[Review] [GF: Phase 1] Pink Paper: Decentralized Publishing Platform

Project name: Pink Paper

Author name and contact info **: Rupin Mathur Email: team@pinkpaper.xyz Telegram: @rupinmathur

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

L2 recipient address: 0xB00FF0E2281B48F652dAFBaA7f6a5c66D57e1D5C

Grant category: Tooling (Public Goods)

Is this proposal applicable to a specific committee? No

Project description:Pink Paper is a decentralized and permissionless publishing platform for individuals and communities worldwide to express their opinions and share the information with the rest of their communities. Users can come and publish blogs and other forms of content on the platform and showcase it to the world. At the same time, one can raise funds for their endeavors on the platform allowing donating to world-changing technologies. Pink Paper will provide a decentralized and censorship-free platform for everyone to use and express their views about different topics.

Project links:

Additional team member info**:
Rupin Mathur(Founder)

He has been a Blockchain Maximalist since 2015 and an advocate of decentralization and self-sovereignty. He worked as marketing head for QuadB apparels from 2015-2017, India’s second-largest custom apparel brand where he established the first VAL (Virtual Assembly Line) basically creating hundreds of nodal points for blue-collar workers scaling the business infinitely. From 2017 onwards, he decided to go all-in Web3 and thus acted a crucial part in setting up Finstreet, India’s 1st Crypto Education Platform and scaled it to a community of 70,000+ Web3 Enthusiasts and 4.2 million social media following.

During this journey, he worked alongside brands such as Near, Algorand, WazirX, Huobi, Polygon, Aave, and many more to help bring their respective platforms adoption in the Indian Markets,

He has begun his journey to create and bring adoption for the Decentralized content management platform, Pink Paper

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupin-mathur-3a7689141/

Relevant usage metrics : NA

Competitors, peers, or similar projects (please link): https://mirror.xyz/

Is/will this project be open sourced? Yes

Optimism native?: No

Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism: Within two months after the grant approval

Ecosystem Value Proposition:

  • What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?

There are increased attacks from big tech worldwide on free speech. Big Tech platforms are increasingly banning specific individuals and communities from their platforms. In these testing times for free speech, Pink Paper aspires to protect the ethos of free speech and freedom for communities who want to raise their voice. Even Stani, founder of Aave was recently banned from Twitter for posting a joke which highlights the need for a decentralized platform.

  • How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?

We will provide a free platform which will be available with zero censorship and there’s increasing need for such a platform where users data is being used to profit billions and at the same time deplatform them anytime the big tech wants.

  • Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?

With increased censorship by big tech decentralized, censorship free platforms will be in high demand. We want to cater to this growing demand and it will directly push the growth for Optimism ecosystem.

Has your project previously applied for an OP grant? No

Number of OP tokens requested: 25,000

How much will your project match in co-incentives? NA

Proposal for token distribution:

  • How will the OP tokens be distributed? (please include % allocated to different initiatives such as user rewards/marketing/liquidity mining. Please also include a justification as to why each of these initiatives align with the problem statement this proposal is solving.)

Majority of the funds will be used for the development of the platform.

Adoption Strategy:

  • We will be partnering with DAOs and companies to bring their content system on Pink Paper. It will be used for providing key updates and announcements for their communities.
  • We will be launching a creator fund to incentivize writers, which will be distributed according to the engagement brought through their communities.
  • We will be Collaborating with renowned authors, and novelists, and publish their upcoming novels on the Pink Papers platform, (increasing visibility and engagement of the platform through their communities)
  • We will be Collaborating with Researchers and publish their research papers on the platform ( this will give penetration into the community of learned individuals in various academic fields)
  • We will be Collaborating with localized news agencies and publishers to have local, national and international news published on the platform.

Key Outcomes:

  1. Adoption of the publishing platform by major individual contributors along with companies as it provides a fair and free platform to communicate with their communities.
  2. Due to the Global, transparent & decentralized nature of the publishing platform, we will be able to better deliver to the different communities and readers around the world.
  3. Pink Paper will provide the platform as a center for decentralized information flow.
  4. One stop medium of communication with the communities of any type, size etc.

Development Roadmap:

First Phase: MVP

A. Building MVP on Optimism with following features:
a. Decentralized content publishing
b. Tipping / Donations for the creators to contribute to creators’ economy in OP token
c. A minimalistic design for content creators to ease creating content
B. Enhancing user experience while publishing and browsing, using the feedback of the community
C. Building community and establishing the community on different social platforms

2. Second Phase: Public Testnet Launch

A. Pink Paper will launch a Community Funding Platform for projects.
B. Partnerships with DAOs and projects to start publishing on the platform.
C. Enhancing the security of the publishing platform.
D. Changing the content template, where users can select from a variety of templates to showcase their blogs on.

3. Third Phase: Mainnet Launch

A. Partnerships across network to bring their content publishing on the platform.
B. Dedicated section showcasing Optimism projects in active crowdfunding stage
C. Strategic partnerships with publishers in different domains to build diversified content on the platform.
D. Voice search feature
E. Admin analytical dashboard where Pink Paper can see how the project is performing and strategize and plan the platform accordingly
F. Improving SEO related services in the project over time so that relevant people get ranked in their content

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Hi team,

Looking forward to the feedback on the proposal.

Hi Rupin, thanks for sharing your proposal.

For clarity, how exactly will PinkPaper be integrated with Optimism? If I login with MetaMask will I be doing more than just using blockchain identity? I can see that you’ve already got a feature for making donations to authors, will that be done across the Optimism network Will there be other features eventually like minting posts and articles as NFTs like on Mirror, or are you intending to keep it simple and more streamlined?

I’m also really interested in the point you made that:

The sale of users’ social media data and it’s subsequent analysis and weaponization by political manipulation companies (like Cambridge Analytica) is one of the issues I think is most important to understand and counter in today’s world. It sounds like you think that your project might be able to avoid this data harvesting somehow, so I’d be really interested if you could expand on that.

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@MinimalGravitas Thank you for your question. We will be integrating Optimism as a network through which donations and toppings can be made to their favorite creators. Apart from this we will be developing social profiling system into our product which will have numerous use cases like projects can directly airdrop to creators with most engagement, etc. . We will be partnering with projects with the creator’s fund to fund the creators on the platform. At the moment we are not actively looking to integrate the NFT part but going forward we will discuss with all the ecosystem partners and include it as per the requirement of the community.

We are not storing any personal data. Anybody can just simply use the platform with their web3 wallet. All the data will be stored on IPFS and related decentralized services. We envision the product not just for web3 people but general people because of the ease being provided by web3-based login systems.

We will provide a censorship free platform which supports freedom of speech for everyone around the world.

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While it’s possible this may be a value add to optimism, the current state of the app still needs a lot of work and lacks users. I think this would fall more under the public goods category as these grants aren’t necessarily for project development.

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I have to agree to MoneyManDoug. The actual development is very much starting up and your objective seems to be very aligned to Public Goods.
If the intention of this grant is to develop the platform, I think you need to rethink at what stage you are before making a proposal. Also “Majority of the funds will be used for development of the platform” tell us nothing about the plan and steps to ensure you will move forward.

What is the plan here? Get 25k OP and… pay your own team to develop the platform?

As a concept this is project seems appealing and aligned to Optimism view, but you are very much at the Concept stage and need to polish it a lot more.

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@MoneyManDoug
We just launched our beta platform. We have collaborated with Finstreet , Mining Devs etc. as our initial creators on the platform. We have received more than 1500 users on our platform. Please find the Google analytics screenshot.

Pink Paper is an essential platform in a world where we have seen increased censorship by big tech. Channels like Bankless got banned in the past on YouTube so we essentially need a platform which supports freedom of speech and offers no censorship.

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Hi @Netrim I request you to please read the adoption strategy and roadmap part of the proposal. We have already gone pass the concept stage and currently running closed beta with selected content partners. Our development roadmap is already lined up above.

Regarding the move forward point we have developed the basic foundation on which we are currently building next set of features based on the community feedback. Every project has a big fund dedicated to creators and we have strategies around the same. We will be bringing a minimum of 150 creators and MAUs 10,000 in the near term of 6-9 months.

Majority of funds will be used in the development of the platform and we will use the rest of funds to bring the initial set of creators.

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@MoneyManDoug @Netrim please refer to our guide for publishing on the platform:

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Hi Optimism community thank you for the feedback. I have changed the proposal status to Ready to take it to the next step.

We are looking forward to Optimism’s support in providing a censorship-free decentralized publishing platform to protect freedom of speech.

You cannot change this proposal to ready.

I will copy this comment from OpUser since he did the summary:
now the process is 3 weeks long.

  1. feedback here from community.
  2. feedback from delegate in second week , once you have explicit approval from 2 delegates, you can mark your proposal as ready
  3. voting

I strongly advice to read up Operating Manual of the Optimism Collective (v0.2.0)

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Thank you @Netrim for the guidance. We changed the proposal to ready based on previous guidelines as new ones are published 4 days ago. Can you please tag the delegates or guide me on how to get their feedback on our proposal?

The Operating manual has the steps you need to follow.

Previous guidelines stated you needed a delegate approval, which you hadn’t gotten.

We are putting this proposal for review by delegates now. To summarise the feedback the community has liked the project and its importance in supporting the freedom of speech by providing a censorship-free decentralized publishing platform.

There were questions regarding the project stage which are answered as the platform is live and we are working with a closed set of publishers in the first phase to improve the experience. One can visit the platform and publish: https://pinkpaper.xyz/

For the publishing guide please refer to the following link:

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Screenshot 2022-08-29 131757

This summarizes the platform features and problems we aim to solve. Please let us know if there are any further questions regarding the proposal.

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Thanks for the proposal! Under the ‘Grant category:’ field, please specify which committee should review your proposal (NFTs and Gaming, Tooling, or DeFi).

Hi, @lavande I have updated the grant category to Tooling. Thank you.

I would suggest applying for a grant once you have launched on optimism and have some form of analytics.

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Hi, @Bobbay_StableLab we have shared the analytics already in the above replies. We are requesting this grant from Optimism to support this as a public good protecting freedom of speech and developing a censorship-free platform where anyone and everyone can freely express their views and opinions.

Hi community,

We have added the following features:

  1. Scheduling for future dates and times for articles
  2. New content templates for the publishers and creators
  3. Crowdfunding contracts developed

We are currently revamping the content page’s landing page and UI.

Please visit https://content.pinkpaper.xyz/ to check

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