Blockchain startup Lino raises $20 million to create decentralized video community

Lino, a decentralized autonomous video economy startup, announced today that it has secured $20 million in funding through a private token sale. The new funding is led by China-based ZhenFund. Lino plans to use the new funding to build its video distribution network, what the startup called “crypto YouTube”using blockchain technology. Founded by Wei and his co-founders Qifeng Chen, Yihe Li, and Ziyue Wu, Lino aims to create a decentralized autonomous content economy, where content value can be recognized efficiently and all contributors can be incentivized directly and effectively to promote long-term economic growth.

According to Lino, “The reason companies like Youtube have enormous power over content creators is that they almost monopolize the means of distribution. Youtube, as a privately owned entity, has its fundamental interest in maximizing profit, which poses an underlying conflict of interest with content creators. The solution is to create a collectively owned, decentralized means of distribution, which ensures all content value is directly distributed to content creators and affiliated contributors without going through a privately owned entity as a middleman.”

“We believe that blockchain has enormous potential to empower video creators by decentralizing how their content is distributed and ensuring that their earnings go directly into their pockets,” said Wilson Wei, CEO of Lino. “We want to eliminate the middlemen in video streaming.”

While traditional video platforms have significant partnership hurdles and take up to a 60 percent cut, Lino uses blockchain technology to ensure content value can be recognized efficiently and all contributors can be incentivized directly to promote long-term economic growth.

Lino decentralizes video content by providing five key infrastructure components:

• Free Transactions: Users can use LINO tokens (LINO) to pay content creators.
• Incentivised Currency System: Lino’s incentivised model creates a sustainable digital content economy by incentivizing all community contributions including content creation, content redistribution, and infrastructure services.
• Proof of Human Engagement: Lino prevents bots from manipulating the reward distribution and prevents potential attacks.
• Proof of Content Value: Lino measures the revenue generated from content as its value reflected in the market, taking several measures to prevent the system from being flooded with fraud.
• Auctioning Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Storage: Lino offers a peer-to-peer, auction-based CDN. Lino also stores video and live stream playback in a decentralized manner by using an auction approach to achieve decentralization.

With Lino storage, rather than creating another Filecoin, the startup uses an auction approach to achieve decentralization. Each person can become a storage service advocator as long as he/she presents a proposal for any storage service that includes pricing and performance details. Lino is led by a team of scientists, doctors, Facebook and Google alumni.