Some business sectors outlined in the framework of VIZ are obvious and do not differ greatly in their methods of generating income from those deployed across other blockchains and digital ecosystems. Such business activities include exchange operations with the purchase and sale of viz tokens, gateways designed for paying for goods and services with viz tokens, maintenance of blockchain nodes with resulting income from total supply, etc.
However, a truly unique and engaging business model built on VIZ with the use of social capital revolves around deploying applications that ensure reward context and the receipt of beneficiary payments from users of these applications. Let us examine these models in greater detail.
In its simplest form, the interactions of users in VIZ are described by the phrase:
John rewarded Mike (that is, increased his social capital).
If the phrase were to be outlined in greater detail and with a higher degree of conciseness, it would read as follows:
John instructed the blockchain to extract a certain number of viz tokens from the total supply and add them to Mike's social capital. The blockchain does the rest.
Why did John want to reward Mike? What did he reward Mike for? What was the context of the situation that resulted in the reward? The answers to these questions are prescribed within the context of the reward.
Perhaps John read Mike's post on some social media network and liked it. The social media post is the context of the reward.
Maybe John voted for Mike in a song competition. Mike’s performance at the competition is the context of the reward.
Perhaps John expressed gratitude to Mike by writing "thank you" in response to his Telegram message. The Telegram chat is the context of the reward.
For a reward to be given, a certain underlying application must be in place. Such an application can be a browser extension, a social networking site, a messenger bot, a mobile application on a phone, or any other program.
The given program intercepts John's action in the appropriate context, be it a like, vote, or a ‘thank you’, translates said action into a special command, and sends it to the blockchain on John’s behalf. Naturally, John must first grant the application the right to act on his behalf.
In our example with John and Mike, new elements come into play:
John wrote ‘Thank you’ in a comment on Mike's message in the Telegram group.
A bot connected to the group and both Telegram accounts noticed this and generated a transaction in the VIZ blockchain, in which John’s VIZ account instructs the blockchain to extract a certain number of viz tokens from the total supply and add them to the social capital of Mike’s VIZ account. The blockchain does the rest.
The entrepreneur operating on VIZ is the one who ensures the creation of applications, such as the bot in the aforementioned example. It is the entrepreneur who finds the context for the use of social capital and offers users to connect their VIZ accounts to this context. There are many situations in life when one person encourages or thanks another for something, which means that such actions can be translated into the language used by VIZ.
The applications are multifunctional, since they are capable of identifying several different contexts. For example, a browser plug-in that is configured to operate on dozens of sites, or a mobile application that reads any QR codes containing rewards. Such a QR code can be displayed on a TV screen, on a waiter's badge, or on a hairdresser's business card – the variations of the context are nearly endless. And there are also narrowly focused applications that respond to only one type of context. For example, a mobile dating application in which a positive swipe results in a reward to a potential partner.
The income received by the application’s owner is composed of beneficiary payments. The VIZ blockchain has a built-in reward sharing system. A blockchain command can be written to result in the issuance of a reward from John automatically to two addresses - part to Mike and part to the beneficiary, for example, the author of the application. The beneficiary can withdraw the converted social capital into tokens and sell them, or use it for their own purposes directly in VIZ.
Now let us return to the heroes of our discourse by taking into account all the clarifications provided herein:
John wrote ‘Thank you’ in a comment on Mike's message in a Telegram group.
The bot connected to the group, and to both users’ Telegram accounts, noticed the action and generated a transaction in the VIZ blockchain. John’s VIZ account then instructs the blockchain to allocate a certain amount of viz tokens from the supply and add 90% of them to the social capital of Mike’s VIZ account, and 10 % to the social capital of the author of the bot. The blockchain does the rest.
If, with the development of the ecosystem and the growth of the price of the token, the average income per transaction in such a service will be at least about 0.5 cents (in viz token equivalent), then it is enough for the service to connect several thousand active users in order to generate income amounting to hundreds of dollars a day.
Here are some examples of possible business scenarios using digital social capital. These can provide users with insight into the opportunities offered by the platform:
- Gateways to social networks and instant messengers. Connection of large channels, groups, chats, promotion of VIZ among their users;
- Dating services: interest in a potential partner (positive swipe or like) reinforced by a reward in VIZ;
- Plugins for popular CMS;
- Loyalty programs for small businesses, both online and offline;
- Launch of competitions with viewer voting participation via rewards in VIZ;
- User-generated content platforms involving user likes;
- ...try to come up with a dozen more approaches.
A major advantage of VIZ is the implementation of permanent addresses in the form of user accounts. This means that a new application does not need to force users to create the another login credential. Users can connect to any application via their VIZ account.
At the same time, a properly written application will not even know the user’s private key in some cases, since transactions can be signed directly in the user's browser. This mainly applies to sites or web applications. In other cases, it is enough for the application to know only the private simple key, which does not give access to token transfers and other transactions of a financial nature. Accordingly, the owner of the application bears a lesser degree of responsibility for safekeeping user data, and the users themselves have more confidence in new applications.
The accumulation of a critical mass of VIZ participants will result in a network effect, which will lead to the rapid growth of the network. If a particular application has already become the “de facto standard” for established and novice entrants by that point, it will be in a better position than new entrants in the market. Therefore, it is more profitable to create and tune an application under real market conditions at the given time, even if it does not yield immediate profits.
The VIZPLUS Initiative foresees help for entrepreneurs in creating and growing their businesses on VIZ. We will provide entrepreneurs with consultations on the operating framework of VIZ for free, suggest promising areas of activity, and, if necessary, delegate social capital to make it easier for them to start working. As for the entrepreneurs, we expect from them the ability to create services and attract users.
Contact details:
email: [email protected], Telegram: for direct messaging, public chat group.