Why Now? Why Tokens?

Data in the online communities is often misguided and unreliable. In a centrally curated data such as Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants, curators can be biased from paid reviews or sponsors. In many cases, data is valuable so private curators do not provide access to general public (e.g. Bloomberg Terminal, VC Funds). On the other hand, data in public communities is unreliable because there is no inherit incentive for general public to curate and monetize good information. This becomes more apparent with fake news in recent presidential election, spam account on Twitter, or bot upvote on Reddit to further one’s own agenda. There is now a way to fix this with blockchain technology.

Crypto asset is a new asset class which acts as an economic incentive for network participants to trustlessly coordinate around a similar objective. We now have an incentive for people to curate good data in the open communities without any centralized parties. Band Protocol is a protocol to create such token-curated registries and communities. People can now gather around a specific topic, stake tokens to submit and validate data, and ultimately benefit from token’s value appreciation if they are able to build good community with many followers. Tokens make it economically irrational for bad data to exist in the community and instead incentivize curators to contribute positively to the communities.