CLOUT: Not Your Average ICO

The rise of cryptocurrency over the past five years has brought with it a degree of mainstream awareness and, concurrent to an increased awareness, a strong demand for news and information related to the space.

A number of media outlets have positioned themselves as authorities in the sector, outlets like Coindesk, and many of the big-name players in financial sector – Forbes, Bloomberg, etc. – are dedicating substantial resources towards bitcoin and cryptocurrency coverage.

Right now, however, the media and information landscape in cryptocurrency is incredibly fragmented. For every quality article or valid opinion, there are 10 more of little or no worth and this has made it difficult to reliably and consistently find valuable information related to space.

One company is trying to remedy this problem – Clout.

Clout is about to conduct an initial coin offering (ICO) targeting the funding of a platform that has the potential to change the way individuals create, consume and distribute content and information in the cryptocurrency space.

In an attempt to figure out how it intends to do this, we took a look at the company’s white paper (available here).

Here’s what we found out.

Clout bills itself as the following:

“CLOUT aims to become the standard in quality for everything crypto; news, media, and investment. It is an online based integrated software that gives cryptocurrency investors a home.”

That’s pretty vague, but subsequent to this initial description the white paper goes on to outline the platform’s concept – it’s essentially a content distribution and creation database with a social element. Think Facebook crossed with Steemit and then limit content type to bitcoin, blockchain and other cryptocurrency related areas and you’ll be somewhere close to what Clout is all about.

But these sorts of content sharing, social platforms already exist – what makes Clout any different from the existing options?

In a word, incentivization.

The Clout team has been able to create a model that harnesses the power of Ethereum based smart contracts to allow users and content creators to reward other users who produce and share quality content. The higher-quality a piece of content or information is, the higher the number of Clout users that reward said piece of content and the higher the likelihood of the content appearing in the newsfeeds of users.

The model works as follows.

Individuals who take part in the Clout ICO will be issued with a certain number of Clout tokens, with said number reflective of the degree of participation (i.e., how much they invest) in the ICO. These Clout tokens are representative of their investment but – and here is the interesting thing – a second token, called CLC, will be the unit of currency that users issue to reward creators and sharers for quality content.

Post ICO, participants will receive one CLC for every Clout they hold. So, if you buy 1000 Clout tokens, you will get 1000 CLC tokens. After that, CLC are generated at predefined periods and, again, issued at a rate of one CLC per Clout through auto genesis mining and smart contract distribution.

Every batch takes an additional year to be generated and each batch totals 100 million CLC.

For example, the first batch will be generated one year after the close of the ICO, the second batch will generate 2 years later, the third batch after the 3rd year, etc.

What this means is that not only are investors rewarded for holding Clout post-ICO, in the sense that the Clout that they hold automatically generates an income in CLC, but, over time, the CLC supply will approach a predefined limit and, in turn, should appreciate in value in line with standard supply and demand laws.

So we’ve got a platform designed to incentivize users to share and create quality content and we’ve got a token system in place that rewards holders both for participation and for accumulation – how is Clout going to make money out of this?

Primarily, and initially, advertising.

In the content creation space, advertising is king and the team behind Clout recognize this. The company is going to partner with other blockchain projects and, through said partnerships, promote various blockchain based entities.

But again, however, this promotion model is anything but standard.

The ability to allow users to determine the quality of an offering or of a service with CLC as their voice allows Clout to ensure that it’s only working with top entities. Against a backdrop of the ICO space right now, which is plagued with unreliable operators, this is going to be a major differentiator for Clout going forward.

Additionally, Clout holders are eligible to receive a maximum 2% of advertising revenue generated, aligning the interests of users with those of the team behind the development and operation of the platform itself.

To sum up, then, this is a platform that could really fill a gap in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space right now and therein lies its value to a potential investor in the upcoming ICO.

Tokens will be available here from October 27 as part of the official ICO, but anybody looking to jump in early can pick up some pre-sale tokens at a token price of $1 here.