From Decent to Yuelian, a six-month leap

Since the successful ICO of Decent in December last year , the cultural and educational blockchain has gradually heated up, until the ICOs of Yuelian and Xuanlian projects are currently underway. In just half a year, the cultural and educational field has become another application scenario for blockchain that has expanded from the financial industry. From the perspective of underlying architecture, technical operations, project structure and operating conditions, these projects have their own characteristics, and ICO market investors may have been dazzled. From an in-depth comparison of several cultural and educational blockchain projects whose white papers have been published, we can see some clues.

First of all , projects such as Decent, Xuanchain, Zhichanchain, and Yuechain all support the release of cultural content, and then focus on the construction of IP protection. From the functional characteristics and application orientation of the blockchain architecture, IP authentication protection seems to be the easiest to enter. Due to the copyright dispute with the National Music Publishers Association of the United States, Spotify began to build a blockchain distributed structure to support online creation. Obviously, even in the West where IP laws and regulations are relatively complete, the IP issue is a "problem", not to mention that in China, where the market capacity is huge and the laws and regulations are relatively imperfect, it is not surprising that blockchain applications are mostly entering this field.

Decent is built on the European context and application environment, with strong European traces in its technical application and style, and is more suitable for European or Western application environments in terms of concept. For projects like Yuelian, which are built on the "national reading" application, foreigners can't figure out what "national reading" is, so it is naturally not suitable for foreign environments, at least not now. In contrast, the blockchain architecture built by Xuanlian and Zhichanlian, which focuses on IP protection, has certain pertinence, but does not have obvious regional characteristics, making it easier to promote internationally.

Second, from a purely technical point of view, DECENT is a self-service Class I decentralized application (Dapp) for digital content publishing. It has an independent blockchain and is a public ledger of all transactions since the genesis block (the early days of the DECENT protocol). The author creates and publishes content and uploads it to the network. The issuer is the key party to maintain and operate the DECENT network. The reward for the time and effort spent by the issuer is the DCT digital currency, which is similar to the Bitcoin rewarded to miners. Xuanlian’s Xuanbi mechanism for issuers is similar to Decent in principle. Yuelian’s setting is almost the opposite of it. Its POR proof of reading mechanism focuses on audience inclusion, emphasizing audience participation and user stickiness. This difference is no longer a simple technical idea. So how does Yuelian solve the needs of content publishing and creation incentives? That is its application side chain. The POA token created by Yuelian ICO targets both the value of the application side chain and the incentives of the open application layer. At the same time, its content crowdfunding almost covers the entire process of creation incentives, IP protection and digital assetization. In fact, it is very complex and requires high technical background.

The third is the application scenario. I believe that the initiators of cultural and educational blockchain projects will have certain resources or priority entry points in the design of project application scenarios. If we compare the above projects , although Yuelian is currently only targeting the Chinese scenario, it has huge advantages. The initiation of Yuelian directly involves the participation of national reading organizations, and it has natural advantages in user advantages, resource advantages, and scenario entry. This may also be the reason for the setting of Yuelian's structure and its confidence in binding POA to the application side chain.

Fourth, in terms of project concept, both Decent and Xuanlian emphasize the concept of content freedom, while Yuelian focuses on application freedom. There is still a difference. Content freedom does not need too much interpretation and is the expectation and ideal of most people. Yuelian’s foundation of national reading scenarios makes it unlikely to come up with similar slogans, but perhaps this can enable it to integrate with real scenarios faster and better.

It is said that the Yuelian team is quite old, which is different from the characteristics of young entrepreneurs in the blockchain industry. Perhaps this is the origin of Yuelian's realism, but they emphasize the ideal and sentiment of universal reading. Who knows? Young people will not experience this much. I hope that Yuelian can bring the blockchain cultural and educational applications to the first climax, and I also hope that projects such as Xuanlian and Zhichanlian will become successful pioneers in the blockchain cultural and educational industry.

Author: Cao Xintong