LONDON (Bywire News) - Galaxy EOS VC fund company Everipedia has partnered with the Associated Press to provide a trusted and transparent oracle for election coverage. The move enables the group to fulfil its vision using the trust and transparency of the blockchain to cover the latest news.
Everipedia’s co-founder, Sam Kazemian, said:
“We wanted to expand the concept of on-chain knowledge to ensure that oracles outside of price feeds for stablecoins can be brought on-chain. This includes election results, news headlines, legislation passed or sports scores.”
He said they pitched the idea to the Associated Press because they are the ‘gold standard’ of election reporting. The group has been reporting on US elections for more than 150 years and is used by major news outlets as sources for their stories.
“This was an incredibly cool demonstration of our first verified oracle product,” he added, “and we were really excited to be working with them.”
The AP dataset was deployed to the EOS network as well as Ethereum with the EOS implementation pushing the cryptographically signed information to the public network. However, EOS was chosen for the project thanks to its superior clock time speeds.
“The main thing with oracles is that the rate of refresh is limited by the actual rate of refresh of the chain itself,” adds Kazemian. “So, if a block time is ten minutes, nothing can be updated quicker than 10 minutes. On EOS with half-second block times, it’s actually quite convenient.”
Bringing information on a chain with its origin source requires, he said, a high rate of a refresh and involves many state changes which do not have a lot of value changes. “I think that capability is fantastic on EOSIO and it’s been a treat to actually do that,” he added.
The election has served as a useful demonstration of the technology. Going forward they hope it can be used to combat the spread of fake news.
My personal hope is that this represents the first step towards fighting misinformation and fake news,” adds Kazemian. “Obviously, with these specific election results, it’s more of a demonstration. But after the election, both in terms of our ongoing relationship with AP and new partners, one of the things we’ve been talking about is how do we build the infrastructure so that spreading fake news is more difficult and more costly for people who propagate it?”
Fake news has never been more prominent during this election and it continues with the President still sticking to false claims of voter fraud. However, it may also mark the point that the fightback against fake news began to take shape.
Social media giants such as Twitter upped their game to fight the spread of fake news on their platforms with Trump’s Tweets regularly being deleted for containing misleading information.
However, the problem is far from resolved. The Blockchain, with its verifiable, transparent and immutable storage of data will play a crucial part in making sure that happens.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)