Today, we’re announcing the new blockchain-based open protocol for the app economy: AppCoins.

With the rise of the Internet came the rise of open source culture. Massive and open collaboration between people and organizations became a real possibility. We see it every day: from Linux to Wikipedia, from Creative Commons to Open Access. Its ubiquitous.

Android is one such platform. While it was meant to be open, in practice, this is not always the case. It makes up the biggest part of the global app economy but it is currently experiencing many issues.

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Large players enjoy the compounding interest of incumbency. They concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. This has a negative impact on consumer privacy and user experience, almost always at the expense of new entrants to the sector. Making app economy transactions safe and trusted is essential to ensure openness.

The app economy has three main problems:

1. Advertising is inefficient. It relies on many adtech middlemen, increasing the cost of user acquisition for app developers, reducing transparency and generating fraud in transactions.

2. Monetization and IAP are not accessible to a large group of users and are costly. IAPs rely on payment methods and flows that are not accessible to many users, especially in emerging markets where the transactions costs are high, with significant margins being taken by payment processors and other fintech middlemen.

3. The app approval process is not transparent. App approval is a complex process that currently is being handled by centralized stores with complex quality assurance flows and relying on arbitrary app distribution policies.

The AppCoins Protocol explained

AppCoins is the solution. It is an open and distributed protocol for app stores based on the Ethereum blockchain, using the ERC20 standard. It proposes to move the following three critical flows to the blockchain: advertising, in-app billing and app approvals.

By redesigning the transactions inside app stores, it creates efficiencies by disintermediation and redistributes the value released in a way that creates incentives for the AppCoins supported stores dissemination.

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In advertising, the protocol guarantees not only that the users install apps but that they pay attention during the 2 minutes of the sponsored ads. The value invested by the developer is then used to award the user with AppCoin tokens for their attention. These AppCoin tokens are stored in user’s wallets.

In-app purchases transactions will grow because users can purchase directly by using earned AppCoins or by purchasing them using multiple payment methods. Financial transactions are registered in the blockchain and later used to detect double spending and guarantee user authenticity.

App approvals are made universal and more transparent through a developer reputation system. The reputation is tied to the financial transactions on the public ledger and is auditable. A dispute system will be created so that AppCoins owners can open a dispute to rank developers.

The AppCoins business model will have a considerable impact on the app economy. It enables a transition towards a circular economy where the value that was previously drained by intermediaries, stays in the system.

AppCoins is the future of the app economy.

(Users and investors seeking more information can download the AppCoins Crowdsale Document and White Paper from appcoins.io, and can sign up to receive notifications for the upcoming AppCoin token sale.)