Governments, corporations, and individuals can’t be trusted to control something as vital to the human experience as the forum in which we gather. Social media in this modern era of digital connectivity needs to allow the free flow of expression to exist unencumbered by bias. Therefore the only solution is web3-based social media. 

The Chive project is a smart contract and NFT-based project built on Ethereum blockchain. It has been designed to be decentralized once distributed nodes have been developed, tested, deployed, and activated. 

Chive can be boiled down to two simple ideas. The first is that web3 is a more effective way to produce spaces for free speech to thrive. The second is that existing web2 social media has missed an opportunity to completely gamify their platforms. Part of the reason we believe this is the case is because to truly gamify social media you cannot just give the illusion of ownership. You must have real ownership. This is where the Chive Media Network comes in. 

We intend to build a platform where both viewers and content creators are competing as if they are in a game. To do this we will use APIs that track both viewers and users and create leaderboards that show things like hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and lifetime scores of channels and individual users. 

We will use things like notification overlays on the content viewers are watching to announce changes in rankings as a way to promote more interaction with viewers and content creators. These leaderboards will lead to awards such as trophies, and these trophies will have value where the holders can get either small rewards or discounts holding these trophies. They will be mintable and tradeable as NFTs and therefore retain or potentially increase in value. 

In the future we will incorporate simple, easy-to-build, low-graphic games into our platform where these trophies will take on a larger significance, thus creating a higher demand for them, a greater value for the most rare ones, and an incentive to buy and sell them on the secondary market. 

To put it simply, content creators and users can go about making their content or viewing content just like they have on all other forms of social media. Their views and content will contribute to the value of ad sales. But for those who wish to engage in the competition of social media, and then later on down the road play the slate of games offered on the platform, their activity on the platform will be rewarded with bigger advantages in those games, as well as small benefits in the form of rewards or discounts on the social media platform. 

We believe this will create a dynamic social media ecosystem where people feel rewarded for creating content and watching content, and therefore will encourage creators and users to spend more time engaging with the Chive ecosystem.