On the 5th of February, Silicon Valley startup Lino announced that it had secured $20 million USD (approximately $25 million CAD) in funding from a private token sale led by ZhenFund. The money raised will help Lino build a decentralized video distribution network powered by blockchain technology.According to Lino, traditional video platforms take as much as 60 percent from a content creator’s revenue as a partnership fee. Lino will instead challenge the traditional model, creating a blockchain network that ensures fair compensation for content creators.As stated on their website, Lino’s “solution is to create a collectively owned, decentralized means of distribution, which ensures all content value is directly distributed to content creators, and affiliated contributors without going through a privately owned entity as a middleman."To create a collectively-owned decentralized platform, Lino’s community will have no fees, no ads, and ensure that there are equal compensation and rewards. The money raised will fund the development of the Lino Blockchain network and their video streaming dApp.
Lino’s decentralized video platform will have five key infrastructure components. These include free transactions, incentivized currency system, proof of human engagement, proof of content value, and an auction-based content delivery and storage network.On Lino, users will use LINO tokens to show appreciation for content creators. Users can micro-tip, gift, or purchase from the creators. Any form of value exchange will go through the LINO token. Lino designed the currency system to incentivize all community contributions from the creation of content to redistribution and infrastructure services. “The blockchain has enormous potential to empower video creators by decentralizing how their content is distributed and ensuring that their earnings go directly into their pockets," said Wilson Wei, CEO of Lino, in their press release. The decentralized video platform also prevents bots from manipulating compensation and rewards to creators by measuring value through human engagement. Since value depends on of engagement and human views, the revenue generated from video content is a reflection of the video's performance in the market. There are also strong incentives for creators to produce high-quality work since the delivery; the platform uses an auction-based system for prioritizing content storage.Since the video platform is a decentralized self-sustaining community, Lino will have no transactions fees, no advertisements, and strong incentives for people to create great video content. These critical infrastructure components will hopefully result in a fairer compensation and reward system for content creators and better user experience for viewers.
"We are trying to create a DAO for the content economy so we can cut out the middleman, so we don’t have the conflict of interest between the users and the content creators,” said Wei to TechCrunch.Although Lino gained significant interest and investment from Zhenfund, one of China’s largest VC funds, Wei and his co-founders Qi Feng and Zac Wu face a lot of competition. Companies like StreamSpace, Flixxo, Viuly, Viewly, and Stream are also creating a decentralized video sharing platform that removes the centralized middleman.Lino, however, had a great start. The organization got strong publicity and support from various investors and partners including FBG Capital, DFund, INBlockchain, and BitAngel. Lino plans to launch later this year with their Blockchain network and video streaming dApp.Image credit: Lino logo
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