THE ECONOMIC MODEL OF EPIK PROTOCOL.

4 min readAug 12, 2021

This article will aim to explain the economic model of EpiK Protocol. As such, it will be focusing on the following areas:

1. Principle

2. Participants

3. Knowledge Supply

• Knowledge Experts

• Bounty Hunter

4. Knowledge Storage

5. Knowledge Access

6. Governance.

PRINCIPLE

The native token of the EpiK Protocol is “EPK,” with a total supply of 1 billion. Full circulation is expected to take 50 years from the start of EpiK’s Mainnet.

The goal of this economic model is for each role in the ecosystem to maximize its own interests while working together to promote the growth of the EpiK’s decentralized knowledge vault.

PARTICIPANTS

EpiK Protocol is a collaboratively-created, trusted, and secure decentralized knowledge graph collaborative platform with sharing benefits, comprised of five core participants:

Knowledge Experts (KEs)
Knowledge Nodes (KNs)
Knowledge Gateways (KGs)
Bounty Hunters and
EPK holders.

A single user can take on multiple roles without conflict. EPK holders are accountable for the upkeep and governance of EpiK’s blockchain ecosystem.

KNOWLEDGE SUPPLY

This basically consists of the Knowledge Experts and the Bounty Hunters. Both are there to ensure the quality of data within the knowledge graph.

• Knowledge Experts (KEs)

KEs are the only ones allowed to upload Knowledge data in the system. To allow for data accuracy, supervision of the KEs’ work by the global community is done by disclosing the information on the KEs which can traced back to the respective KEs.

 Voting

New KEs can be nominated by existing KEs and while in the nomination stage, cannot nominate any other KEs. When a nominee receives more than 100,000 EPK community votes, he or she is immediately promoted to a KE, with the ability to nominate other experts and upload knowledge to EpiK’s Knowledge Vault.

 Returns

The KEs' returns are directly proportional to the amount of knowledge they contribute. The system will allocate 9% of each block reward to KEs based on the quantity of data contributed. By default, after the KEs are successfully elected, they will accept the rules and regulations of the "EpiK Protocol Knowledge Expert Commitment" issued by the EpiK Protocol Foundation.

• Bounty Hunter

Bounty Hunters contribute to EpiK’s ecosystem by assisting KEs in the process of knowledge extraction, fusion and refinement sp as to generate knowledge.

The EpiK Protocol anticipates constructing a super-large-scale knowledge graph in which KEs will breakdown and verify tasks, Bounty Hunters will assist in completing knowledge extraction subtasks, and nodes will store the refined knowledge.

EpiK Protocol will be capable of teaching machines to better understand human knowledge and broaden the horizons of AI.

KNOWLEDGE STORAGE

One of the requirements of the EpiK Protocol’s knowledge graph is the storage of knowledge in a tamper - proof environment, and decentralized storage technology is the most innovative and efficient solution for storing this knowledge permanently over time.

While in the knowledge graph collaborative scenarios of the EpiK Protocol, small bin-log files are produced at a high frequency by micro-collaboration in order to make the best use of network resources, EpiK Protocol intends to build a Layer 2 storage network tailored for knowledge graph collaborative platforms, based on Filecoin’s core technology.

Domain experts can use the knowledge node to store their data for free. The knowledge node can gain computing power after storing the data uploaded by the domain experts. Knowledge nodes that have completed file storage in the first N positions can get double the computing power for each new file uploaded by domain experts.

KNOWLEDGE ACCESS

The primary and most important task at hand is to maintain access to EpiK’s Knowledge Graph. As a result, the network’s total bandwidth will be limited at all times.

The EpiK Protocol will allow users to access data in an orderly fashion despite limited bandwidth resources, while also encouraging KNs to continuously optimize their bandwidth resources.

Users in the EpiK Protocol can receive 10MB of data access traffic per day for each EPK staked. The data access limit is updated on a daily basis.

GOVERNANCE

EpiK Protocol aspires to create an unending knowledge vault by combining decentralized storage and decentralized crowdsourcing to create a global collaborative decentralized knowledge graph.

However, in order to realize this vision, the community must be self-sufficient.

All governance rights will be passed from the Foundation to EpiK DAO after mainnet 2.0 "Hammurabi" is deployed, where all EPK token holders will be able to partake in initiating new projects and voting for consensus, further enhancing and preserving EpiK Protocol.

Specifics of the EpiK DAO governance plan, as well as the Knowledge Fund governance plan, will be elaborated on in the "EpiK Protocol Governance Whitepaper" at a later date.

IN CONCLUSION,

Token incentive mechanism and DAO governance model combine to create a global open autonomous community with four core capabilities: trust storage; trust incentives; trust governance; and trust finance. This allows global community users to work together at a very low management cost and continuously produce high-quality AI data.