We are the same 1Ramp that you saw at Steem Fest 3, that rewarded Steemians by running a series of 25 creative contests, that built the only contest creation tool on Steem, ran an Artist Showcase Program, and developed the SteemConnect4J.
Our variety of experiments on Steem and building the 1Ramp Steem Apps (Web and Android) kept us busy for more than a year. But we always wanted to take a break and rethink our approach of building a platform that empowers creators while being consistent with the ideologies of Steem, Information Economy, and democratic social platforms.
In this update (after almost 48 days since last we posted on Steem), we'd like to talk about the projects that the 1Ramp team is working on and our vision for the creative communities on the Internet.
1RAMP
Ever since we started building 1Ramp on the Steem blockchain, our purpose is to make a place for the content creators on the Internet where their work is valued. The underlying Steem blockchain has made our work even easier with the inbuilt incentives and growing community of Steemians.
With the new 1Ramp, we are following a different approach where Steem is integrated later as an add-on. That will allow us to do more experiments with the content creation tools and will also give the Steem ecosystem a different use case. We took inspiration from the way Steempress has built their service. @steempress-io brings way more value to the Steem ecosystem than the applications built solely on Steem.
All new features on 1Ramp that will enable creators to do more on the Internet, new ways in which they can earn rewards, and new ways to form communities will be available on the 1Ramp platform. A lot of features and ideas are under development. And we are eager to bring them out for the community as soon as they are ready.
The other essential work that aligns with Hapramp's vision of giving people control of their own data is Asteria protocol.
Asteria Protocol
Every application that deals with user data must ensure security and privacy. But there is no standard for the platforms to provide provable privacy. The only choice users have is to trust the applications.
Asteria changes that with open-source (trustless) data handling standards and encryption. By storing the user’s data on Asteria protocol any application can instantly bring privacy and security to their users.
We are simplifying privacy by design. The user data is encrypted and they choose who gets access to which data. Also, security and privacy are verifiable, not even the application owners can access data without explicit permissions from users.
We are equipping Asteria with Blockchain to store all the interactions on user data (data access logs). The logs remain immutable and every user can see which data was accessed (when) and can change permissions as they wish. User-generated data is their property. And we believe a fair monetary compensation (if data gets monetized) is fundamental, just like privacy. This is a tiny step towards a fair information economy where users earn for the value their data has for the Internet platforms. The Steem ecosystem has proved that incentivized social media platforms can function also effectively. We understand that there is a long way to go in this direction to discover the right model to onboard new creators, incentivize and reward them, and make this setup self-sustainable.
Visit hapramp.com to sign up for monthly updates on Asteria's development and visit 1Ramp.io to sign up for early access to the 1Ramp platform.