem. We chose to focus first on building a working decentralized application and learning from the actual use what sorts of problems we should be solving with a custom token.
What does it mean? For me, it means that at this stage they have no clue about the most important part of their project: the underlying economic model. Launching without their own token imposes some serious limitations. Without access to the printing press, how will the finance content creation and curation? How will they hedge their users from volatility in Ethereum's price?
And even if they decide to switch to a native token later on, how do the expect to achieve mass adoption while having to cope with transaction fees? Do they really expect that a new user will make the effort to buy their token before they even sign up? Do they expect people actively curating new content when each upvote costs you money?
IMO, no serious competition at this moment. Definitely not from Akasha.
