Good morning Lions I trust you are keeping safe and well,
Today I would like to introduce you to a project launching in two days on Terra Network called Valkyrie. This is an interesting project and one I am following very closely for a few reasons. One being what Valkyrie is attempting to achieve and that is merging a similar style of affiliate marketing with newly launching projects in a way that promoters or social media influencers work. If proven successful Valkyrie could potentially alter the outcomes of many block chain projects and see significant growth.
As we all know social media influencers have become all the rage in the current time with many promoting their lavish lifestyles and constantly making us jealous of their perfect lives and utter freedom, So they'd have us believe. There's no shortage of social media influencers or people wanting to be social media influencers so it is likely that Valkyrie will pick up some steam but to what level we will have to wait and see.
How it works
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In summary Valkyrie isn't to different from your typical affiliate program whereby you share a link in your bio, add or whatever you're promoting and when people make a purchase through the link you're provided you get paid. A relatively straight forward process but it isn't without it's set backs with many social media influencers stating that a large chunk of purchases whom see your add won't necessarily click your link to make a purchase meaning you miss out on revenue.
This has led to growth in influencers charging businesses who want to procure them for specific marketing a risk often worn by the business if it doesn't generate sales. Looking at an influencers lifestyle one would think procurement of an influencer wouldn't come cheap, well not a decent one with a strong following anyway.
This is where Valkyrie differs just that little whereby participants don't just get a referral link to click on but they also receive a set of tasks they must complete to achieve what's at the end which is typically Valkyrie $VKR tokens which will hold a financial value.
Now these tokens don't just manifest for undertaking random tasks, no. Instead campaign creators must upfront the cash first and purchase $VKR tokens and have them placed in their campaign. Let's say for example you want to start a new project and instead of undertaking the current method of air drops or ICO you want to do something a little different and have people earn them.
You can commence a marketing campaign and allocate for example $1000 worth of $VKR tokens and for people to receive them you come up with a set of tasks which might include connecting their wallet to the contract, staking tokens, writing a blog post, sharing with friends etc. Once they have completed the set of tasks they are then awarded the amount you decided the task was worth.
Alternatively you could just use it to create an affiliate link that you pump out to a few Decentralised Influencers (just coined a new term) who then would shill it to others and if they click on it the Decentralised Influencer gets paid.
Now this is where it gets different to mainstream models whereby there is no way of knowing if people on mainstream web are accessing the affiliate link or thousands of bots but on Block Chain there is and it is all open and transparent. Ensuring people must connect their wallet to a contract instantly confirms if it is a unique user or the same user returning so you can automatically cut out someone constantly refreshing their video for more views or accessing a website. Yes there could theoretically be a heap of wallets created and a bot runs them all that can cycle through affiliate links but undertaking such an initiative on a block chain is quickly identifiable and it wouldn't take long for projects to pick up hoards of bot accounts cycling through and blocking them. (this is the advantage of block chain and web 3 over current internet).
Potential for Data Mining
We can't continue to applaud Valkyrie for developing a wonderful platform without clearly mentioning the thing that most people on Decentralised web hate the most and that's targeted marketing through algorithms, mapping user behaviours and data mining.
That's not to say data mining is a bad thing I am a data nut and absolutely love it, but in the wrong hands that data can be misused and even pose significant personal safety issues. I am not suggesting Valkyrie is at all going to do anything nefarious with the data it can collect but I think the project will need a pretty strong privacy policy and be completely clear with what it will do with the data it collects should it choose to collect it. After all campaign creators who take out a campaign will also have access to user data which in a decentralised world poses an even larger risk and a nice in road for scammers and future potential cyber crime.
None of the above seems to be a thought in the projects white paper and security focuses heavily on the contract itself rather than the community who might be users of it. There is however a bug bounty on offer and I wonder if I am eligible to claim because I have identified a security risk?
Don't be too alarmed
Don't be too alarmed with what is mentioned above chances are we have been providing data to a lot of projects especially if you jump around project to project a lot. All that data can be mined also if you have the right bot and everytime you engage with a contract there is more data. So users have to make up their own minds when engaging with future campaigns and ensure it is from a trusted campaign creator or dev team.
But my cryptonian friends, I think we're about to see the rise of Decentralised Influencers I know I'll be on the look out for affiliate links I can use to provide you with relevant information in the future and who knows, we might even start seeing Chanel or D&G take out campaigns on Web 3.
As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments section below you can check out Valkyrie here and they are launching their very own first campaign to earn $VKR I believe which opens in 2 days time and you can find that here
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