The Olas Foundation is a non-profit Company Limited by Guarantee incorporated in Ireland to steward development of the protocol. It will raise funds, control the IP and employ staff to bring the concept to life. Unlike the legacy media system, once the software is released it will have no control over the content that is published on the protocol however.

Anything. News. Opinion. Scientific publication. Economic data. Market data. Company data. Sporting event results. Literally any type of information we require to be trustworthy and accurate.

Yes. We believe the more high quality information is freely available to people, the better our lives become. However, we are confident our subsidy-based economic model, in a world where micropayments become both economical and frictionless, will actually deliver more value to content contributors than the advertising and subscription models do now. See the answer to question 5 for a development of this point.

There have been numerous studies that have shown prediction markets to be superior quality control mechanisms than peer review in science. Olas will harness this powerful tool and offer review protocols that are entirely performance based rather than credentials based. It will also employ robust anti-collusion mechanisms to prevent powerful interests from capturing the process. Reputation scores will be updated to give everyone insight into a participant’s historical market performance. The entire system is designed so that the only profitable strategy is honesty, and the only allocator of profits is market-determined performance. We expect result will be a much less biased media system, with much higher quality informational output. 

Trust in all forms of media has been in decline for two decades. It is now at critical levels. We believe the ongoing AI revolution is going to exacerbate the situation since producing information becomes such a trivial task. People are rightfully becoming increasingly sceptical of any information they consume. With trust levels so low, the case for an unbiased internet-native system of information review is overwhelming. We believe when such protocols exist, once Olas is in production, internet users will demand all information be subject to these quality controls so that they can trust it. We believe content contributors will have no choice but to submit any content they produce for review.

We expect high performing content contributors and high performing reviewers to make significantly more money that they do in legacy media systems. Since Olas is a neutral platform by default, people of all political persuasions can trust it doesn’t have an agenda. The total number of possible readers for contributors no longer aligned with an institution with a particular readership thus becomes much larger. The absence of paywalls means a much larger number of possible readers too. These factors, coupled with our belief in the high demand for quality-controlled information, mean the total addressable market dwarfs existing media platforms.

The only question then is whether Olas’ subsidy model can deliver more value than the advertising and subscription models do. The advent of web 3 payment technologies will mean that tipping someone $1 will become as easy as liking a social media post is now. We are confident the increased readership numbers, coupled with this extremely low friction payments environment, along the lack of an existence of an owner extracting profits, will result in substantially more money in the pockets of journalists, scientists, and other contributors alike. This despite contributors incurring the costs of review themselves.

A plagiarism check is the first step in Olas’ native review protocols. Any unoriginal content will be marked and those that submit it will not only not profit from it but will in fact lose money in their attempt to plagiarise someone’s work because each contribution is accompanied by stake. Yes people will be able to plagiarise the work on other platforms external to Olas, but readers will have no way of being able to trust its veracity as it won’t carry Olas’ quality control stamp. For this, readers will have to access the Olas protocol directly, and the only contributor that can profit from information on Olas is one that submitted original content. Therefore, Olas’ review protocols not only represent a superior form of information review to editorial and peer review, but a substantially cheaper form of copyright protection than legacy systems too.

There are two reasons why Olas benefits from having a native cryptoasset. Firstly, to be truly neutral, Olas must not be dependent on money issued by external entities. If it were, those entities would be able to use their influence to dictate outcomes on the protocol.

Secondly, the history of open-source software is a story of serial underfunding. Proprietary platforms came to dominate the application layer of the internet given their ability to generate huge revenues. The revolution that is tokenisation has turned this situation on its head. It enables people to build free-to-use OSS while still profiting from their creation as a popular OSS network will see demand for its native token. Building and investing in OSS is now an economically attractive proposition. As such, for the first time since the dawn of the internet, OSS can not only compete with, but outcompete privately owned web platforms, due to the superior value and control it offers users.