Guides to Blockchain Related Apps Voice Social Media Platform

Overview

Voice is an upcoming Social Media application that will be running on the EOSIO blockchain and is being developed by its founder, Daniel Larimer together with his Block.one team. Daniel Larimer is currently the CTO of Block.one and is the founder of EOS ecosystem, Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPOS) consensus protocol, Bitshares decentralized cryptocurrency exchange and Steemit social media as well. The development team currently has a working internal testnet loaded with all the Steemit social media contents and their goal is to launch Voice beta version in year 2019.

On 1st June 2019, Block.one introduced Voice Social Media to the world and announced that new “Voice” tokens will be launched for its users to utilize instead of re-using the EOS blockchain native coins. This is to avoid using EOS coins to pay for everything and inflate its price beyond what a common user can afford. Voice users and developers will still need EOS coins to stake for acquiring blockchain resources to use/develop the application efficiently.

Tokens

Voice tokens are fungible utility cryptocurrency tokens that can be bought and sold. The tokens can only be created by a real person producing real contents and liked by real people. Authors earn Voice tokens by acquiring likes through creation of popular, useful contents, and at the same time gain more visibility to their contents in proportion to the number of likes acquired. Authors can embed videos from youtube and others on their posts but Voice platform will not host the videos.

Authentication System

During the June 1 event, Block.one announced that they have succeeded in developing a special authentication system that can detect bots and burner accounts, ensuring every user that uses Voice is an actual person. This is to prevent users from teaming up to create bots for the purpose of liking each other to earn coins which will results in posts about nothing gets tons of upvotes and killing the token price. The new authentication system will allow unique real Voice users to post messages and likes posts/comments for free but each user has a limit on the number of active likes, hence it will be very hard to organize enough people to cheat the reward system.



Caption: Profile page of a user.

Voice It

Although posting a message is FoC, user has the option to spend Voice tokens to “Voice it” and move his/her comment to the top of the other comments. This will increase visibility of the user’s comment together with the article which can be started by the user, or with an article written by someone else that the user thinks is valuable.



Caption: Users can use Voice It to move comment to the top.

When a user for example, John decided to “Voice it”, he spends his tokens and some of those tokens will be burned. John will get his tokens back and makes additional 10% return if someone else decided to out-voice him, paying and burning more tokens in the process. John can then decide if he wants to continue the bidding war, he will be able to earn more Voice tokens as long as he is not last. If he ends up being last, his comment gets more visibility resulting in higher chance to get more likes, and likes can earn him money from inflation.

Privacy Comparison

On privacy comparison, Facebook allows its users to post private messages that can only be seen by individuals, private group of users, friends or relatives. For Voice, there is no private message, all posts can be seen publicly similar to Twitter, and hence some analysts commented that the new Social Media will be more of a competitor to Twitter than Facebook.

KYC Process

Voice will require all USA users to complete the KYC process if they want to earn its tokens, this is to comply with government regulations. Those users can still post if they do not go through the KYC process, but they will not be able to earn any tokens. Block.one has informed that name will be searchable on the Voice platform with full name on chain and everything else private. They informed as well that full name and address will be stored in encrypted database. KYC and full name display may discourage some users from registering but will make the social media more tolerable for everyone, considering that many people avoided social media because they were harassed by anonymous trolls with little regards for respects. Block.one informed that there will be Voice account recovery for users that lost their accounts, and users that sign up for Voice will get a FoC EOS account.