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Let’s start by going back in time, to March 2020. France enters in lockdown and begins to face covid 19, transforming our social relations into virtual relations.
Amid these discussions, these free hours for reflection, and this happy end-of-the-world atmosphere, we asked ourselves a simple question: how can we quickly access the sources of what we read on social networks and how can we know where the information comes from?
The covid crisis has accentuated this need since we could read everything and its opposite on the disease and vaccination, creating mistrust on all information, polarizing pro and anti parties, and giving the desire to see more clearly in the middle of this giant hubbub.
Therefore, we have dipped into our engineering knowledge to try to answer this problem.
What if our skills in deep learning, blockchain, data, and software development allowed us to track the spread of information on the web and source as much content as possible? What if web3, this new web based on blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, gave us the tools to do so?
Thus was born Exorde: the web3 protocol that can clear the way in the web jungle.
The first problem we had to face was to be able to follow the web pace. The data flows that circulate on the Internet are indeed gigantic (7.7 Exabytes per day in 2021).
Then, how can we succeed in following in real-time the information circulating on social networks and on the web? This ambition may seem crazy, but we are convinced that Exorde is the only solution that can achieve this today.
Because our approach uses a tool that has been neglected in the past: decentralization. By creating a very large community of developers and data scientists who will scrape and link information from the web, then we can scale up and track more and more information.
By using the technical knowledge of our contributors around a standardized web data processing protocol, then we unite the skills and bots of everyone to fight misinformation.
But aggregate many contributors around Exorde is not without difficulties, and this is where an advantage of web3 comes into play: the possibility and simplicity of creating an economy capable of organizing and financing our ecosystem.
So we decided to create our cryptocurrency, the EXD, which will allow us to reward contributors for their work and motivate as many people as possible to participate in the Exorde protocol.
This token is the heart of our system since it also allows to secure our protocol. Indeed, any participation in the protocol is subject to the staking and consensus mechanism.
In each step of the protocol (called Worksystem), one step allows contributors to submit their work and the next step selects other contributors who check if this work is valid.
At each stage, you will have to stake a small amount of EXD to prove your good faith.
If this URL is for example a pishing URL or a pornographic video, then you lose your bet, you don’t get back the EXD put in play and you lose reputation.
On the contrary, if the URL is valid, then you get your stake back as well as an associated reward for your contribution, and you gain reputation in the system.
The stake is unlocked for the honest contributor and for the moderators having made the same choice as the majority of the other moderators (this is the consensus mechanism).
The reputation allows to unlock the more critical steps in the protocol and limits the access to contributors who have already proved their integrity.
Exorde is not a new infrastructure but a data protocol based on existing decentralized technologies. We will therefore rely on a proven blockchain that can process the various transactions of the protocol very quickly, with very low transaction costs.
Our choice is not yet made and we are making a comparison between several candidates:
The concept of blockchain is fundamental because it allows following all the transactions made and will allow anyone to audit our system.
The data sent by contributors will be stored on IPFS and organized via Filecoin.
This is another great advantage of web3 and Exorde: allowing information to be processed in a completely transparent way.
Another problem we had was to create a system where we could not be accused of conflicts of interest. As founders of Exorde, our opinion on economic or political issues should not in any way influence and change the treatment of information on the protocol.
Here again, the web3 is a great help thanks to the DAO concept. The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) allows to set up a totally decentralized organization that will make all important decisions for the future of Exorde.
The greater the contributor’s reputation and number of EXDs, the greater their weight in DAO decisions.
Exorde is therefore destined to belong totally to its contributors.
Our private company Exorde Labs is only there as a service provider to communicate around Exorde, and to launch products and services around the protocol data.
Any person or company will also be able to use this data and sell new products and services, creating a new information economy.
Exorde could never have been created without web3.
Indeed, it is now possible to create a new economy thanks to cryptocurrency, to publish data with transparency through the use of blockchain, and to limit conflicts of interest by giving power to decentralized governance.
All these assets lead us to believe that Exorde can achieve its ambition and become the first decentralized protocol capable of sourcing information that circulates on the web in real-time.
If you’ve liked this article and want to know more about Exorde, you can visit our website and join our Exorders community on the different networks (twitter, discord, telegram, reddit).
You can then become one of the essential nodes in the Exorde protocol and participate in one of the main battles of our time: reduce the misinformation that plagues our societies.