While researching blockchain technologies and its possibilities, Luigi and Chris envisioned a new type of editorial system, where people (referred to as Voters) are incentivized to vote on the truthfulness of content. Both founders, spending the majority of their careers studying market behavior as practitioners and academics, quickly recognized that the wisdom of crowds and the shared economy can be used to assist in uncovering truth in content.

Proof is, at its most basic core, a market based platform using the wisdom of crowds, a shared economy, well designed incentives, applied microeconomic theories and a strong governance system to create a unique, inexpensive and scalable solution to solve society’s problem of untruthful content.

Proof is currently in development with its alpha version coming to the market in Q4 2018.

Proof is being developed for multiple users (community members) who can engage and receive incentives for their work. There are three community member roles within the Proof ecosystem: Submitters, who provide us content that they believe is questionable and are relying on our community to vote on the factual content of the article. Readers come to the platform because they value vetted content and the experience of the community’s proprietary news analytics. The final community member role is the Voter, who reviews and votes on content as part of a larger community driven effort to ascertain facts. Each of these members are incentivized towards good behavior and some of which are paid for their work.

By leveraging various concepts, including blockchain, cryptographic schemes and applied microeconomics,  Proof was conceptualized to secure access to truthful content in text, video and photographic form.

In the mid-1990’s, the common held belief was that the internet would democratize the creation and distribution of content supported by a new advertising model.  While this did occur, what many failed to anticipate was that there may be a need for a global editorial system, built with the same industrial scaling capabilities of the publishing tools themselves. In many ways, content has been weaponized by people, groups, publishers and countries for purposes of generating clicks, destroying personalities, modifying elections, or lying for the sake of self-interest.

The wisdom of crowds is also referred to as collective intelligence. Under the appropriate conditions aggregated individual decisions provide highly reliable judgments which over time are greater than any one individual by themselves. Since its early adoption in economics, the wisdom of crowds has been utilized in political science, sociology, psychology and other disciplines to solve simple to complex problems.