Asia Blockchain Review recently spoke to Treasure Lee, Founder and CEO of Pibble, a social media platform based on blockchain that focuses on properly compensating content creators for their contributions. Lee talked about rewarding PIB tokens to users, the company’s innovative blockchain copyright system (BitDNA), increasing the number of users with blockchain, as well as her vision for the future of content management.

Asia Blockchain Review: What was your inspiration for founding Pibble?

Treasure Lee: After working and running IT companies for 18 years, I really needed to get away from it all. So, I dropped everything and packed my bags to head to Africa. While there, I realized that so many of the modern conveniences I took for granted at home were inaccessible in many parts of the world. After returning to Korea at the peak of Bitcoin fever, I learned about blockchain and its potential to help.

With that in mind, I wanted to create Pibble to empower people, whether they had access to a bank account or ID, to be able to earn from their photos. Almost everyone has a smartphone these days and has beautiful photos to share. I created Pibble as a way for people to earn through their photos by granting rights while democratizing and internationalizing the gains from content.

 

ABR: What is the main feature that differentiates Pibble from other existing social media platforms?

TL: The whole foundation of Pibble is that average users and content creators are not getting paid for their content. Right now, Instagram and Facebook’s traffic is purely from users posting on the site. However, the company keeps all of the revenue from their ads they are pushing on users.

Pibble will turn this paradigm on its head. By posting a photo/video, users can actually earn from every like they receive, creating an automatic means of content monetization. Our goal is to have everyone see value from their content, whether they have 10 or 10 million followers. We think that this core model provides enough differentiation to set us apart from the existing social media platforms.

 

ABR: Can you tell us more about PIB tokens and its uses?

TL: As anyone interested in blockchain knows, utility coins have developed a bit of a negative reputation. Too many utility coins struggled to find a way to actually provide the utility promised in their name or how to create a coin that benefits both holders and provides a real use case within a platform.

However, Pibble token is completely integrated into every aspect of the platform ecosystem, both in the way you earn and use PIB. While the complete list of uses for PIB is long, it can be used for purchasing digital and offline goods, charity donations, crowdfunding campaigns, pushing P2P marketing campaigns, purchasing more upvote power, and many more additional functions as we continue to add more functionality to the app.

 

ABR: How will your plan to compensate content creators work?

TL: When creating the ecosystem for Pibble, we thought hard about the best way to reward content creators while preventing abuse and spam from overtaking the platform. We want to reward users for all the social actions they take in the platform. Our result was an interlocking system, where uploading content provides users with Pibble Green Brush (PGB) that can only be used to upvote others. This effectively solves the issue of spamming to maximize rewards. When a user upvotes a photo, their PGB disappears and the content creator is rewarded with that amount in Pibble Red Brush (PRB), which can be converted into PIB tokens.

Additionally, users can upload and sell their photos within our digital commerce store, for either the stock image market or as a new revenue stream for indie/professional creators. The full-resolution image is protected from view until someone makes a purchase. This has interesting use cases for content creators to help fund their different creations. Webtoon artists can monetize without ads, indie artists can create a “virtual tip jar” to fund future projects, and entertainers can control their image rights while profiting from the image themselves.