Joystream: The Ultimate Platform for Creators

Unlocking Potential: Are We Ready for a Creator Revolution?

What if creators could fully own their channels, content, and even monetize in new, innovative ways without the restrictions of traditional platforms?

The Problem with Traditional Platforms
Closed Platforms Stifling Innovation and Earnings

In today’s digital world, most user-generated videos are dominated by a few corporate giants like YouTube in the West and Youku in the East. While these platforms have become cultural, social, and political powerhouses, they come with significant limitations:

1. Siloed Innovation: Unlike open protocols like the web or email, closed platforms prevent independent developers from building new products using their existing massive content and social graphs. This stifles innovation and limits the potential for new, exciting developments.
2. Undermonetized Creators: The current advertising model only benefits a small percentage of creators. Less than 5% of YouTube creators can monetize their content, leaving the vast majority struggling to make a living. This stark reality underscores the need for a platform that caters to the diverse and passionate audiences of these long-tail creators.

Joystream’s Revolutionary Solution — An Open, Decentralized Platform Empowering Creators

Joystream introduces an open innovation platform, a public network ripe for everyone to contribute to and utilize. It brings powerful new financial tools and audience growth strategies designed specifically for creators with dedicated followings.

Here’s how Joystream transforms the digital content landscape:

1. Open Blockchain
2. Open Open Social Graph
3. Content Storage
4. Content Moderation / Delivery
5. Video NFTs
6. Creator Tokens
7. A DAO

Open Blockchain: A Foundation of Transparency

At the heart of Joystream lies a custom-built, application-specific Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain. This blockchain is the backbone of the platform, serving as a shared ledger for content, social interactions, governance, and assets.

• Consensus: Utilizing Nominated PoS and the BABE protocol for block creation, Joystream ensures secure and efficient operations. The GRANDPA protocol achieves deterministic finality, relying on the integrity of validators.
• Interoperability: Joystream’s blockchain, with its high throughput and deterministic finality, is primed for seamless interoperability with other chains through protocols like IBC XCMP.
• Block Time and Space: With a target block time of 6 seconds and a block size of 5MB, Joystream boasts significant space throughput, accommodating the demands of a video platform.
• Validator Set: The size of the validator set is dynamic and adjusts based on the incentive to validate, which is automatically adjusted through a staking reward mechanism. This mechanism targets an ideal staking rate for validation, ensuring a robust and secure network. The consensus algorithm is designed to support hundreds of validators, making it highly scalable.
• Fees: Transactions on the JoystreamDao blockchain incur fees based on their size and compute requirements. The compute requirements are efficiently computed in constant time, avoiding the overhead of dynamic resource accounting found in some smart contract runtimes. While fees are burned, users can add an extra tip for priority inclusion.
• Throughput: The blockchain’s throughput depends on the type of transactions being processed. A useful benchmark is that a single block can create 720 new channels every 6 seconds, in isolation. To put this into perspective, YouTube publishes roughly 50 videos per second.
• Forkless Upgrades: The JoystreamDao blockchain features a built-in upgrade mechanism that allows the protocol to be upgraded without the risk of a fork. This is triggered by a successful governance proposal, ensuring a seamless and continuous evolution of the network.
• Execution Environment: The execution environment is based on WebAssembly, with a runtime written in Rust. Notably, there are no smart contracts, and no Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is used.
• Security Audits: The blockchain has undergone security audits by two leading firms, SRLabs and Quarkslab, both specializing in Substrate-based blockchains. Their reports are available for review, providing an added layer of transparency and assurance in the network’s security.

This design and architecture ensure the JoystreamDao blockchain is scalable, secure, and flexible, providing a robust foundation for the Joystream Network.

Open Social Graph: Unlocking Permissionless Innovation

A Public and Portable Social Graph for Everyone

Joystream’s social graph is fully public and indexed, allowing anyone to publish and access profiles, channels, content, assets, and metadata.

• Profiles and Channels: Creators and consumers have public, portable profiles and channels that work across all applications. These profiles are fully owned by their users.
• Content and Metadata: Each channel can host various content types, complete with rich metadata. This allows for detailed customization and new standards introduced by independent developers.
• Data Assets: Channels can store large data assets with on-chain hash commitments and off-chain storage, ensuring data integrity and accessibility.

Content Storage and Delivery — Efficient and Decentralized Content Management

While Joystream exercises control content storage and delivery to maintain economic viability and community standards, it adopts a decentralized approach to moderation. Applications within Joystream can implement detailed policies suited to their specific user bases, reducing the pressure to enforce a monolithic content policy.

• Content Storage: Large data assets, like videos and images, are stored in infrastructure managed by the DAO.
• Content Delivery: On-demand content delivery is handled through a CDN, also operated by the DAO, ensuring efficient and reliable access.

Video NFTs and Creator Tokens: Monetization Redefined Innovative Financial Tools for Creators

Joystream empowers creators through innovative monetization tools:

• Video NFTs: Creators can mint one-of-one NFTs for their videos, sold through auctions and peer-to-peer transactions. On-chain creator royalties ensure continuous revenue.
• Creator Tokens: Each channel can have dedicated fungible tokens representing a share of the creator’s revenue, enabling new forms of monetization and audience engagement.

The Joystream DAO: Efficient Decision-Making through Optimistic Autonomy and Accountability

The Joystream DAO is designed to overcome the common pitfalls of apathy and inefficiency that have hindered many decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). By adopting a philosophy of optimistic autonomy and accountability, the Joystream DAO empowers specific actors with domain-specific knowledge to make swift and unilateral decisions within well-defined domains.

Key Components:

1. Domain-specific autonomy: Actors with expertise in specific areas can make decisions without requiring consensus, enabling fast and effective decision-making.
2. Ratification mechanism: High-risk decisions require multiple ratifications, ensuring that critical choices are thoroughly reviewed and validated.
3. Slashing mechanism: Malicious or harmful actions can be detected and penalized through slashing, maintaining the integrity of the network.
4. Observability: All actions and decisions are transparent and observable, allowing for accountability and trustless verification.

Benefits:

1. Efficient decision-making: The Joystream DAO’s design enables swift decision-making, avoiding the inefficiencies that often plague DAOs.
2. Expertise-driven governance: Domain-specific knowledge is leveraged to drive informed decision-making, ensuring that decisions align with the best interests of the network.
3. Accountability and security: The slashing mechanism and observability features ensure that malicious actions are addressed, maintaining the security and integrity of the network.

Working Groups:

1. Storage: Ensures storage infrastructure uptime, manages content directory, and accepts inbound uploads.
2. Membership: Handles new membership invitations, referral rewards, and member acquisition via referral schemes.
3. Content: Oversees content publication, responds to reports, adjudicates disputes, and updates content information. Collaborates with Builders to improve tools and user experiences.
4. Forum: Monitors and supervises public communication channels for compliance with usage policies.
5. Builders: Develops and maintains Joystream software, manages technical operations, and ensures the DAO’s technical integrity.
6. Distribution: Runs and maintains distributor nodes for efficient data delivery to end users.
7. HR: Integrates new members, provides onboarding, catalyzes growth, manages bounties, and nurtures community development.
8. Marketing: Increases outreach, shares platform content, promotes development news, and drives member acquisition and growth.
9. Apps: Runs multiple video streaming apps on Joystream blockchain and supports external app operators.

Participate in our DAO:

- Vote on elections and proposals
- Submit proposals for platform growth
- Enter paid roles to support the platform
- Contribute to working groups that align with your expertise and interests

Join in shaping the future of decentralized video platforms. Together, let’s build a robust and community-driven ecosystem.

Official Websites:

Website Manifesto Blog GitHub Twitter

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