Q-Rate: A decentralized way of fighting against fake news
The team behind Warp – the data driven smart contracts on Arweave – have just dropped news on their latest project which is aimed at being a decentralised way of fighting against fake news, and giving the verdict power back to the community.
It is called Q-Rate, and its sole purpose is to address one of the biggest issues of the current Web – disinformation.
Let’s take a look!
Q-Rate
(Q-Rate was created as the Warp team’s hackathon project for Kyiv Tech Summit).
Q-Rate allows users to vote with unique QRT tokens whether a website contains fake information or not.
Fake news and disinformation have been around for as long as human communication has, if not longer. And in the digital age, these have found a medium (aka the internet) to spread like wildfire.
They cause major issues that sometimes have so much momentum that they cannot be stopped. Recently, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one could see this impact with many conflicting supposed-real stories hitting news outlets around the world.
Q-Rate wants to fight this problem and give the power of deciding what is right and wrong back to the people.
According to their blog:
The aim of this plugin is to spotlight the problem of fake news spreading on the Internet. It seems to be an increasing issue as the number of information on the web grows. It was visible especially when the Russian invasion on Ukraine started. Q-Rate wants to fight this problem and give the power of deciding what is right and wrong back to the people.
How Q-Rate works
Once someone has identified a site that has disinformation on it they can:
- Vote with their QRT tokens whether a website contains fake information or not.
- When the voting ends, tokens voted on the lost result are distributed proportionally between winning addresses.
- If the voting confirmed a website as fake news it is flagged.
At first, one might think that holders of large amounts of QRT tokens (aka QRT whales) might be able to manipulate this structure to their will (via the voting process), marking malicious sites as trustworthy, and vice versa.
To eliminate this issue, Q-Rate has implemented the concept of quadratic voting into the code. Using the concept of quadratic voting means that consecutive staked tokens cost more credits than the previous one(s).
This is crucial to make sure that the structure of the voting (and verdict) maintains its integrity, while protecting the interests of smaller participants/stakers.
The algorithm used for quadratic voting is:
cost to the voter = (number of votes) ^ 2
Q-Rate – which is a fork of native Arweave wallet ArConnect – utilises the Arweave blockchain and Warp contracts to work:
- Arweave manages the permanent and immutable storage of all the data.
- While the Warp contracts SDK handles the Q-Rate’s logic.
- The smart contract is written using Assemblyscript, and compiled into WASM.
Read Warp’s full blog post here.
About Warp
Warp is an implementation of data-driven smart contracts built on top of the Arweave network. Created by RedStone Finance, the Warp contracts boast extremely high speed.
Using the RedStone Warp Contracts, developers can benefit from:
- Fast transactions processed in seconds.
- A secure WASM sandboxed execution environment.
- A convenient set of extra tools for developers
The Warp SDK provides useful methods which ease the process of evolving smart contracts. For those unfamiliar, evolving is a feature in SmartWeave that allows the contract deployer to add more properties to the contract’s state – even after deploying the contract and its state files.
For more info on how to implement the SDK in your own contracts, please check out RedStone’s official readme here.
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