Contentos (COS) is a blockchain project focused on content creation, distribution, and monetization with decentralized control.

Content creation today is heavily influenced by centralized platforms prioritizing ad revenue, often at the expense of creators’ true expression. These platforms dominate the landscape, controlling which content gets visibility and reaping most financial benefits. This imbalance raises concerns about genuine freedom of expression and equitable income distribution. Recognizing these issues, Contentos seeks to revolutionize the digital content ecosystem by empowering creators, consumers, and advertisers with a blockchain-based platform that ensures fair compensation and greater autonomy for all parties involved.

What is Contentos (COS)?

Contentos, co-founded by Mick Tsai, officially launched its Mainnet 1.0 on September 25, 2019. Tsai, former US Head of Operations and Product Director at LiveMe, alongside VP of Product Zac Nien and VP of Engineering Peter Wei, led the development. The blockchain platform is designed to support a decentralized digital content ecosystem, allowing for the creation, distribution, and monetization of content while ensuring the rights of creators are protected.

Starting in May 2018, Contentos undertook extensive preparatory work, including market analysis, technology research, and ecological operation model design. By July 2018, the team was building a creator community that integrated with existing platforms like LiveMe and PhotoGrid, educating users about blockchain technology. The project has raised approximately $31 million through private token sales in 2018, setting a solid financial foundation.

In 2019, Contentos focused on ensuring compatibility with various digital content applications and continued to expand its global creator base. The launch of the Mainnet marked a significant milestone, providing a stable infrastructure capable of handling 3,000 transactions per second with a system load rate under 1%. To address scalability, the team planned to introduce sharding in Contentos 2.0.

The vision behind Contentos is to create a global community where digital content can be freely produced, shared, and monetized, returning value to creators and users. The platform’s use of blockchain technology enables transparent and fair compensation for content creators and provides a tamper-proof record of ownership.

Contentos is unique as it operates as a nonprofit organization, which aligns with the ethos of blockchain as a community-driven technology. This structure ensures that decisions and developments within the platform prioritize community interests over profit.

How Does Contentos Work? Digital Content System and Sharding

Contentos operates as a decentralized digital content system that leverages blockchain technology to disrupt the traditional centralized media landscape. By enabling content creators to earn revenue without reliance on major platforms directly, Contentos facilitates a more equitable digital content ecosystem. Creators can freely produce, store, and distribute content, reaching consumers and advertisers directly. This setup fosters a marketplace where the value of content is measured transparently and fairly, and prices are determined in an open market.

The Contentos ecosystem is designed to support a variety of functions, including content distribution, copyright registration, and creator certification. It also incorporates social features such as likes, shares, and comments to enhance user engagement. Within this ecosystem, the COS token, Contentos’s native cryptocurrency, is utilized to reward contributions and pay for services. Transactions and rewards distributions are managed automatically through smart contracts, eliminating the need for intermediary oversight.

Contentos is built around several core values emphasizing transparency, creator ownership, and equitable revenue distribution. These values ensure content creators maintain control over their work and receive a fair share of the revenue generated. The platform’s commitment to these principles is supported by its structure as a nonprofit organization, which aims to maximize the benefits for all ecosystem participants.

Source: contentos whitepaper

One of the innovative aspects of Contentos is its use of intelligent content advertising. Smart contracts automate compensating creators based on the viewership and interaction of their content garners. This system allows creators and advertisers to form agreements that could include additional compensation if the content performs above expectations. Furthermore, Contentos facilitates direct transactions between users and creators through mechanisms such as subscriptions, donations, and the purchase of virtual gifts, all secured through smart contracts.

Additionally, Contentos addresses the problem of content selling within its platform. It enables content creators to transact among themselves; for instance, a video creator can request soundtracks from music producers, who can bid to contribute, thereby fostering a collaborative environment. Each transaction and the resulting profit sharing are transparently managed through smart contracts, ensuring clarity and fairness for all parties involved.

Despite these advantages, Contentos recognizes the challenges posed by existing centralized platforms, which typically marginalize individual creators and obscure the pricing and distribution of advertising revenues. In response, Contentos introduces a decentralized revenue distribution model. Pricing within this model is transparent, and artificial intelligence algorithms determine the value of contributions, which are then recorded on the blockchain for public verification.

The technical architecture of Contentos includes three layers: the protocol layer, the business layer, and the application layer. The protocol layer is built on a foundation that enhances Ethereum’s capabilities with IPFS for distributed storage and incorporates cross-chain technology for broader interoperability. The business layer provides blockchain and artificial intelligence audits alongside tools that incentivize content review by the community. The application layer enables the development of content-focused communities through APIs that package various components for developers.

Source: contentos whitepaper

The challenge of traffic distribution on centralized platforms, which often prioritizes content that maximizes ad revenue over quality or diversity, is tackled by Contentos through its decentralized approach. This model democratizes content visibility, supporting both established and emerging creators.

As the discussion transitions to sharding, a key technological implementation in Contentos, it is clear that this approach is set to enhance the platform’s scalability and performance further. Sharding will enable Contentos to manage many transactions and interactions efficiently, preparing it for increased dApp traffic and user engagement.

Sharding

Contentos is expanding its blockchain infrastructure to enhance scalability and prepare for increased dAPP traffic by introducing a sharding mechanism in Contentos 2.0. Sharding aims to distribute the workload and data across multiple partitions, or “shards,” making the system more efficient and scalable. This approach allows each shard to process transactions and store data related to specific dAPPs, effectively clustering state data and reducing the number of cross-shard transactions, which generally improves performance.

The proposed sharding model in Contentos 2.0 is structured around a Beacon+Shard architecture akin to what was planned for Ethereum 2.0. In this setup, the Beacon chain is the root, coordinating and maintaining the network’s overall integrity, while the shard chains handle specific dAPP transactions. This two-layer tree structure ensures that the Beacon chain is the single source of truth for the network, while the shards operate as independent entities under the Beacon’s oversight.

All nodes in Contentos 2.0 are required to join the Beacon chain, which manages and relays messages across shards. A node can choose to join one or more shards, but it must also maintain the state data of the Beacon chain in addition to its own shard data. This requirement ensures that all shard nodes are synchronized with the network’s main governance and transaction protocol, maintaining network cohesion and security.

Cross-shard communication is critical in this model, especially for token transfers between shards. For example, if a user on one shard wants to send tokens to a user on another shard, the transaction is split into two parts: the token deduction on the sender’s shard and the credit on the receiver’s shard. The Beacon chain plays a crucial role in relaying these transactions to ensure they are completed reliably.

However, challenges such as network jitters and temporary partitions can disrupt cross-shard communication, potentially leading to inconsistencies. Contentos 2.0 addresses these issues by requiring messages to retry until successfully delivered, ensuring the robustness and reliability of cross-shard transactions. Unlike some systems that rely on user-initiated retries, Contentos aims for a non-interactive solution that maintains consistency automatically.

In addition to handling transactions, the Beacon chain in Contentos 2.0 is responsible for shard management functions such as creating, suspending, and managing shard participation. This includes a dynamic shard management system that can adapt to changing network conditions and dAPP requirements, further enhancing the scalability and flexibility of the Contentos ecosystem.

With the introduction of sharding, Contentos not only aims to scale the network to support a higher volume of transactions but also sets the foundation for more complex dAPP functionalities that can operate seamlessly across multiple shards. This strategic update is expected to enhance the performance and capability of the Contentos blockchain significantly, ensuring it remains competitive and capable of supporting a wide range of decentralized applications. This transition to a more sophisticated sharding model marks a crucial evolution in Contentos’s development, poised to make a significant impact on its operational efficiency and scalability.

Source: contentos whitepaper

Contentos Use Cases

Contentos offers a transparent, decentralized environment where content creation, distribution, and monetization are facilitated securely and efficiently. Here are four key use cases of the Contentos platform:

• Identity Authentication: Contentos secures user identity across its network, providing a permanent, transparent credibility record for each user. This ensures that identities remain intact even if a specific content community or product ceases operation. It facilitates cross-platform recognition, enhancing security and trust across all applications within the Contentos ecosystem.
• Content Copyright: The platform ensures that each piece of content’s creation and transaction times are immutably recorded on the blockchain. This allows any user to verify ownership and view the complete history of any digital asset. This system deters plagiarism and unauthorized use, protecting creators’ intellectual property rights effectively.
• User Credibility: Through its public chain, Contentos maintains a comprehensive record of user behaviors and evaluations. This system promotes accountability, as all actions and reviews are permanently stored and linked to user identities. This transparency helps build trust within the community, as it rewards positive contributions and deters malicious activities.
• Smart Contracts: Contentos supports customizable smart contracts through its Contentos Virtual Machine (CVM), enabling automated and programmable transactions and agreements directly within the blockchain. These contracts can govern complex interactions and financial transactions, reducing the need for intermediaries and lowering transaction costs.

These are just some of the use cases that demonstrate the versatility of the Contentos platform in transforming the digital content industry. Each feature not only serves specific functional needs but also interlinks to create a cohesive and dynamic ecosystem.

What is the COS Coin?

COS is the native cryptocurrency of the Contentos platform, facilitating transactions and rewards. Its total supply counts 10 billion units, of which 5.11 billion are already in circulation (May 2024).

The COS coin is designed to facilitate various transactions and reward mechanisms within its blockchain network. This coin underpins an extensive reward system, where 35% of its total supply is earmarked for ecological rewards, to be released over a 12-year period. The ecosystem’s commitment to a fixed supply during this period ensures stability, with potential for additional token issuance subject to community votes to meet future developmental needs.

The allocation strategy for COS tokens is well-defined: 30% for private sales to investors and advisors, 10% reserved for the foundation, 15% for the founding team, and the largest share, 40%, dedicated to ecosystem operations and user rewards. The remaining 5% supports community cooperative activities. This strategic distribution is crafted to ensure robust participation and engagement within the Contentos community, providing a foundation for sustained growth and utility.

Source: contentos whitepaper

Funding from token sales is primarily allocated to research and development (70%), with the remainder aimed at promoting the Contentos platform and ensuring operational reserves. These funds support the project’s goal to revolutionize digital content creation and distribution through blockchain technology.

COS tokens not only incentivize content creation but also power the Contentos credit system, which rewards users based on their engagement and contribution quality. This system promotes a fair distribution of rewards and discourages malicious behavior by requiring a minimum credit rating for reward eligibility.

Overall, the COS coin is central to Contentos’s mission to decentralize content ownership and reward distribution, making digital content creation more rewarding and equitable for creators worldwide.

Contentos Main Features

The Contentos ecosystem offers a unique suite of platforms that leverage blockchain technology to empower creators and enhance the user experience across various digital media formats. Each platform within this ecosystem is designed to address specific needs while promoting greater user engagement and content monetization opportunities.

COS.SPACE

COS.SPACE is a distinctive platform within the Contentos ecosystem, designed as a virtual space for creators to showcase their work. Here, users can trade their SPACE on mainstream NFT marketplaces and customize their appearances on the map. Each SPACE acts as a personal gallery where users can display favorite NFT collections and videos. This platform is limited to 20,000 SPACEs, adding exclusivity and the potential for rarity as users can combine adjacent spaces. An upcoming product update, COS.SPACE Reality, will transform these spaces into a virtual reality environment, enhancing the way users interact with digital content at events like the COS EXPO 2023.

Source: cos.space

COS.TV

COS.TV functions as a dynamic content platform and blockchain explorer. It not only provides a wallet for COS token transactions but also offers a space where users can engage with video content and live streams from various creators. COS.TV supports content monetization through ad revenue and direct user donations, making it a comprehensive tool for creators to earn from their creative outputs. The platform’s integration with the Contentos mainnet ensures that all user interactions, such as likes and comments, are immutably recorded, enhancing transparency and trust in the digital content marketplace.

Source: medium.com/@contentoshome

PhotoGrid

PhotoGrid is another key component of the Contentos ecosystem, focusing on photo and video creation. It enables users to earn $COS by creating and sharing content within the app, which can then be converted into rewards. PhotoGrid integrates seamlessly with other DApps in the Contentos ecosystem, supporting a broader range of content creation and distribution opportunities. This platform is designed to empower creators, allowing them to retain control over their content and directly benefit from their creations without intermediary interference.

Source: medium.com/@contentoshome

These platforms are just some examples of how Contentos is reshaping the digital content landscape. By leveraging blockchain technology, Contentos ensures that creators are fairly compensated and fosters a more transparent and user-empowered content economy. This approach signals a shift towards a more equitable digital space where creativity is directly linked to value creation.

Is COS a Good Investment?

Contentos offers a decentralized platform for content sharing, addressing a clear market need by empowering creators with control over their content and earnings. This model has potential benefits like enhanced transparency and direct creator-to-consumer interactions. However, similar platforms such as Steemit have faced challenges in achieving widespread adoption, which suggests that while the idea is promising, success is not guaranteed. The success of Contentos will depend on its ability to overcome the hurdles that have impacted predecessors in this space.

How to Own COS?

To own COS, you can use the services of a centralized crypto exchange. Start by creating a Gate.io account and get it verified and funded. Then, you are ready to go through the steps to buy COS.

News on Contentos

According to what was reported on the official Contentos blog dated 16 April 2024, COS.TV has launched a new “Swap” feature that enables users to easily convert $ETH and $USDT to $COS by connecting their Web3 wallets. This integration simplifies trading and enhances user interaction within the platform. The swap process deposits $COS directly into users’ Mainnet wallets, streamlining their experience on COS.TV and fostering engagement with its comprehensive Web3 features.

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