2 keys to the sharing economy of the future

Alterseny93
6 min readFeb 24, 2021
2key network

With the development of the Internet and online payments, previously unavailable opportunities have opened up for a person. To receive goods from another country in a few days, write a message or send funds to a friend on the opposite end of the world — 50 years ago such fantasies could be considered crazy. But the world is changing and economic relations with it. Instead of ownership, people make a choice of use. And this phenomenon is called the “Sharing Economy”..

What is sharing economy

Even if you do not know such a term, it is very likely that you were a participant in it. When you book on Airbnb, travel on BlaBlaCar with a driver, or rent a drill for 1 day — you are using the benefits of the shared economy.

Sharing economy is the collective use of goods or services instead of owning them.This approach allows you to get what you want without significant costs for its acquisition. After all, it is logical that it is illogical to buy a car or an apartment when traveling to another country :) it is much easier to rent them and save a tidy sum, bringing income to the owner of this property. According to analysts, the sharing economy will grow to $ 335 billion by 2025 — and these are impressive figures.

How it works in crypto

ICO

Thanks to the smart contracts on the Ethereum network, it became possible to develop the sharing economy on the blockchain infrastructure. And I must admit, this is the perfect environment for the sharing economy. Blockchain allows you to reduce costs due to the absence of third parties and eliminates the problem of trust between parties due to smart contracts.

The most obvious example of the sharing economy in crypto is crowdfunding or ICO. Instead of receiving investments from 1 large investor, projects collect small amounts from hundreds and thousands of participants, which together will bring more benefits for its long-term development. Other examples include blockchain polls and reviews with the Instar project, Brave browser, that shares ad revenue with users, the DeFi ecosystem and the provision of liquidity.

Despite the emergence of the first crypto startups in this area, many others are monopolized by centralized giants such as Google or Facebook. This, of course, is about the personal data of users, which they, without a twinge of conscience, trade or leak to the state. At the same time, the user himself does not receive any benefits from this, except for the free use of the product. The 2Key Network project is bringing the sharing economy into such a popular area as content consumption and online advertising. Let’s figure out how it works and whether it is possible to earn money here.

2key Network

2key network

Just imagine — how much content per day (articles, tweets, posts, etc.) do you consume? Personally, I read dozens of articles a day and view several thousand messages :) How many ads are there? — it’s hard to say, but I think around 10% are trying to sell or impose something on us in one way or another. But what if ….. All these budgets, which are spent on promoting advertising content, are taken and divided between its target audience? — “No, it doesn’t happen like that,” you say. Nonsense.

Until recently, it was, but everything is changing. This is exactly what 2key Network does — it rewards users for viewing and sharing content in the browser.

In simple terms, 2key network is a decentralized protocol for monetizing online content. Users register with 2key and get the opportunity to monetize the time spent consuming and sharing content in the browser. Advertisers effectively spend budgets on their target audience, receive transparent reports, and track audience activity. It’s all wrapped up in a single decentralized interface and powered by 2key’s flagship Smart Link product.

Smart Links

The main product of 2key is called “Smart Links”. With this tool, simple links become smart — a smart contract is attached to them, which tracks all actions and rewards users for interacting with the content.

SmartLinks

The whole process takes a few minutes — you just need to link a smart contract to an existing article, after which you can start your advertising campaign. Over time, you can achieve good indicators in terms of cost per click, as examples on the site there are successful cases from crypto startups:

SmartLinks usecases

Wanchain managed to achieve $ 0.04 per click — this is a very cheap indicator in the crypto industry. In addition, the system can filter bots and spammers, selecting only a live audience. Needless to say, part of the budget spent went into the pockets of people who read this article? — It goes without saying that their loyalty to the project has increased significantly.

How do Smart Links work?

Technologically smart links are complex and require some technical knowledge. Nevertheless, we will now analyze the main point and this will be quite enough.

Protocol key features

Smart contracts on the Ethereum network consume a huge amount of gas and it would be problematic to work with them. That is why 2key has developed their own L2 solution — all transactions for Smart Links are performed off-chain, which is very fast and does not require additional costs. However, 2key is connected to Ethereum and all calculations are easily verified, and the 2key token itself is of the ERC-20 standard. Many smart contracts track the movement of links, interaction with them, user reputation, etc. As a result, the creator can see the entire history of the link’s “journey” in the form of a Merkel tree.

To summarize, the created Smart Links work on L2 very quickly and at no additional cost, but all the results are connected to the Ethereum network and are easily verified. We get cheap, fast and secure transactions and smart contracts based on Eth.

A look into the future

2key is now a small startup with big goals. Changing the way content is promoted is a big and difficult task, but the first steps have already been taken. Users share content and receive rewards for it, tell their friends and family about it. As new partners are attracted, the user network will grow — coverage and payouts will increase. Thanks to such a viral effect, a boom can happen and more and more people will want to monetize their time and resources like a snowball.

Just imagine — you scroll through your Web 3 Brave browser, watch only ads that are interesting to you, take polls from Instar and read + share articles with Smart Links connected to them — for all this you will be credited with cryptocurrency in passive mode. This is the sharing economy in action — I really hope that we will come to this in the coming years.

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