Project summary:
The Layer Protocol is a borderless reputation and incentive system that unifies sharing economy companies across the world, creating a next-generation, decentralized global authority of user behavior reputation.
Layer's first partner is Spin, the leading urban and campus smart mobility provider, with smart scooters and bikes in over cities all over North America. Spin, a venture-funded company is in over 70 markets, has served 1M+ users with 1M+ rides, in less than a year. The partnership with Spin will make Layer the most used blockchain protocol in the sharing economy, and get LRX in the hands of the masses.
Layer's ERC-20 token ("LRX") provides the economic incentive for computation of complex reputation scores (by master nodes), encourages adoption of the protocol, and drives community governance.
The Layer team has experience at Y Combinator, Lyft, Samsung, Fitbit, and Stanford. Advisors of Layer include the founders of Ink (XNK) Protocol, Origin Protocol, among others.
Problem:
In recent years, asset-sharing has become the foundation of a new generation of multi-billion dollar companies. These companies have changed the way people view the concept of ownership, and the industry as a whole is poised to hit $40 billion in revenue by 2020. Companies that rent out assets, or run two-sided marketplaces, include Zipcar (short term car sharing), Spin, Mobike, ofo (stationless bike and mobility sharing), Airbnb, Sonder, Zeus (short term rentals), and Ankerbox (battery sharing). Rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft will also evolve to become asset sharing providers as they move to effectively renting out autonomous vehicles.
Despite this paradigm shift in ownership, the sharing economy is not designed to encourage users to treat these assets as if they were truly their own. This hurts providers, platforms and users by increasing the cost of providing these assets and services, which ultimately limits the potential of asset rental businesses, and the sharing economy as a whole.
However, these existing reputation systems are either non-portable or are managed by a private entity. Currently, the most portable best measure of a consumer's responsibility is their credit score, which is revealed only in very limited circumstances and only takes into account financial considerations. Sharing economy platforms use their own internal measure of reputation to encourage positive behavior – think Uber’s and Airbnb’s five star ratings.
Solution:
The Layer Protocol is a borderless reputation and incentive system that unifies sharing economy companies across the world, creating a next-generation, decentralized global authority of user behavior reputation. Access to user behavior history, and an aggregate representation in the form of a reputation score, will be a vital influence in the relationship between asset providers and their users, in terms of assessing the risk of renting to a given user, ensuring the assets are kept in good condition, and offering better prices to users with a history of positive behavior.
Layer can be easily adopted by existing centralized platforms, DApps, or direct P2P transactions where reputation plays a role (eg. subletting an apartment on Craigslist). With Layer, asset providers will be able to:
1. Access network-wide reputation scores of their users, akin to a credit check, which they can use to determine an appropriate level of service (e.g. charging deposits for lower reputation users) and benefits (e.g. rewards in LRX for parking a scooter responsibly);
2. Benefit from pre-built infrastructure and algorithms to store and calculate their user’s reputation scores;
3. Build their own reputation by positively serving their customers.
Project Roadmap:
August 15th
Core
ERC-725 Compatibility: Finalize requirements and design of the identity protocol to make it compatible with ERC-725.
Tooling: Test environments, tools, integration, smart contract versioning, and establishment of deployment practices.
Layer Nodes
Benchmarks: Performance tests of potential Layer Node architectures to determine the best system design moving forward.
September 1st
Core
Asset Provider Identity Interface: Smart contracts and unit tests for an asset providers to push an identity onto the blockchain.
Utilities
Asset Provider Python SDK: Wrappers around smart contract methods, including package manager support.
Layer Nodes
Datastore: Local temporary store when retrieving data from the network.
September 15th
Core
User Claim of Identity: Interfaces and unit tests for users claiming an identity. This allows users to link multiple identification properties.
Utilities
SDK: Interfaces for the identity protocol.
Layer Nodes
Containerization: Package Layer Nodes in a Docker container for easy deployment.
October 1st
Core
Identity Challenge on Claim: ERC 725 compatibility, and permissioned access to necessary public methods on contracts.
Reputation Data: Models / interfaces for reputation data by provider category.
Utilities
SDK: Reputation data model and methods.
Layer Nodes
Discovery: Ability for node discovery starting with a seed node, followed by other peer nodes.
October 15th
Core
Scoring Interface: Asset provider can score a user based on an identity hash.
Utilities
Identity Signing: Start backend to hold/serve/publish public keys for signing an identity, including private keys for verification.
Layer Nodes
Host Seed Node: Internal seed node to discover other Layer Nodes.
Peer Connectivity: Identify all Layer Nodes are active on the network at any given time. This will eventually be used for maintaining quality of service.
November 1
Core
Provider Reputation Score (PRS): The ability for asset providers to retrieve PRS for users.
Utilities
Identity Signing: Complete.
Layer Nodes
Caching: Layer Nodes cache structure to optimize future computation of scores.
November 15th
Core
Provider Reputation Score (PRS): Complete PRS, along with unit tests, and deploy to Testnet.
Utilities
Identity Signing Tool: To aid development, this tool helps developers sign user identities for use throughout the protocol.
Layer Nodes
PRS Computation: Layer Nodes compute PRS from transactions and provider category processing.
By December 1
Core
Provider Reputation Score (PRS): Optimize PRS read/writes for computation and storage utilization.
Utilities
SDK: Integrate remaining features to Layer SDK for asset providers and Layer Nodes.
Layer Nodes
Layer Reputation Scores (LRS): Begin computation algorithms.
December 15th
Core
Scoring Release: Release of scoring to the Testnet.
Utilities
Layer SDK: Unit tests, documentation and packages for Testnet release.
Layer Nodes
Layer Reputation Scores (LRS): Unit tests for LRS algorithms.
January 1st
Core
Identity Signer Update: Identity signers can contribute additional identifiers to user identities, and perform an “identity check”.
Utilities
Publish Second SDK: We will provide a complete SDK in another language.
Layer Nodes
Reputation Score Signing: Nodes have to sign computation results for them to be valid.
January 15th
Core
Layer Nodes Stake: Smart contracts to manage staking of Layer Nodes.
Utilities
Sample Application: Start demo application that based on developed SDKs.
Layer Nodes
Staking: Running a valid node will require a LRX stake to be put up.
Testing and Optimization: Continual optimization of Layer Nodes around performance, gas costs, and security.
February 1st
Core
Identity Match API: The API matches two identities without user claim by trusted identity signer. This fixes the issue of unclaimed identities lacking data, or users repeatedly signing up to perform bad behavior.
Utilities
Sample Application: Complete, open source, and deploy a sample application for viewing data on Layer Protocol.
Layer Nodes
Testing and Optimization: Continual optimization of Layer Nodes around performance, gas costs, and security.
Documentation: Detailed developer and user guides (installation, configuration tips, etc.).
Token Distribution and Use of Funds
Token: LRX
Total Supply 1B tokens.
$15M Hard Cap
Token Allocation: 40% token sale, 15% team and advisors (2 year vesting), 30% company reserve (growth of team, build core partner network, user acquisition and control economics), 15% community (onboard partners, nodes and community growth)
Usage of Funds: 40% User Acquisition, 20% BD and Partnerships, 10% Operations and Overheads, 30% Engineering
Website:
http://www.layerprotocol.com
Whitepaper:
https://docsend.com/view/esxs96z
Social Channels
Telegram: http://t.me/layerprotocol
Telegram Announcements Channel: https://t.me/LayerProtocolAnnouncements
Medium: https://medium.com/layerprotocol
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LayerProtocol
Press:
https://hacked.com/ico-analysis-layer-protocol-lrx/
https://coindrift.io/layer-protocol-ico-review/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsjAVNx9Yso
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Layer Protocol was formally known as the Pin Protocol
https://medium.com/layerprotocol/announ ... 6b8056ed4b