Lunyr is a decentralized crypto token based on the Ethereum blockchain which rewards users with app tokens for peer-reviewing and contributing information. The goal of this project is to offer a compensation for those content producers that create and share reliable, accurate knowledge in the form of articles, videos and other digital medias.
Lunyr has built a clever set of incentive schemes that could potentially help it provide much higher quality information than other similar sites, including the likes of Wikipedia.
Today, Wikipedia represents one of the best known successes of large-scale knowledge sharing collaborative networks. In fact, it has been such a massive success that it killed the 2 centuries old Encyclopedia Britannica and other world famous reference books, because the traditional model they use just couldn’t keep up with the frequency of updates and the addition of new information by Wikipedia, along with the decentralized group editing features. Run in a completely voluntary fashion, Wikipedia highlights that it is possible to create collaborative knowledge networks in today’s interconnected worlds.
Scratch a bit deeper though, and you’ll see a host of problems with the Wikipedia model, from errors to outright hoaxes and self promotional Wikipedia pages trying to pass for facts. A large part of the reason for this is that neither the contributors nor the editors who later check the articles have any financial incentives. Economics, after all, trumps many other human systems of collaboration. The same economic incentive problem has been leveraged in the past to create groups of Wikipedia editors that have been bribed to create, edit or delete pages; the reason behind this is that Wikipedia is a highly respected source of information, and Google treats pages linked from it as valuable — therefore paying someone with a high reputation to create a page and link your website or blog from there will make your page skyrocket and land at the very top of the search result page.
Lunyr aims to create a better knowledge base by giving a editors a compensation for their effort, pushing them to produce high quality content and lower the chances of having unwanted, promotional articles.
Lunyr’s ultimate goal is to create a new kind of collaborative knowledge system, but this time around, the team behind this crypto token wants to do it based on providing economic incentives that may remove the issues plaguing the Wikipedia model. Another benefit of the Lunyr system is that it is not limited to just the creation of written content.
The vision is to be able to expand the system to much beyond that. With the advent of technologies from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Virtual Reality (VR), Lunyr aims to create powerful APIs that plug into all these systems that require information and knowledge.
This is a powerful feature, since it is likely that in the future, machines (machine learning/artificial intelligence) will be the primary customers of information and knowledge, rather than humans. Data, after all, is overtaking the written word already. It is only a matter of time before machine intelligence consumes more content than us mortals. How then will they consume this information? They will also need to ensure the information is accurate, and that not anyone can change the proven facts and approved via which the algorithms operate. Lunyr provides a possible solution to that problem because there is economic incentive system built into the system to prevent such abuses.
Lunyr works by creating a completely decentralized knowledge sharing database. Contributors can create new articles, and get paid for their efforts. Editors can edit, make changes, and accept/reject articles and get paid for their efforts. There is also a dispute-resolution system, which is needed in decentralized networks because not everyone may agree with a certain point. The monetary value of the network is through advertising. There are less chances of corruption in a decentralized decision-making process like Lunyr than with a centralized model like Wikipedia through advertising.
The way Lunyr works is genius in its simplicity. Writers, editors and moderators will share knowledge by producing great content, making sure it’s well researched and formatted following the guidelines approve by the community.
Once the content has been created, peers will check it and make sure that the article’s quality is high. This is the most important step and makes sure that only excellent content gets approved.
If the article passes the peer review, the author and the people involved in the approval process can claim the Ethereum blockchain smart contracts that have been issued, and redeem the LUN and HNR token bounties attached to them. The first can also be spent to advertise on the platform, while HNR tokens can be spent by users to resolve quality disputes and resolve issues.
On April 27th 2017 the initial coin offering for the Lunyr project ended successfully, with a total supply of 2,703,356 LUN that sold at over 47 thousand ETH, which are currently valued around the 15 million USD mark.
As this token has huge advantage to be a game changer on the net and feasible bringing the blockchain closer to the mainstream, the current price for share is very much undervalued. But because the lack of communication from the team it’s fair that investors are holding back and wait to have some updates on Lunyr’s development. The cost have considering climbed constant within the 3 and 4 USD range, with a top price at $5.60, and Lunyr is currently at 3.60 USD for each LUN, which is an amazing feat considering that the only thing that has been produced by the project is a whitepaper and the token itself. As stated before, the rate is predicted to move within the coming months as the team announced to provide some updates.
LUN are priceless for firms and advertising companies. Considering that the content types offered by the platform covers a wide range of topics, the LUN tokens have general purpose utility for businesses to promote their services on the Lunyr platform. Businesses are in a high-quality position to buy LUN, given that they’re going to have a more favorable position than customers to maintain a lot of disposable assets to compete in bidding wars and pressure up the demand for LUN as they promote their products.
The value of LUN correlates well with the development of the knowledge base . As the skills base grows once editor position opens and LUN start to become interesting for advertising companies, it eventually reaches a crossover point where the demand for advertising slots exceeds the deliverable content, and the demand for advertising will drive up the value for LUN. Then, seeing a economic advantage in this new market, extra contributors enter the ecosystem and add and assessment content which attracts extra readers.
Strong network effects take over and speedily develop the value of the ecosystem along with the value of LUN. Considering the fact that contributors are rewarded for his or her efforts, the crossover point will be reached rapidly.
The worth of the Lunyr ecosystem and LUN token is not limited only on the shared knowledge base. Lunyr has a long term vision and the ultimate goal is to create a valuable content API, eventually using up the total worth of the ecosystem. At some point, Lunyr might also create different merchandise and offerings, a few of which may develop the demand of LUN.
The newly created LUNs virtually makes LUN extra valuable as time goes. One perspective is that growing LUN factors the LUN worth itself to decrease. However, this view forgets to consider that each time new LUN are rewarded to editors, contributors and peer reviewers, extremely valuable content exists and the worth of the ecosystem grows. So what certainly happens is these newly created tokens put a downward strain on the value, but additionally fuel content construction, which creates a long run upward pressure. Additionally, the creation of new LUN tokens will not occur until the Mainnet release, an important step on the Lunyr roadmap which is still not on the official roadmap outlined in the project’s whitepaper. Given the amount of work and efforts put in this project we can speculate that this will happen by the second half of 2019 or very early 2020.
It’s additionally fundamental to comprehend that the effective inflation decreases from 3% towards 0% over time. New LUN are created annually at a constant fee of 3% of the initial token supply. For instance, if the initial token give is 500,000 LUN, then 15,000 LUN are created annually. Within the first year, the inflation is 3.0%, however within the second year it’s going to be set at 2.9%, and continue to decrease until it reaches zero. There’s additionally the loss of LUN from forgetting passwords, accounts that are inaccessible because their private key has been lost, and accidentally sending LUN to an unowned account. The loss of LUN grows with the scale of the ecosystem and in my opinion this is a great way to capitalize on the normal mishaps that affect all systems based on user accounts.
The LUN issuance model was in particular designed to aid us overcome the chicken and egg predicament where contributors will not become a member of the Lunyr community until the rewards are worth it, readers won’t join the LUN token revolution unless they are able to find valuable content on the platform, and advertisers won’t buy advertisements to promote on the Lunyr platform until advertising is adequately valuable. Fortunately the Lunyr team has found a stylish solution to tackle this problem. The limiting element comes down to the quantity of well curated content and articles to offer to readers. Once we establish a sufficient amount of contributions, readership will continue to grow until the platform becomes viral and community effects take over. The LUN spent on promoting is usually small within the commencing part of the project so the newly created tokens make the LUN pool worth it to contributors in the beginning. Finally the LUN from advertising element of the LUN pool should be enough to be able to fund the platform by itself and help the ecosystem grow.
Overall, the ecosystem war created and structured in a way that it produce steady, long term value as it grows. The skills base is a collaborative effort, and by means of joining its ecosystem users can effectively bring significant value to their work and to the whole group.
The next step in Lunyr’s development that have been set in the road map outlined in the whitepaper tells us that in the next months an alpha release within the Test net is going to be released, which will grow into a beta release 3 months after. At the very beginning of 2018 we’ll see a beta release on the Mainnet, which will be followed by an overhaul of the content Peer Review system around early spring. The next steps are going to be an upgrade in the way tokens can be used to solve disputes and resolutions, and a finalization of the Lunyr Advertising platform by early December 2018.
Once everything is set, supposedly at the very beginning of 2019, Lunyr API will be officially disclosed and we can assume that by the beginning of Q3 2019 we’ll see a public stable release of the platform, and mainstream adoption will begin. As people will start to peruse the content, the results on search engines will begin to show how profitable this ecosystem can be to advertisers, and from there on the platform will start to produce economical value.
It’s still extremely early to make any kind of speculation around this project, Lunyr is at the very beginning of its infancy and the prospects in the next two years is that it will reach a market capitalization to exceed one billion, which means at least more than a hundred times return on the initial investment made during the ICO.
Because of the solid ideas and ethic behind this unique project, the extremely low supply and the team that is working on it, LUN seems to be a great token to diversify your long haul investments portfolio.