Decentralized Social Intelligence

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Mainline is x-ray vision for social media, allowing the community to see through bogus vanity metrics, capitalize on organic virality, and participate in governance, curation, and a data marketplace.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Over the past year, our team of 6 have built the Mainline platform which is now in open alpha. We are an experienced team of startup junkies & crypto degens that were fed up with the problems created by social media and saw an opportunity to make an impact using Web3.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The Mainline platform (https://getmainline.io/platform) is an intelligence tool to help us figure out what's real on social. It uncovers the authenticity of influencers and projects, and find what's going viral before it gets huge. With it, the community can see beyond the algorithms and echo-chambers to know what's really going on in social media.

The platform is built and operated by the Mainline DAO (https://getmainline.io/) which is driven by the $MAIN token that allows holders to earn from social data that businesses use to make key decisions on where they invest their resources, as well as reward mechanisms to help collect, process & curate data. As a DAO, we also have a governance model that allows the community to prioritize features and get rewarded to participate in their development.

The Mainline platform is currently live and in open alpha. You can make an account here (https://app.getmainline.com/) to get a sense for what we're building.

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Primitives of the Mainline platform:

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Real-time streams of topics across multiple social networks visualized as a network graph-- called conversation maps-- that delivers a god-mode view for the ongoing conversations. Identify the people, topics, and trends that are driving engagement. Here's the map on Cardano from today (https://app.getmainline.com/user/cardano).

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Profile pages on users, posts, hashtags, links, and media where authenticity, engagement, activity, and influence audits are requested and consumed. Browse through the top followers and engagers to get a sense for who and what is real. Use these pages to do due diligence of projects, influencers, or even yourself and your own account. Here's the Cardano profile page (https://app.getmainline.com/user/cardano). Sign up at the top right to see your own profile page.

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Leaderboard pages on users, hashtags, posts, links, and media to rank by overall influence, engagement quality, and activity. Projects use these to find influencers or partners and top emerging conversations, VCs and retail investors use these to find quality projects:

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Mainline Algos

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We've developed a set of algos that provide visibility of both what's going viral as well as who and what are most authentic:

• Virality detection -- using a variety of network graph math and engagement numbers to find conversations and users that are emerging as viral
• Influence scoring -- algos that see through large follower counts for those users that have the ear of high value people
• Engagement quality scoring -- algos that see through huge engagement numbers to find the accounts and posts that are getting authentic engagement

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Mainline DAO and token ecosystem:

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The DAO uses the $MAIN token to drive collection of the most valuable data, process and contextualize it as quickly as possible, offer a free tier that doesn’t require ads, and eventually create a sustainable ecosystem not reliant on centralized infrastructure. 

prioritize collection | distribute compute | incentivize human intelligence | decentralize benefit

Prioritize collection - Speculator market - Auditors and Brokers

Mainline doesn’t just search social networks– it collects, connects, analyzes, and stores it too. This gets costly really fast, and there’s A LOT of data on social networks– for example just on twitter there’s over hundreds of millions of users generating around 500M tweets per day. How do we prioritize the data we collect? We use the token to introduce market forces to this process– incentivizing holders to accurately predict which topics and trends will attract and be of most interest to paid users of the platform. Brokers speculate on which topic streams will be accessed most, while auditors predict which users and activity will be most important to verify. The latter drives collection of user objects across social, the former of posts. 

In our open alpha to date, we have collected over 600gb of social data:

• 400,000,000+ users
• 158,000,000+ posts
• 20,000,000+ media
• 9,000,000+ links
• 2,000,000+ hashtags
• 260,000,000+ time series data points
• Billions of interactions

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HUMINT - Curators

Machine learning and AI is great at a lot of things, but at present misses important nuances. We incentivize community verifying, labeling and categorizing in MAIN, using a reward multiplier based on quantity and quality of curation. Curation activities include reCAPTCHA-like widgets and tagging users and posts for sentiment, quality, predictions, and more. Anyone can tag elements in the system in the Search and Feed tabs, but only stakers are eligible for Curator rewards. Stake any amount to access the Curator tab and tag to earn. 

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Distributed data collection and processing - from passive contribution to node operation

Data collection is distributed, with rewards in MAIN to contribute to the process– in the beginning, opting in allows the network to make authenticated API requests on your behalf to process authenticity audits more quickly for everyone. In the future, a master node architecture will fully decentralize data streaming, parsing, analysis, and storage. 

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Decentralized benefits - Everyone

Social media platforms have dramatic expectations for growth and are really expensive to run, and are invariably forced into the ad-model to underwrite their sustainability. Unfortunately, the ad-model has led to the complete degradation of digital interactions by incentivizing manufactured divisiveness, the proliferation of shills and bots, and the amplification of the most outrageous. 

Social media can be blamed for social polarization, covid disinformation, and the near complete breakdown of political discourse. But it’s also connected and organized the citizenry of the world in profound ways to check the balance of power– from r/wallstreetbets shining light on a rigged system (and making lots of tendies in the process) to global groundswell of support that pressured governments to support Ukraine. 

We’re not turning back from the connectedness these platforms deliver. And we’re not likely to have a viable alternatives to the OG behemoths– it’s where we already spend our time and have crafted our personas for much of our lives. 

Mainline isn’t a social network, and doesn’t aim to replace or compete with existing platforms– it’s aim is to deliver x-ray vision of activity across many social networks, providing a layer of control and visibility where anyone who uses these social platforms can benefit. 

The data collection and curation driven by the MAIN token builds a massive community-owned database that supports an ongoing free tier including a chrome extension that anyone can use to better navigate social media and break out of the algorithms and echo-chambers. 

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

The blockchain industry has weathered many dangerous storms so far, but the sustainability of the industry is contingent on real-world use cases that provide undeniable value not only to crypto-natives, but also to outside businesses and regular people.

We believe our project marries a solution to many of the problems of social media with the fundamental aspects of web3 -- visibility, governance, and incentivized participation in a way that can cement Cardano as a chain with high value projects that solve real-world problems.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

The biggest risk is the bear market creating an unsuitable environment for a token launch. We are mitigating this risk by delivering value to blockchain projects, crypto-specific VCs, as well as non-crypto businesses in order to build a sustainable community that leverages the platform to grow their businesses. By proving the business use cases/value of the platform, we thus prove the value of the token ecosystem as described in this application and included documents.

Another risk is platform APIs -- at some level, much of our system is at the mercy of API policies which are subject to change. We mitigate this risk in the long term by supporting integrations to many different platforms as well as having several methods of still accessing certain data by scraping.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Q2 2021: 3x oversubscribed in our seed round

Q3 2021: private beta with select crypto marketing firms and influencers

Q4 2021 to Now -- open alpha for Mainline platform allows users to access real-time conversation maps and authenticity/engagement audits. Go make an account here and check it out: https://app.getmainline.com/

Q3 2022:

• Launch chrome extension -- allows anyone in the community to overlay virality and authenticity data on top of their social media experience. Creates a viral component to our marketing to attract both crypto and non-crypto users.
• Launch paid platform features -- we will launch with the ability for the community to run their own audits, create custom conversation maps, and create custom influence leaderboards for projects shopping for influencers, capital firms shopping for projects, and retail investors to perform due diligence. Payment will be accepted in both fiat and crypto. As we launch the token and associated dApps, the community will be able to share in that revenue by participating in data curation and the generation of data assets such as authenticity/engagement audits and real-time maps.
• Staking dApp -- community members can stake to earn 2.5% of all platform transactions (incl. fiat payments)
• Curation dApp -- community members can help label data for rewards based on their stake

Q4 2022:

• Data marketplace dApp -- creates a data speculation market where token holders can create and acquire a variety of data assets and earn whenever paid users access them. This allows the community to earn on social data as well as prioritize which data the system collects
• DAO governance -- make public our backlog and open up for community voting to prioritize development as well as get involved/rewarded to help build out what the community decides is important.

Q1 2023:

• Data broker dApp -- allows node operators to host the Mainline system and get rewarded to host real-time conversation maps, process audits, and participate in distributed compute for Mainline algos.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Backend development/hosting - $70k

We have been building our database of Twitter activity for about a year:

We prioritized cost for our first year, and we will have to upgrade our hosting scenario and database architecture in order to achieve scale.

• Scalable database architecture and hosting
• Relational
• time-series
• graph
• Social platform integrations - we focused our attention on Twitter first due to its friendly APIs, but the long term of our platform is to integrate as many social networks as possible to deliver visibility and control across these platforms
• Reddit
• Telegram
• Discord
• Youtube
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Data science and algorithm development/improvement
• AI/ML layers for predicting virality and authenticity
• Bot detection and auto-labelling
• Distributed data acquisition system -- allows any community member to be rewarded to passively contribute to data acquisition from social platforms
• Distributed compute system -- allow stake pool operators to run nodes which facilitate compute of virality and authenticity algorithms as well as host real-time streams and audit data for rewards

Front-end development: $40k

• Chrome extension to overlay over social media experience
• UI/UX for 4 dApps
• Staking - stake tokens to earn 2.5% of all platform transactions
• Curating - label and tag data for rewards based on stake
• Auditing - generate and own audits that will be of highest value to business users
• Brokering - host real-time maps and participate in distributed calculation of Mainline algos
• User testing

Smart contract development: $60k

• Data marketplace - smart contracts that power the Audit and Broker dApps
• Curation rewards - manage curation rewards and prevent gaming of the system
• Staking rewards - tie in with our billing system to automatically reward staking pool with 2.5% transaction rewards
• Data brokers - installs node software, manages participation settings, and allows for new real-time map creation

Marketing and community development: $30k

• User acquisition initiatives
• Partnership opportunities with other projects
• Community growth and management

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Preston Tesvich - algo development, backend design, product management

Chris Berger - marketplace and rewards dApp design, ecosystem partnerships, new user growth

Brandon Berger - full-stack dev and sys admin

Jessica McCann - UI/UX, creative director

Ben Meredith - token ecosystem consulting, smart contract development

Fran Waldecker - community management, marketing, project management

Jonathan Hill - legal and compliance

We are looking for Plutus/haskell devs that can consult and build out parts of our dApps

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Likely yes. We see tremendous benefit with our platform for the Cardano ecosystem and community and the opportunity to build out our system to support Cardano if the community will have us.

Our platform is highly extensible and has the potential for a large number of modules that can benefit both projects of all kinds as well as the ordinary Cardano community members.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

• Overall platform metrics:
• New platform signups
• Daily active users
• Specific feature use:
• Number of audits requested/consumed/shared
• Number of leaderboards built/shared
• Daily usage of conversation maps

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Launching our dApp ecosystem and DAO on Cardano where community members are earning by participating in platform growth and development and businesses are deriving ongoing value from using the platform

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is a new proposal