Happy Chinese New Year! As we entered 2023, kicking off the second half of LikeCoin’s 10-year promises. The founder of LikeCoin, kin reiterate the promises he made and intended to devote ten years of his life to the project. And the last time he started a business, it lasted for 20 years.
Reinvent the Like – Reward the creators
LikeCoin first started in 2017, and the development of LikeCoin can be divided into three phases. In the early days of its launch, LikeCoin’s slogan was “Turn Likes into Rewards.” The industry now describes it as “write to earn”. The original concept of LikeCoin was simple, as you can imagine five years ago, few people understand and are interested in blockchain and crypto.
Content Registry – Preserve and Guarantee Content Integrity
The second phase of LikeCoin’s development began to build out the decentralized publishing infrastructure, the content registry to guarantee content integrity and serve as tamper evidence. The team spent a lot of time studying the mechanism of “content metadata on-chain”, the early concept of the design “content fingerprint” also appeared in the early whitepaper. LikeCoin then moved from Ethereum to its own chain based on Cosmos SDK in 2019. The registry was officially launched on the LikeCoin chain as ISCN (international standard content number) named after the International Book Number ISBN in 2021. With our own sovereignty chain, community members are able to participate in governance and practice liquid democracy. LIKE as a token also evolved to become a meme coin, governance token, and utility token all at once.
Writing NFT – Decentralize Publishing
Given we have established the early infrastructure on content reward and registry, selling articles and books became a natural product development path. Hence, the application of NFT contributed to the third phase of LikeCoin, decentralized publishing with NFT native content. We have then integrated reward, registry, and NFT publishing functions together to begin the new journey of promoting the new publishing model in 2022.
Many people think that the concept of publishing is irrelevant to them, and it is only relevant to a few people such as writers and publishing houses. We see it the opposite way. People nowadays produce and publish content more than ever on social media, blogging platforms, and chat groups. As long as the author wanted any of their published content to be circulated and retained, it can be considered “published” in a broader picture.
The threshold for publishing has become so low that you only need a few clicks to publish, and a three-year-old child knows how to publish information to the world. Ironically, while the Internet has facilitated the circulation of information, it has also spawned various by-products. Algorithms, content censorship, and media weapon have pushed the threshold of publishing to unprecedented heights.
Facing the paradox of the threshold for publishing, LikeCoin tries to reinterpret publishing. The LikeCoin publishing system prioritizes the importance of content registry. Only when content is properly recorded at the metadata level can the content be circulated, discovered, monetize and seen through various websites and applications.
In July 2022, the LikeCoin chain upgraded to the StarFerry version with the NFT module, and became the last piece of the puzzle, completing the missing corner of the decentralized publishing picture.
Everything has changed, except the vision
After the LikeCoin project was established in 2017, everything changed. The only thing that remains unchanged is the original vision of serving the creators. We believe that LikeCoin should respond to changing technological development and social changes. The community should not aim to stick to one or an ancient system design, but always look for legitimacy.
kin quoted the famous French writer Roland Barthes proposed the idea of “the author is dead”, encouraging readers to let go of the burden of the author’s original intention and interpret the work themselves. Borrowing the master’s words, kin proposes to kill the founder, let the entire community interpret LikeCoin, formulate the development of the “second five years” through liquid democracy, and take the Star Ferry to the other shore. (Read the full article in chinese)
You can also visit the official blog to learn more about LikeCoin 2022 product recap.