After much anticipation and over a year of development, the Upfiring dApp goes live today. The heavily awaited Ethereum-based platform is set the change the way files are shared between peers through a seed-incentivized model.

Without any financial incentive, the existing torrenting system relies heavily on the goodwill of users to seed files. By creating a monetary-incentive for users to allow other peers to download their files, Upfiring looks to create a file-sharing ecosystem that fosters faster download speeds and greater file availability.

The Upfiring application, which has been live in its beta stage for a few months, uses a proprietary file type (.ufr). By uploading files into the dApp, file information is encrypted and stored locally. The .ufr file type is based upon the .torrent file specifications with several additional parameters built-in. Because all file-data is encrypted, the contents of UFR files are not visible to outside parties like ISPs.

To decrypt a file and view its contents, downloaders must pay the required price in UFR. Upon doing so, paying users immediately start earning the token. “Free Seeders”, users that wish to earn UFR without paying for decryption, can also earn UFR simply by downloading the file. Users that have paid for file decryption earn 3x more than free seeders since they then hold a copy of the decryption keys, making it faster and easier for others to decrypt the file in the future. The original seeder, the first person to upload the file, will never earn less than 50% of the UFR price.

The Elephant In The Room

When it comes to Upfiring, the elephant in the room is BitTorrent. The file-sharing protocol that was purchased by Tron last year has been hot on the heels of Upfiring for some time now. File-sharing enthusiasts have drawn similarities between the projects, leading many investors who were unable to get their hands on the BTT ICO to look in the direction of UFR. While the projects are frequently compared, the incentive model and token-usage differ slightly.

What’s Coming

According to the graphic below, which was released by the team via Reddit, the team is scheduled to release a slew of updates including a detailed application documentation release.



Using the dApp

The dApp can be downloaded here. For a detailed walkthrough of using the dApp check out this helpful Upfiring dApp guide.