Token Curated Registry: A registry which accepts multiple challenges (Concept)

Ethereum is considered as the Blockchain for Smart Contracts (SCs). ERC20 token contracts are the most popular SCs on the Ethereum chain and ERC721s are also not so behind in the race after the inception of Crypto-kitties. One of the other SCs, which is catching up on the popularity train, are the Token Curated Registries, or TCRs.

To give you a brief, TCR allows to curate a list of items, where every item on the list has been verified by the community, that is, the people who hold tokens specifically associated with that Registry.

What do I mean by verified? Well, if the Token Holders of the registry find that the new entry is legit and worthy, well, then the entry is accepted in the registry. But, if they don’t, the entry is discarded.

This way, the token holders of the TCR decide who gets to stay in the registry and who doesn’t. There are some of the popular features of TCR which are worth noticing but I’d like to focus on one of most important properties of registry:

Any entry challenged can result into 2 outcomes, either get white-listed in the registry or get discarded.

These are the only 2 outcomes possible in the current version of TCRs. This sounds reasonable when curating a list of items, whether the items gets to stay or has to leave.

But, there are some examples where, one can have more than one outcomes. Like, an answer to a question, not an ideal example, but let’s take for an example.

Anyone who asks a question, waits for a defined amount of time, where someone has to answer the question. If not answered, the question gets discarded. But, if it does get answered, people get to up-vote the answer. Now, this is a single challenge mechanism, which can easily be implemented with the current TCRs.

The problem lies when someone else also wants to answer the question. Now, you have two competing answers and token holders or community can choose between the two. What if another one pops in? Now, they have 3 choices. Hence, this way you could have multiple possible challenges for a single entry.

And the question creator sets a bounty on the correct answer and hence, the person who can answer it most accurately, gets awarded and the community decides the winner. Hence, the people who voted for the winner answer, get rewarded as well and those who voted for other options have something to lose. Taking the exact working of the TCR with 1 challenge and implementing it into multiple challenges is what the aim is.

This allows a lot of subjective answer based applications to be built on top of TCRs and hence, we can one day have a decentralized Quora. Where, anyone can post a question for a bounty and they get it answered. The more the bounty, the more likely they are to be answered. And once someone feels that the answer is old enough, they can re-challenge the same answer and seek an updated answer for the same question, allowing an ongoing and never saturating platform of TCR.

Stay Tuned for further updates !!!

NOTE: Decentralized Quora might not be the exact application which might work with TCR, but the idea here is to introduce the concept of multiple challenges for a single TCR Entry.

PS: I’ve been working on this for a month now to create a customized version of TCR to allow multiple challenges for a single entry.