Audius Music-Sharing Blockchain Project Shares New ‘Loud’ And ‘Audius’ Token Information

New blockchain startup Audius recently finished a funding round that brought in about $5.5 million to their platform. As soon as it ended, Audius took to the press to discuss how the company plans to operate upon launching. However, their platform is not due for launch until next year.

Their goal is to make a platform that is full decentralized for artists. Artists will be able to control their own intellectual property and where it is distributed, forming a more solid connection with the fans that purchase it. Now that this protocol has been established, they can move forward with the next step – publishing the company’s whitepaper.

In an email to CoinDesk, Roneil Rumberg, the co-founder of Audius, said that the main different between them and similar platforms is that they have no centralized infrastructure.

He also added,

“We strongly believe in the value of a fully transparent, decentralized and community-driven effort to share the world's audio content.”

Right now, there are two tokens in the works – loud and audius. Loud will be used for transactions, while audius is meant to be more of a governance token. The loud tokens are valid for both creators and listeners, based on the information offered with the whitepaper.

The whitepaper also says,

“[Audius will be] used by service providers to participate in staking protocols and earn proceeds from the minting of loud tokens,”

it continues.

“This separates the mechanism for price-stable value transfer (loud) from the mechanism for value capture and accrual (audius), better serving the needs of users of each token.”

Anyone who would get loud tokens receive compensation, which would be “in proportion to how much value they create.” However, the ones that only work on the protocol would find the audius tokens more to their needs.

The startup wants to ensure that this kind of protocol is something that anyone can benefit from. However, it is crucial for users to follow the rules of the protocol. With the built-in algorithms, the price for the loud token should remain stable, and the company plans to create or burn tokens on an as-needed basis to achieve this.

Along with the two tokens, there is also a decentralized storage protocol, an upload manager, a payment and revenue sharing protocol, and a “discovery” protocol, which all hold together the infrastructure.

To elaborate, Rumberg said,

“Our architecture includes novel work around how decentralized content discovery can work, including a crypto-economic mechanism for enforcing honest behavior of services indexing content. Discovery services index the Audius blockchain and are paid by other network participants to query this dataset.”

Governing the platform is still a necessary evil. There will be two meta-protocols that make this possible, which will include a group of arbitrators who must solve disputes in the community, and a group of audius token-holders that will propose improvements.

By early next year, the crypto community should have their alpha version in place. The full launch is scheduled for the end of 2019.