DECENT: Blockchain Content Distribution Platform

A talk was held by Malaysian Global Innovation Centre (MaGIC) at their headquarters to brief on the potential products and applications of the blockchain platform other than within the financial sector. MaGIC is known to be the platform that supports the creativity and innovation development in Malaysia through dynamic programs and capacity-building initiatives. There were five moderators but this article will be focused on the talk by Matej Michalko, the CEO and Founder of DECENT, with the talk title of “Blockchain : Future of Content Distribution and Authors’ Rights protection”.

The problem with current publishing method

The current publication sector seems to be struggling in getting their products to the ground and attracting enough audience to sustain their creative products. This has resulted in many creators (of music, writings, artworks, etc) using middleman services, in order to market and sell their products. By handing over the reign to these intermediaries, creators are essentially giving consent to the publishers to choose and approve which of their products gets published and how much they will receive from the cut.

In addition to that, getting middleman services would cost the creators extra charges. In fact, Michalko gave an example of a book sale in Amazon. Let’s say a writer wrote a book and sell it on Amazon for $20. For 100 books per week, he should get $2,000 but this will not be the case. Amazon will take royalties up to half, and the writer will only receive $1,000 for a week sale. This example can also be applied in the industries of music, gaming, videography and any other content distribution industry, where huge amount of unnecessary money is accumulated in the middleman hands.

DECENT – a decentralized content distribution network

Just like any cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, with the help of the peer-to-peer network blockchain technology, content distributors and consumers can be liberated from third party fees and manipulations. DECENT was built to solve the question – why go through a third party when you can go directly to the source?

DECENT is a decentralized protocol platform made for those who want to share and publish any digital data onto the internet. DECENT is stable, secure as well as cost-effective, which is basically the attributes that blockchain technology offers. DECENT uses their own token, DCT, as a medium of payment in their platform. DCT is already listed on the trading market and it’s price at the time of writing is USD$1.26 and the market capitalization is USD$64 million.

It also uses the Blockchain Minimum Viable Data (MVD) standard, which means that every data (content) uploaded in the platforms, belongs to the author, not DECENT. This non-profit platform also has its own MVD format that is augmented with more data. For example, it uses .ADCT instead of .MP3, uses .VDCT for video, and .TDCT for text.

With DECENT, it’s a “one-to-many” relationship. An author produces and uploads a content onto a secured database, and the content will be distributed to the consumers within the DECENT network. DCT will be transferred to the creators when consumers purchase their product. DECENT runs two main layers: 1) the transaction layer and 2) the data distribution layer. DECENT created a data distribution layer to store content that takes up large disk space, like videos, to ensure that transactions can be processed seamlessly. Upon publishing a product, authors encrypt their work with secure encryption in the data distribution layer and the key will then be stored in the blockhain platform of DECENT and only authorised consumers can access it.

DECENT is free, and an open source platform. As a result, other developers can utilise their infrastructure to build any other applications. Examples of third party applications built on top of DECENT platform are Publiq, ATMChain, and SophiaTX. As we mentioned earlier, DECENT monetises various kind of content and can work with different applications – DECENT Web, DECENT Music, DECENT Books, and DECENT Stream.

For more information, you can visit their official website at https://decent.ch/.