DECENT is a new decentralized content distribution platform that is open source and utilizes blockchain technology, ensuring trust and security. The project intends to obsolete third parties in the way content is delivered to consumers, eliminating censorship.
DECENT opening doors for creative people, authors, bloggers, publicists and their fans and followers it allows borderless publishing of any text, picture, video or music content. Intention of the project is to revolutionize Data Distribution on the Internet. DECENT is acting as a resourceful and independent unit. It allows information sharing without any boundaries or restriction.
DECENT want to create a fully integrated & trustworthy worldwide system of digital content distribution in which the communication flow is secured and timestamped by the blockchain mechanism.
DECENT’s mission is to become a liaison between various industries by bridging the gap between the emerging blockchain ecosystem. Through secure and trustworthy digital content sharing platform we provide a vertically integrated system for industries, organizations or businesses while we focus on flexibility & sustainable development. Infrastructure of linked systems enables to set more intelligent international standards of efficient, cost-effective & secure content distribution. The principles of DECENT, based on distributed trust machine – the blockchain, bring reliability to wide range of sectors & services in which privacy and security play the crucial role.
Technical Description
DECENT combines several functional layers. One layer takes care of distributed storage. We build on the results of the Tribler project, adding own extensions, such as the proof of retrievability, to provide highly scalable, anonymously distributed, guaranteed storage that automatically scales based on the content popularity.
The heart of the solution is, of course, the blockchain. We are designing and fine-tuning several processes and associated transactions for use cases – publishing content, buying content and providing feedback. We use a lot of underlying cryptography inside to make everything work, just naming decryption key sharing, various zero knowledge proofs, etc. The devil is in the details, so as we are still working on technicalities, for detailed description please wait for white paper.
Last but not least, the user experience would not be full without recommendations. Since all data are available in the blockchain, anybody can execute data mining to find the most suitable content. DECENT foundation plans to incorporate their own recommendation engine for their clients, but it is totally up to the users.
Use Cases and Incentives
The first and the most natural use case is content publishing. The user interface will be based on the industry best practices. Upon creating the content an author’s client will encrypt it, possibly adding free preview, and create a content package. This package is then anonymously shared with publishers/miners. These guys will be also given their encryption key shares.
The author’s wallet is debited the certain amount of tokens for publishing, which will be later distributed (based on the proof of retrievability) to the publishers for storing the content. This way the miners are incentivized to share their disk space with the community.
The second use case is buying the content. The consumer browses the available offers, e.g. based on recommendation engine suggestions, and can check the free preview. When he/she decides to buy it, he/she will also download the encrypted part, pay for it and retrieve the encryption keys via the blockchain. Technically this is the trickiest part where we use several interesting techniques to avoid frauds such as blockchain-based smart contracts with escrow and ZKP.
Last but not least, consumers can provide feedback to the author in the form of rating. This is also a blockchain-based transaction.
Get involved
DECENT is currently looking for ambassadors who will help spread the word about the platform. For more information sign up to newsletter and find out more about how you can contribute to this project.
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Milestones
1) DECENT Core
Getting current core written in C++ up and ready
Launch Q1-Q2 / 2017
2) DECENT Apps
Improve various GUIs for DECENT-Core and craft a full batch of Apps
Launch Q3-Q4 / 2017
3) DECENT Apps
Continuous integration of DECENT-Core into existing ebook readers,
software app stores, music marketplaces, Smart-TVs, password managers etc.
Launch of DECENT App Store
Development of DECENT mobile clients
Launch: Q1-Q4 / 2018
4) DECENT Stream HW
Manufacture of DECENT-Stream HW devices,
Plug&Play USB-HDMI devices that enables any Smart-TV to be directly plugged
in the DECENT Network
Launch: Q3-Q4 / 2018, Q1-Q2 / 2019
DECENT introducing Decentralizing Content Distribution with Blockchain