On January 12, 2018, Narrative, a social media network that rewards users who provide quality content, made an announcement about making a switch from the Ethereum blockchain to the NEO blockchain, for both their Token Sale and to operate their platform.

What is Narrative?

Narrative is a “social media network that rewards content creators, moderators and everyone who positively influences the quality of content.” 85% of all revenue will be distributed to users who participate on Narrative. The ‘Content Economy’ is governed by users through their contributions and actions, which is influenced by their reputation on the service. Narrative uses blockchain as a basis for content currency, to provide compensation for the user-generated content.

Narrative wants to be the “World’s Public Journal” and describes itself as a “mashup between Medium, Instagram and Twitter, but with more focused subject-matter.” The new service aims to disrupt the top-down forms of compensation utilized by current content providers, and puts its members in control through:

  • Reputation and content scoring;
  • Member governance through user-owned content, elected moderators, and a user-elected Tribunal;
  • Transparency of all revenue-related transactions and a public audit of the organization; and,
  • Compensation through either the Narrative token (NRV) or fiat currency.

Narrative’s Token Sale will allocate 50% of the genesis tokens to those who purchased through the crowdsale, which will provide 300 NRV tokens per NEO. 20% of the tokens will be allocated to the Narrative team, and 30% allocated for marketing.

Narrative will require Know Your Customer (KYC) information to whitelist Token Sale registrants. The minimum contribution to reach “Founder” status will now be 60 NEO (previously 10 ETH). Despite the switch to NEO and minor changes to the details of the Token Sale, the timeline still remains nearly the same as before the platform switch:

  • The Private Pre-Sale is on-going, and will end on February 9, 2018, and
  • The Public Sale will begin February 13, 2018 and end on March 22, 2018.

The roadmap for Narrative has the Token Sale ending in Q1 of 2018, the launch of the beta platform in Q4 of 2018, advertising added to the platform in Q1 of 2019, and the launch of Narrative in Spanish, German, and French throughout 2019. The leadership and adviser team is comprised of individuals who have vast experience in online content and community spaces.

Why did Narrative switch from Ethereum to NEO?

Narrative saw issues of transaction bottlenecks, high transaction fees, and unclear enhancement plans with Ethereum. Ted O’Neill, the Founder of Narrative and Social Strata, said there are other promising blockchain platforms they were looking to develop on, but NEO is the most advanced and developed.

Some of the qualities of NEO highlighted by O’Neill as reasons for choosing the platform are as follows –

  • Narrative aims to be a large social media network that has lots of transactions recorded on the blockchain. NEO can handle up to 10,000 transactions per second, and will have less scalability issues.
  • NEO charges no transaction fees. As there will be accounting systems built into Narrative that will occur internally, between the system and members, there are huge potential savings over time.
  • There are many programming languages that can be used on the NEO blockchain, which reduces costs associated with training new developers.
  • NEO’s consensus mechanism, delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance, will lead to more stability for the platform, and won’t have the possibility for any contentious forks down the road.
  • There’s an additional level of security added into NEO, that a lot of other blockchains have not yet included in their development. The Quantum Computer Resistance adds a level of security Narrative finds of value, because they are dedicated to protecting anyone who uses their platform.
  • Lastly, Narrative witnessed the successful launch of two token sales – Red Pulse and DeepBrain Chain – through the NEP-5 protocol that sets a standard for NEO tokens. O’Neill stated, “with Ethereum anyone can launch their own token at virtually no cost. This has led to a flood of projects, many of them scurrilous. One thing we like about NEO, on the other hand, is that there is a significant system fee for deploying a new token.”

Ultimately, Narrative made the switch to NEO from Ethereum for two primary reasons. First, to minimize the risk of regulatory compliance required by KYC (it should be noted Chinese investors will not be allowed to participate). Secondly, the leadership team finds the NEO platform to be able to meet their current demands and future needs.

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