Publica’s protocol for decentralised publishing on the blockchain is a reinvention of Gutenberg’s press for the 21st century. Even if it becomes a de-facto largest publisher, it maintains no inventory. Nonetheless, the books that it publishes can last forever, both for the readers who own them and for the world.
A book’s access keys are represented by an Ethereum ERC20 token that Publica calls the READ Token, unique to each literary work. A READ Token balance is mapped to the public key of its owner in Ethereum’s programming language called Solidity. Decentralised free access to the Ethereum blockchain’s data enables transparent verification of ownership. It also enables decentralised authorization of access to the literary work that any given READ Token is associated with.
The operational protocol layer is built in Solidity and uses the Ethereum network’s computing power. It processes direct transactions in the protocol’s currency between readers and authors (buyers and sellers) for a book’s access keys.
Literary works will be stored in decentralised immutable storage built on top of continuously advancing solutions for decentralised immutable storage. Publica protocol is experimenting with solutions offered by IPFS, Storj, Sia, MaidSafe and upcoming Filecoin, EOS and eventually, Swarm for Ethereum.
Publica’s protocol is powered by its currency called Pebbles (PBL ticker, an ERC20 token), issued in a fixed and locked supply.
The protocol’s application layer of customer-facing apps will be built by the protocol team as white label, open source tools available to the community for branding, extending, and embedding into other applications, to enhance current ink-readers and e-readers with a walletmodule supporting Publica’s protocol.
Publica
