ICO Review: AllSpark

AllSpark is a public blockchain aiming to link content creators, advertisers, and social media users into one network.

AllSpark’s goal is to become the platform for content creation, trading, and distribution for the age of social media. While we’ve seen plenty of social media blockchain projects, this one has an intuitive feel to it, where mainstream adoption might be plausible.

Aiming to raise a Hard Cap of 40,000 ETH, here’s what we think of AllSpark’s whitepaper:

The Basics

Their Concept

AllSpark plans to utilize blockchain technology to establish a content and influence pricing mechanism that cannot be settled in the current age of social media. They believe that their distributed content trading market and assessment mechanism will naturally incentivize the distribution of quality content while serving as a valuable feedback mechanism for social media.

Their Values

AllSpark includes the following in their values:

1. Top quality creators will realize a higher income while ensuring ownership of their content, effectively boosting their motivations to create better content.
2. Regular social media users receive pay for their influence, which will incentivize the dissemination of quality content.
3. Advertisers have full transparency, which will lead to significantly higher ROI; additionally, consumers who want to pay for content directly will have more options at a lower cost.

How Content Creators Will Use AllSpark

AllSpark uses the example of a musician as the content creator, to which they include the following as how their process will work:

1. The musician will publish their song on the AllSpark chain, ensuring digital identity and confirming ownership.
2. They then can upload their music to existing social media sites, publicizing the download, share, and gift-sending links.
3. Fans of the artist can then:
   1. Pay for a download of the high-quality version using AllSpark’s token.
   2. Share the musician’s music to their social media accounts, which if others have paid and downloaded related works through the link, then the distributor will win additional income.
   3. Send gifts priced by the AllSpark token.

How Brand Operators Will Use AllSpark

AllSpark will enable brands to employ regular patrons for promotional materials. The example they give is of a restaurant posting a task for travelers to write reviews for them, which can be especially useful if the person has developed a reputation as an influencer. When viewers book with the restaurant with the shared link of an influencer, that person will get paid the agreed upon income set between the writer and restaurant.

Another example that AllSpark includes for brands is their ability to advertise tasks and splitting revenues. The specific case they use is a t-shirt company that posts the task of designing a shirt, which when order volumes reach a certain capacity, the smart contract executes. From there, profits are split between both the designer and distributor, as well as those who spread the word about the shirt, and others buy via their link.

The Design Of AllSpark

AllSpark will be designed mainly as a content trading platform and evaluation mechanism through a distributed network.

Content Trading Mechanism

The philosophy of AllSpark’s trading mechanism is to enable distributors and consumers to select good contents, bring the creators and distributors more benefits, and provide consumers the best content at the lowest price. Furthermore, content creators will be responsible for setting the transaction and pricing modes as they and the market wish. Here’s how it works:

1. Content creator sets the price for their uploaded content.
2. Content seeker selects a trading mechanism and fills in a description for the needed content.
3. Pending content/order needs the owner’s signature and blockchain record before it’s considered established.

Content Evaluation Mechanism

The purpose of the Content Evaluation Mechanism is to define the reputation and public praise a creator receives. To achieve objectivity, AllSpark plans to avoid malicious negative feedbacks as well as click farming. Here are the components on how it works:

1. Evaluation Object, which only includes content and transaction. Malicious behaviors can lead to a loss of the content creator’s credit.
2. Qualification of Evaluations, which is when the parties involved with content trading are obliged to give their evaluation.
3. Standards of Evaluations, which is ensured by having users pay a certain amount of ASK for an evaluation.
4. Collection of Evaluations, which is when the evaluation of content and transactions will be assessed.
5. Number of Evaluations, which indicates quality and effect.

Our Thoughts

AllSpark presents an attractive model to consider for the engagement between our current social media landscape and content creation. Although this is an incredibly popular application of blockchain, the benefit of AllSpark is that their design seems much more intuitive to synthesizing with current social media platforms, as well as provides an incentive model that isn’t lofty. Furthermore, they’ve done a great job on outlining the specifics of the project, as well as how it will grow. Overall, AllSpark is an excellent content platform project, and definitely one you should keep your eye out for.