In the past few months, there has been an increasing number of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in the cryptocurrency market. With the rise of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, many people are pushing for a move towards decentralisation, and ICOs are a great way for startups to attract attention and investment to work on a variety of decentralised products and services.
For example, just last month, the Bancor Foundation raised a record $153 million to build a protocol which allows users to create smart tokens which enable them to trade other currencies. This is just one of the many promising startups which have raised millions to fund their ambitious, innovative and decentralised projects.
While many of the recent ICOs are focused on building payment and trading platforms, Indorse is a startup with a different approach: they aim to build a professional social network, just like LinkedIn. However, unlike LinkedIn and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Indorse will ‘aim to give back ownership of the data to the member, and allow them to profit from sharing their skills and activities on the platform’.
Modern social networks collect a lot of data about our interests, our most frequented sites, and they also track our location through their mobile apps. Although it may not seem like it, this is a large invasion of our privacy; we are essentially giving up our private life in return for a social media platform. Indorse aims to solve this.
Indorsing
If you are familiar with LinkedIn and how you can endorse ‘skills’ your connections have, then understanding the Indorse system should be relatively easy. It is essentially the same concept, but with a score which corresponds to a certain amount of IND tokens.
Upon registration, each member will be issued a minimum Indorse score, sort of like a reputation score. However, instead of just having a number being displayed on their screen, the member will be issued a specific minimum amount of IND tokens. They can then use these tokens to post a ‘claim’ – for example, that they can add their past work experience to their profile. This ‘claim’ can then be verified by other eligible users – such as past co-workers. This verification is known as ‘Indorsing’, and if the claim is valid, then both the Indorsed and Indorser’s scores will go up, and they will both receive SCR tokens.
New members can only indorse and create one claim at a time. This helps promote the use of the Indorsing system, and users will have to contribute to the platform to earn higher rewards.
Tokens
Indorse will have two tokens – one tradable token, and one internal accounting token.
The tradable token is known as IND, and it is the token that will be issued during the token sale (ICO). These tokens will be listed on exchanges and will be tradable. They can be used by advertisers to purchase advertising units on the platform, and thus, as the platform grows, they will become more and more valuable. IND tokens will start with an inflation rate of 5%, which will halve every year until it reaches 0.625% at which point will become fixed.
Each user will also have an Indorse Score, which mainly works as a reputation rating. These are tracked by using SCR tokens on the Ethereum blockchain – however, they are not tradable, and are used for internal accounting purposes only. SCR tokens are needed to post updates to the user profile and to create and indorse claims.
Indorse ICO
The Indorse Initial Token Sale will start on 8 August 2017. The tokens sale proceeds will be used to finance the development and promotion of the platform, while the actual tokens can be sold/used to buy advertising units on the platform after its launch.
CoinGecko
CoinGecko's editorial team comprises writers, editors, research analysts and cryptocurrency industry experts. We produce and update our articles regularly to provide the most complete, accurate and helpful information on all things cryptocurrencies. Follow the author on Twitter @coingecko
