Deep Dive: Akita Social

What the hell is a community token?

When I was asked to take over Akita I spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating what it meant for Akita to be a community token. What the intersection was between my skillset & being a grassroots community ran crypto project.

For those that don't know I am not the founder of Akita. I'm just one of many overly involved community members that wanted to see Akita continue & thrive. I've had the immense pleasure of building for this community for nearly the last 3 years & I'm extremely proud of everyones commitment & resilience in sticking out some really hopeless times throughout the bear market of the last few years.

Akita Social is the end-all be-all of what I feel; after years of contemplation, a community token in its truest form is. Like many others, I believe blockchain & by extension cryptocurrencies have the power to supercharge transparency, fairness & equality in a truly trustless manner. I believe in the far future this technology will be the backbone of every major piece of global public & private infrastructure.

"Why does the world need yet another place to socialize on the internet?"

There's lots of options, lots you've never even heard of. Why not just build on X or some other pre-existing infrastructure?

Here's the issue - there are fundamental problems with every major social platform that currently exists:

• you don't really own any of it, not your account, not your content, not your relationships
• Advertisers are the real customer: you're the product
• Platforms have almost no real incentive to prevent sybil attacks, aka bots & metric inflation/manipulation
• Everything you do is being extracted, sold & analyzed
• Blackbox algorithmic curation is at best a echo-chamber reinforcement engine & at worst a means of mass manipulation & influence over the general public

Blockchain, specifically Algorand is perfectly positioned to solve these core problems & give us a social protocol we deserve.

How Akita Social Actually Works

1. Every single aspect is owned by you, your account, your content & your relationships. You even get to own the protocol (more on that further down). You have true self sovereignty over your social identity.
2. You're the real customer. Akita Social is a peer to peer micropayment social engine. When you reply, react or upvote someone else's content you are directly paying them. Small enough that it doesn't feel like anything to you but a piece of content that gets some good traction could make a good amount. The protocol itself takes a small sliver of the payment to fund things like interfaces & more. The fee is between 20% & 1% depending on the recipients impact score.
3. Let's talk about sybil resistance. There is no such thing as a sybil proof system. Attempts at such a system always end up with some kind of privacy invasive KYC service that still does not prevent sybil - it instead just creates a blackmarket for the identity information required. Instead we have opted to create what we call The Impact Score. It's a weighted score up to 1,000 based on a plethora of onchain metrics. The goal is to create hoops that are easy and natural for a person to jump through while being a difficult long term effort for exploiters with questionable PnL for the time, effort & money.

All on-chain & in real time we evaluate Account history, age, rating. NFD data, including verified socials from places like X & discord. Staking history & amount, Subscription status & more. The idea is fairly straight forward: do stuff onchain: get more impact. We're looking for statistical confidence that you're a human being interacting with the social protocol.

This impact system is directly applied to on-chain voting. Upvote someone's content and the rating of the content will rise proportionally to your impact score. While the tax calculation is based on the recipients impact score and will net them between 80 to 99% of the micropayment. Starting out the reaction cost will be 10 $AKTA but this can be changed by the Akita DAO. When you downvote content you don't directly pay the content creator, instead the payment goes directly to the protocol, the same goes for creating a post. Posts will cost 100 $AKTA starting out and can also be adjusted by the Akita DAO.

Posting, Reacting with NFTs, upvoting & downvoting, your profile, following, blocking, gating & actions. All of it is on-chain. You can't even have a profile picture or banner without it being an NFT.

Protocol Ownership & Growth

Since Akita Social is a grassroots community led project, we won't take VC money.

So how do we grow this thing? We came to the conclusion that to grow a grassroots project like this you need to give it away.

Introducing $BONES - our governance token.

Bones will be a large token supply purposed to decentralize ownership & management of the Akita Social protocol. Owning $BONES enables you to stake to participate in governing control of the protocols upgrades, content policy, moderation, social & service fees in addition to collecting a % of $AKTA flowing through the protocol as well as service fees from all Akita offerings: Staking, Shuffles, Auctions, Subscription fees & more.

Distribution:

• 5% allocated to team (50B)
• 15% allocated to service usage (150B)
• 12% allocated to $AKTA holders (120B)
• 20% existing synthetically inside the AKC & Omnigem collections (200B)
• 40% allocated to daily active users of the protocol (400B)
• 8% allocated to governance staking & participation

The hope is that by giving away ownership of the protocol to Akita's longterm supporters & active, social participants we can amplify the reach & network effect of Akita.

The Technical Stuff

Gates are the core on-chain membership & interaction qualifier. They are a set of smart contracts that check any on-chain verifiable piece of information and apply to who can react, reply & interact with contracts embedded in your post. They're also conjunctive. You can build your own unique qualifiers for post interactions. Want to run an airdrop but only if the user holds an NFT from your collection & has an NFD? Sure. Want to run a poll on which collection is most active but only let holders of those collections participate? Go for it? Want to run an auction that only your paid subscribers can participate in? Yes please. Want to airdrop to your first 100 followers? Awesome, go for it.

Gates are a new Algorand primitive for on-chain interaction gating.

Now for Actions. First some context: The chain tracks the relationships & metadata of all posts & interactions but the content itself is stored on IPFS. The Akita Social post content is an Algorand markdown file bundle. Not just a single file, this special flavor of markdown embeds hooks for referencing Accounts, Assets, Contracts & other bits of on-chain information & state. They can be linked together to create dynamic interactive mini-dapps. Because Algorand Markdown is so broad and flexible it opens us up to malicious smart contract interactions and therefore needs a safe & secure way of validating what contract interactions the Akita frontend should allow. In the future, other clients may have their own opinions for what contracts are safe.

Enter the Akita Action Registry.

Similar to the plugin safety system Akita Actions are voted in contract interactions bundled with metadata such as button call-to-action title, markdown block for how the contract should be interacted with. State within the contract to track & expose to the user as well as other helpful information like state refresh intervals and more.

These; along with new Gates, must be voted into the registry by the Akita DAO in order for the frontend client to allow seamless interactions without heavy warnings before the user proceeds to interact with the posts content & the contract interactions that the post exposes to the user. They will be thoroughly evaluated before they can be added to the registry.

So there you have it - what started as me trying to figure out what the hell a community token even is turned into building something entirely new. Akita Social isn't just another social platform or token - it's what happens when you actually put users first & let them own the whole damn thing. From the content they create to the protocol itself, everything is designed to be community-owned, community-governed, & community-driven. No VCs, no shareholders, no extractive bullshit - just a social protocol that's actually social. We're building the infrastructure for what social media should have been from the start, & we're giving it to the people who matter most - the users themselves. Whether you're here for the tech, the community, or just tired of being the product instead of the customer, Akita Social is being built for you. Let's see what we can build together.