I’m a fan of the mobile app pepo, I picked up on it pretty fast because it was one of the first crypto apps to have been accepted by apple.
My reason for being excited about that is i had been waiting the longest time for someone to do something similar, after all with instagram and tiktok ruling the video app roost it was only a matter of time before a crypto alternative was going to be available.
And while Facebook is supposed to be bringing us libra and both those services I mentioned above could launch their own tokens to a massive user base right now, that’s not happening — so pepo has the early mover advantage — pepo coins being minted on the OST blockchain.
pepo/ost did some clever things, three of them really stand out to me as to why I get behind the way the application was planned and executed.
in-app token purchasing — coins are like xp in games
This is the first thing that attracted me to the app, not the features of recording and earning crypto, the fact that I could buy into an eco system quickly and easily.
I could load up on pepo coins (basically ost backed tokens) and then turn them into ‘unicorns’ — the pepo stable coin if I want, it became like a little pocket money box away from everything else but also when I topped up.
I could go around distributing bits of value to videos I liked on the eco system, i think the very near future this could be the building blocks of bringing on contributors to your projects.
partnering and using best in class gnosis safe
Pepo is adapting fast, they are not re-inventing wheels but instead going with ‘best in class’ and verified sources of code implementations instead of being arrogant and spending time to build something similar — why re-invent the wheel when you can partner with another company in this ecosystem that has a piece of enterprise class code (formally verified) — https://safe.gnosis.io that does this perfectly.
This provides every pepo use with a wallet inside the app that feels natural, easy for the user to understand and most importantly ‘gets out of the way’
You log in with your twitter account and you can secure your account with a six digit pin, you also get the recovery code if you want to restore your wallet if for instance you change phone etc, really easy.
they are already thinking of decentralising video with ipfs
Thinking of the future it looks like pepo are already considering offloading the video part into ipfs in some way, this opens things up I think also for a much broader platform, maybe a web interface or frontend but also I’d like them to start thinking of pro features like the ability for a user to have a pro account per month that spins up an ipfs node instance in the cloud to be part of a bigger network, have our own videos and maybe people we support and follow.
in conclusion
Even thou my usage of the application has dropped for a variety of reasons in the last month I still believe that the application has a future in this space, the fact that they have a bunch of projects building applications around the OST token is encouraging — feels very much like what I expected the SMT layout would look like when you go to https://view.ost.com — you can already see 10 applications that have created a token.
I’m very keen to create an application on the OST token, I’ll be working with the sketch application to try and mockup and create a useable layout and structure and hope then I can find partners to work with to realise the potential of what I think could be a killer application, backed and powered by crypto with some unique features I’ve not seen anywhere done well and reliable with a SLA backing it up, I also think that it could have a healthy revenue stream to support the video hosting and a security team required to make sure the videos were encrypted and stored.
__humble x
Reference Links
pepo
gnosis safe
view ost tokens
If you would like to learn more about ‘decentralised video’ this was a part from my 1.5hr long course from skillshare — https://smarturl.it/decentralized-video — you can currently get two months free and get all my courses and over 10,000 more for sixty days (then either cancel or sub for the year. Supporting my courses allows me to bring you more content.
▶️ DTube
▶️ IPFS