People have a fetish for lists: frequent versus infrequent; business versus personal. There are grocery lists, to-do lists, bucket lists, Oscar nomination lists, top charts, top movies and top restaurants. By utilizing blockchain technology, token-curated registries (TCRs), that is, decentralized lists created with underlying economic incentives, have the potential to increase the accuracy and governance of any online list.
Online Lists Created by Centralized Companies
In 2018, most public online lists are curated by a centralized company or individual. Public online lists include: Spotify’s “Rap Caviar Playlist,” Lonely Planet’s “Top Locations in Budapest, Hungary,” or Opentable’s “Best Restaurants in Madrid, Spain.” Consumers trust centralized companies to create these lists honestly.
As a result, these companies hold all the power and exert an enormous amount of influence. They can easily remove an item from a list with few repercussions or manipulate a list by including advertisers who pay a price to be included or be listed higher than competitors.
Imagine a hypothetical situation where Spotify decides to cut ties with Katy Perry for her outspoken views and no longer recommends her music in curated pop playlists. Because Spotify owns the pop playlist lists, it can theoretically exercise this sort of complete control and remove popular (or up-and-coming) artists without the Spotify community’s approval. Spotify could also, for example, list other artists who are willing and able to pay a premium price for advertising above those who do not, putting rising talent at a disadvantage.
Online List Created by Individuals:
Lists created by individuals include YouTube playlists, iTunes playlists, polls that create a list based on individuals’ votes and other parameters, and more. These lists are created for a variety of reasons: for organization, clarity, self expression or ranking, or to share content with friends, family and the community at large. Shared online lists created by individuals are beneficial to the community because they can help people find what they are looking for or validate information they have already encountered.
These lists are often ranked and filtered based on likes or some form of human feedback. But they can be manipulated and spammed by online bots.
Token Curated Registries (TCRs)
Unlike traditional lists, TCRs are inherently decentralized, community-dependent and driven by underlying economic incentives. Co-invented by Mike Goldin, James Young, and Ameen Soleimani, TCRs use intrinsic tokens to “assign curation rights proportional to the relative weight of entities holding the token.” In simpler terms, TCRs allow people to stake tokens for or against an item that is proposed to be added to a decentralized list. In this way, these lists are maintained through economic incentives and the Wisdom of the Crowds principle — the idea that large groups of people are collectively smarter than individuals.
How Token-Curated Registries Work
At a high level, each TCR (list) is completely decentralized, meaning it isn’t owned by a single entity. Each requires three kinds of participants: consumers, candidates, and the list’s token holders.
