Stefan Thomas, CTO of Ripple and inventor of the Interledger Protocol, has decided to step down from his position and launch his own project, called Coil. The Coil project will aim to allow micropayments for content management. But Thomas will not sever the ties with Ripple completely - the Coil service will use the Interledger Protocol, and carry XRP tokens for monetization.
https://twitter.com/justmoon/status/996012724235759616
Micropayments are not a new idea for monetizing content. However, the idea failed to take off, as online payments were cumbersome. Yet Thomas aims to reintroduce the concept, as an alternative to the current ways of monetizing that annoy users. The Coil project aims to monetize through XRP micropayments, instead of supporting content by advertising, paywalls, or selling user data.
The XRP digital asset remains volatile, and still has not managed to justify the expectations for a $5 price and real world usage. But Coil may be one small addition to the Ripple ecosystem, which gives usability to the asset.
XRP prices steadied at $0.74, still exhibiting weakness below $1.
!Ripple!
Currently, there are other platforms that monetize user-generated content, but professional journalism is rarely monetized by crypto coins. The one exception is the launch of a Monero script on some publications, in lieu of advertising revenues.
But for now, the exact structure of Coil is unknown. According to Thomas:
“Coil will use Interledger to make the web a more vibrant market for apps and content, where everyone’s contributions are rewarded.”
It is possible that the Coil project in a way resembles Steemit, where content creators and curators are rewarded. There are other similar paid social media, with different levels of fairness. The biggest criticism is that those paid social media fail to generate quality content, and instead rely on mutual upvotes to monetize recycled postings. Bots are also used on those networks.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
