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A Polish startup is aiming to use Blockchain technology
to combat fake news by using incentives to rank content. Userfeeds, which has gained $800,000 in seed funding from investors including Coinbase Founder Fred Ehrsam, is currently working on its flagship Userfeeds Engine product. “Blockchains give us the open layer that is necessary for storing data relationships currently locked up in closed silos,” Founder Maciej Olpinski said in an introductory blog post in November.
“Crypto-tokens make it possible to program incentives and design new reward structures for people’s behaviours.”
Userfeeds Engine, TechCrunch reports, “will allow users, developers and publishers to run custom rankings to produce search results, information feeds, recommendation systems, top 10 lists, and sponsored links.” In the long-term, however, an entire platform is in the pipeline. Users will be able to create reward schemes for target audiences and even reward them in their own bespoke crypto tokens. A decentralized equivalent of Google Ads is also planned, capitalizing on the nascent Blockchain ads market, along with decentralized voting systems.
Blockchain startup Symbiont has raised an undisclosed sum
from Chinese software firm Hundsun Technologies. Hundsun, according to data from Thomson Reuters, provides software services to financial institutions such as banks, brokers and exchange operators. The firm is partly owned by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, who founded e-commerce giant Alibaba, after Ma spent more than $500m in mid-2014 to buy a controlling stake, per reports at the time Past statements from Hundsun indicate that it has been looking to invest in financial technology startups since as early as January.
When reached, a representative for Symbiont declined to comment on the amount Hundsun invested in Symbiont. In addition to providing the funds, Hundsun will gain a board observer. The partnership between the two firms will see Hundsun opening up Symbiont’s smart contract software to its Chinese customer base. In particular, the partnership will focus on "[streamlining] business processes in both public and private securities markets", according to Symbiont.
Guan Xiaolan, Hundsun's executive president, said in a statement:
"We selected Symbiont because of its superior, mature and highly differentiated DLT stack. Its data layer is protected by market-leading security and privacy solutions, and its smart contracts have a proven ability to automate complex business logic, such as highly tailored employee compensation waterfalls for private companies."
The investment comes just under two years after Symbiont raised $1.25 in seed funding.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
