The Etho Protocol is a decentralized project to its core. The project was born out of a dream to build an entirely democratized internet free from the centralized hands of corporate greed, where all data and information is completely held in the public domain, giving governance of this data back to the masses via consensus and democracy.

The Problem:

Free-speech and anti-censorship are the cornerstone of any democracy but with the rise of deplatforming and online censorship, media platforms our society relies on are becoming more and more unreliable for the average user. Free-flowing information and ideas are almost always catalysts for the next stages of societal evolution and exponential technological growth. Online censorship today ranges from something as small as a single blocked tweet all the way up to a full corporate website being banned if the messaging doesn’t fit an individual platforms definition of appropriate.

The Solution:

Giving the power back to society via consensus to determine a broader definition of appropriate information and messaging is the project goal. It has accomplished this in three ways:

-Decentralize content & storage hosting, so no single entity has control over what is appropriate.

-Utilize community and user consensus to moderate this decentrally stored content.

-Maintain a closed-loop economy around steps one and two to encourage participation, reward contribution and network utilization.

Decentralized Content & Storage Network:

At the core, the Ether-1 Network is built on top of an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) blockchain, utilizing a hybrid POW (proof-of-work) consensus mechanism and a network of community-owned collateralized nodes which all contribute storage and bandwidth to the network.

Decentralized Governance for Content Moderation:

Pure free-speech and anti-censorship comes at the cost of any piece of data being allowed on the network unchecked. It balances this with allowing collateralized node/network participants to moderate content based on on-chain decentralized voting. Governance participants are rewarded for their participation in the system.

Economy Built to Reward Participation and Utilization:

All network participants are rewarded monetarily in our native coin (ETHO) for their contributions. Collateralized node owners and miners are all rewarded each block with a share of the block reward. Node owners also receive a split of network storage revenue generated from data uploads.