Today The Olas Foundation announces its joining of the Nethermind Starknet program, receiving a grant of €100k. This move marks the continuation of building the Olas protocol, with the project established to revolutionise how we share and consume information. This grant, awarded to innovative Web3 projects, further affirms the Olas concept.
The Olas Foundation, which was launched in late April 2024, is a non-profit that stewards an open-publishing protocol development, harnessing blockchain technology to democratise access to non-private information, with the goal of becoming the most trusted media platform on the internet.
The team, founded by Ciaran Muuray, are targeting the issues facing legacy media and knowledge systems, such as dwindling revenue, misinformation and distrust.
Founded in 2018, Nethermind is an Ethereum execution client available to be run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. In April of this year Nethermind announced its launch of the Starknet Grants program, created to provide grants to developers they feel have the potential to bring innovative, user-facing products to the ecosystem.
The total allocated amount in this fund sits at $1 million, and today’s announcement notes Olas as one of the new projects to be receiving a grant accordingly. This strategic investment by Nethermind looks to propel Olas’ mission further and drive innovation in the media landscape.
In addition to the grant amount of €100k, benefits that the Olas team will be able to avail of include access to the ecosystem, expert guidance from the ecosystem developers and consideration for future funding opportunities.
Olas aims to create a media platform with:
- A sustainable economic model using quadratic funding, offering an alternative to traditional advertising and subscriptions;
- Content from independent contributors, with payouts based on performance in review markets, with its decentralised structure preventing any single entity from having control, distributing power to users;
- Market and reputation-based protocols will promote accuracy, integrity, and reliability;
- Quality control mechanism that looks to encourage knowledgeable readers to review information, maintaining high standards in news and information production.
It is the team’s belief that such technology will be a viable solution to contemporary media institutions, providing value to readers of the news, researchers and journalists alike.
With this grant, the Olas team will be focusing on the development of its Opinion Markets, which will serve as a platform where contributors to Olas offer diverse opinions and predictions on various subjects.
What sets Olas’ Opinion Market structure apart is the difference of its prediction market utilised from traditional prediction markets, with Olas’ looking to incorporate BTS (Bayesian Truth Serum) or SPA (Surprisingly Popular Algorithm).
This structure seeks to remedy current issues associated with traditional prediction markets, as bettors are currently more incentivised to bet on what they believe the majority believes to be true rather than what they know to be true themselves.
In order to achieve this new prediction market, and from that the Opinion Market, the team’s efforts will be centred on:
- Developing a working BTS algorithm in Cairo for on-chain execution on Starknet.
- Devising a method for private or secret voting on Starknet.