Today, I’m happy to announce the next phase for Starflow, the company I founded with the mission to create, establish and facilitate an open distributed ecosystem, inviting all participating parties, to engage and collaborate in the empowerment of man in the new distributed digital economy.
At Starflow, we are re-shaping the influencer economy by providing an infrastructure network enabling an ecosystem where individuals can thrive and where everybody can interact and participate in the creation and consumption of value. We leverage a network, who’s purpose is to maximize income for content creators, follower experience and brand reach, designed for consumers to come closer to their favorite creators and topics with a better experience and for other users to share their interests.
Starflow is an initiative to create an ecosystem and economic incentive mechanisms to reach a more fair equilibrium in the game that is the Influencer Economy. The blockchain makes it possible for the first time to give individuals ownership and control over their digital identities.
Ecosystem Design
It is now clear that the most important aspect of ”blockchain” is crypto-economics and the possibilities for mechanism design.
Borderless and trust-less peer to peer transactions, governed by smart contracts, will satisfy Coase’s (1) theorem for determining the lowest cost of transactions. In this environment, in which contracts are enforced by code, traditional middlemen structures will no longer be the most effective model of organisation but displaced by ecosystems where transactions can happen directly peer to peer. This removal of middlemen and implementation of “the permission-less model of innovation” are of fundamental importance, but what is genuinely novel; is the power to distribute “the creation of money” and thus resource allocation.
It can be argued (2) that the most powerful function of the kind of FIAT money in use today is not to be a medium-of-exchange, a unit-of-account nor a store-of-value but a system-of-control. We are using this power to do good — to fairly incentivise those with the power to achieve certain desirable outcomes for the long term sustainability of the ecosystem as a whole.
Most people today are active along a spectrum of different social media services. They follow fragmented content and sometimes particular content creators aka Influencers across the web.
What all these services have in common is that they are self-serving Data Dictators extracting all the value. Both consumers and professional content creators are showing an accelerating interest in taking back control of what is rightfully and by definition theirs; their personal data. Controlling a wealth of data allows them to extract key insights by running analyses, in private, across the entire data and full history, including every interaction, every like or retweet, as well lifestyle and shopping patterns and any other type of personal data to objectively determine their Intention Rank, i.e. the likelihood that attention to a certain message will translate into a desired Action. These kinds of ratings are extremely valuable to any marketer or opinion maker and the data subject deserves compensation. StarCoin will be created and rewarded to individuals on the StarMarket marketplace.
The best way to reach (3) and make actionable the intention of large crowds is to do the messaging via users with a large number of followers. These power users are commonly referred to as Influencers and are at the core of the Starflow concept.
Ultimate power in society emanates from the privilege of creating and distributing the medium for economic exchange — money. This has always been the domain of kings and governments and more recently delegated to retail banks when issuing consumer credits. In the Attention Economy, the medium of exchange is the attention token (quantified and tokenised in likes, follow-ship and retweets). To make matters worse, in this oligopolistic market only the property owners can trade the tokens, selling it to marketers and advertisers.
We have already seen the emergence of open source production of software and collaborative, but legally questionable, distribution of digital content on BitTorrent surpass the enterprise in scale and quality. These particular collaborative commons examples are sustained by the direct mutual benefits derived on each side of the trade. In general, however, it is necessary to inject a medium of exchange and digital tokens to establish more complex value networks in order not to bounce back to a pure bartering economy that does not scale. In a near zero marginal cost society of abundance, value and the representation of it will not be one step removed as a social construct but it will be directly generated around the only resource that still remains scarce and non-automatable — human creativity and attention.
This is where carefully designed Smart Impact Tokens, such as StarCoin, issued to incentivise exactly the desired behaviour and outcomes will; displace and outcompete the centralised power structures of today. We will reward exactly the kind of behaviour considered beneficial to the ecosystem as a whole. Incumbents need to pay attention and consider their options to avoid disruption and potential obsolescence. Money will be created at the point of value creation — not at the point of control.
Data Property Rights
This raises the question of who actually owns the information and under what conditions others can be permitted access, and for what purposes. Here we can see an attitude shift that, in combination with new legislation such as PSD2 and the European General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, enhances the rights of individuals to their own data.
We envision individuals themselves possessing and managing the rapidly increasing amount of personal data and thus gaining the opportunity to actively engage as prosumers rather than uncompensated production units in someone else’s social media empire. Additionally, they become empowered to selectively offer access to their entire attention history in exchange for StarCoin. StarCoin is the utility token created to incentivise ecosystem optimising behaviour. It is the exclusive currency for purchasing attention and production of attention creating campaigns as well as to directly purchase content and services in the Starflow marketplace for entertainment purposes.
To unlock this potential, a number of challenges must be addressed.
A universal Digital Identity. All personal data must be rooted in a universal digital identity owned and controlled by the individual. It is a cornerstone in each system designed to put the individual at the center.
Guaranteed, Integrated Information Integrity. The system must in its basic structure ensure that the information is authentic and cannot be manipulated.
Built-in policy guarantees with traceability. All actors must be able to verify that sharing, analysis and other handling and use of the information has been done based on the owner’s, i.e. the individual’s, intentions and in accordance with applicable laws, regulations and processes. All events must be verifiable and traceable to all actors.
The public Ethereum Blockchain provides the necessary infrastructure to launch an innovation ecosystem where independent app and system developers in the personal entertainment industry can begin experimenting with the new protocols the blockchain and the Starflow platform offers.
Individual Self-Owned Digital ID
A central part of the Starflow platform is a built-in digital ID that is controlled by the individual. This ID is a set of standardised Smart Contracts on the Blockchain and can be used via a mobile app to authenticate against the services running on Starflow. We are using the uPort standard contracts developed by ConsenSys in order to be in line with global standards proposed by DIF — The Digital Identity Foundation.
Guaranteed, Integrated Information Integrity
All information stored in the Starflow Content Management System is digitally signed on the Blockchain and cannot be manipulated. All actors can independently verify that the information is authentic.
Built-in policy guarantees with traceability
Information flows and other rules or agreements, between parties trading on the StarMarket marketplace, are described in the Smart Contracts that ensure compliance. All activity such as the creation of new information, sharing of information, etc. takes place in the form of transactions on the Blockchain, resulting in a cryptographically signed activity log over everything that has occurred in the system.
The Starflow dApp Platform
Most products proposed in ICOs these days are not taking advantage of the foundational principles and possibilities of the decentralised Web3 architecture. Instead we see a lot of self-contained and siloed approaches where only the token aspect is utilised. It is essential to make sure that data is liberated and managed in a distributed fashion controlled by it’s legal owner. This will not happen in applications where users are modelled as mere identifiers in a traditional relational database. The data architecture must be content and user centric. Only then do we get privacy-by-design where computation can be invited to operate on the data in private rather than promiscuously being shared only to be captured and lost.
Wallet
The Starflow dApp will be a combined Self-Sovereign Digital Identity and fully fledged Token Wallet with Send and Receive functionality as well as an integrated Decentralised Exchange.
dApp Store
The Wallet will also feature an integrated dAppStore where all the third party apps that use and implement our APIs (we will probably implement the Coinbase Toshi Standard) will be listed for installation. Each installed dApp will be represented by a Card in the Wallet exposing all its data as well as certain key functionality. Legacy Social Media apps will be featured as built in dApps wrapped around their API functionality. Other relevant true dApps such as the Steemit Social Network will be other prime candidates for integration.
Attention Exchange, StarCoin and ProtoStars
Core to our design is that every action on the platform corresponds to an exchange of value, i.e every action is a transaction. While posting content as a creator will be rewarded highest, every attention amplifying action on behalf of a follower will also be rewarded, I.e liking, commenting or forwarding a post.
The most important transaction to be enabled is that of brands paying creators to promote their brand or some particular product.
Campaigns
Branding campaigns will be payable exclusively with the native currency of the platform. StarCoin will be issued as a standard ERC20 Coin on Ethereum, some of which will be sold during our ICO. To make on boarding easier for newcomers to the crypto space it will be possible to buy StarCoin directly in the Wallet using Fiat currencies.
However, due to cost, scalability and performance limitations of the Ethereum Blockchain we will implement an internal currency to be used for micro transactions on the platform.
We call this currency ProtoStars to recognise that they are the embryo for StarCoins and always exchangeable at a fixed rate of 1000 ProtoStars = 1 StarCoin.
It is assumed that over a certain threshold users will choose to exchange ProtoStars for StarCoin to mitigate the counter party risk involved with Starflow managing their funds. The ProtoStar accounting system and ledger will be centralised and built using conventional web technologies for maximum scalability. Purchase agreements between Brands and Creators will be implemented using self-executing Smart Contracts triggered by Smart Oracles providing trusted outcome metrics to trigger the business process. This kind of automation is essential to lower the friction of transactions to successfully compete with the legacy marketplaces according to Coase.
The Data Protection Regulation GDPR
The new EU Data Protection Ordinance (GDPR), which enters into force in May 2018, places higher demands on companies and organisations that handle personal data in general. This leaves very limited time to adapt to existing routines and systems, and to live up to this EU common law is expected to be a challenge not only for Staflow but for society as a whole.
The Blockchain is expected to be a key component of the institutions, systems and mechanisms required to comply with data protection regulations and guidelines such as GDPR. Furthermore, it enables an effective framework for managing and securing personal data in general, where the information owner has actual control of how the information is used.
Starflow will be GDPR compliant by design since all personal data is always under the control of the individual. Starflow or any other third party service provider will at the most take on the role of Data Processor and compliance with Article 20 “The Right To Data Portability” is automatically achieved. Any application built on Starflow, will be well prepared for GDPR compliance because, the infrastructure itself puts the creator in the center as the owner of the information.
FTC & EU Compliance
The US Federal Trade Commission (4) as well the EU has issued new rules demanding that any branded content has to be clearly advertised as such. Starflow is of course complying with the regulations but in addition we are taking advantage of the Blockchain to automatically create an immutable and auditable log of all deals being negotiated and entered into on our platform.
Conclusion
We at Starflow strongly believe that a fully integrated micropayment system, directly attached to content, and there by allowing seamless and instant value creation and information consumption, is fundamentally essential. Not only for the Influencer Economy, but for the entire creative and media industry, entrepreneurs and creators. We are entering the creative era and we must be able to see the value of our creations in the epicenter of the value consumption. At the same time, consumers need to access a network system where premium, exclusive and enriched content can be assessed seamlessly and instantly. This will enable global reach and not only a system permitting wide spread influencer marketing campaigns, but a network that, in the long run, can save the entire media industry and reassure the spread of the gig economy to its full potential. In other words to cater to the loss of jobs that AI, VR and robotisation will create. This, — all in one place.
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