At 12:00pm (UTC -4) on Tuesday, April 2nd, Narrative opened its beta platform to the public. Narrative aims to create “The World’s Journal,” a member-controlled content network with a revenue-sharing model powered by its NRVE token. Narrative’s Evergreen Capitalism business model encompasses a 15%/85% distribution equation. 15% of the revenue generated by Narrative goes to the company, and the other 85% goes to the content creators.

Narrative has built a platform where the founders will have “no role in the day to day governance of the platforms processes.” Rather, the team’s “role is to create and maintain the software and infrastructure and to market the network overall.”

The community will suggest, vet, own, and moderate content and subject areas, known as “niches.” Niches are the locations where users publish their content. Examples of niches include cryptocurrency, healthy recipes, politics, and football, among others. As of March 2019, owners had bought nearly 830 niches.

Any participant of the Narrative platform is eligible to receive activity rewards, intended to incentivize users to participate by “commenting, voting for nominated niches, voting in Tribunal elections, up-voting/down-voting content, etc.”

Further, users can become niche moderators, a role which is responsible for the approval and organization of content. In the Narrative ecosystem, moderators receive 6% of rewards distributed each month. Narrative noted in its March 2019 report that a total of 2.76 million NRVE tokens had been added to the reward pool.

Reputation is an additional component the content platform. Narrative states, “reputation is earned based on what you do on Narrative and is designed to identify quality actors within the network.” The higher a users reputation score, the more of an impact their votes and decisions hold. 

Upon the public beta launch, Narrative stated, “we want to be a platform that is free from censorship, that makes quality content easy to find and fake news simple to identify, and that returns nearly all revenue collected by the system back to the creators, moderators, and participants of this brave new ecosystem.”

Narrative’s history with NEO

In January 2018, Narrative announced a switch from Ethereum to the NEO blockchain to conduct its public token sale and build its dApp. At the time, Narrative cited NEO’s zero transaction fees, ability to comprehend multiple programming languages, and dBFT consensus algorithm as reasons for choosing the platform.

Narrative’s public token sale concluded in March 2018 and raised approximately US $5 million.

In the year since its token sale concluded Narrative has been conducting private alpha testing, primarily focusing on refining the reputation system and building out the library of niches.

Looking forward

The platform continued to increase its user base in Q1 2019, rising to 7,000 from around 5,500 in December 2018. Narrative co-founder and CEO Ted O’Neill stated, “Reaching 7,000 registered members during [the] private alpha phase was staggering, considering that no one could even post content during that time. Clearly, there is strong demand for a democratized content network.”

Looking forward, O’Neill states Narrative seeks to continue adding support for many more features this year, including tipping, publications, premium content options, niche moderator elections, Narrative rewards accounts, acceptable use policy review queues, and more.

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