If you head over to the #snaxbountyprogram tag, you will find hundreds of posts written on Snax. Being curious, I went on to learn more about it.
According to the team,
Snax is a blockchain platform. It was created for people to receive rewards for their social activity (tweets, Instagram posts, and so on) and to make instant free micropayments without leaving their favorite social platform. Developers can use Snax blockchain to create decentralized social applications (social dApps).
Snax is built on top of EOS and just like Steem, they believe that there is value in content created on social networks and users should be rewarded for them. However, instead of creating a content creation platform, they decided to use an overlay and integrate with existing social networks instead. Over in this article, they compared themselves head-on with Steem.
By connecting to existing social networks, Snax reward authors with SNAX tokens for the value the author provides. "Value" is determined by attention rate which the team defines as,
Attention Rate is a metric that being calculated for every post separately. It shows how much attention this post has received and can be calculated on the basis of interdependent factors:
- quality of the audience of your social media account
- amounts of interactions with the post (likes, comments, reposts)
- quality of interactions with the post (who made a comment, and/or reposted)
So far, Snax has only integrated with Twitter and they will be integrating with Steem on 14 May.
To register on Snax, you need to make a Twitter post. Once done, you will need to create your wallet which requires a Chrome extension. After that, you will just need to unlock your wallet in order to login to the site and see your earnings.
While everything seems to be easy and simple, I am particularly concern about the fact that a browser extension is required for this to work. Browser extensions are very powerful applications. With the right permissions, they are able to intercept all your web traffic and even access your clipboard. Snax is not a well known name yet and it is always wise to read deeper into the extension I just installed.
Using CRXcavator, I found that there are no known vulnerabilities on the extension. However, the permissions required did get me slightly concerned.
First, the "webRequest" permission is required. Chrome webRequest permission allows the browser to intercept and even modify your web traffic. However, this permission is only requested for the Snax website and Twitter. While I can understand that this permission is perhaps required to login to the Snax website, I am baffled by why it is required for Twitter.
Next, they also requested for the "clipboardRead" permission. I also find this puzzling as I do not see any functions which the extension offers that require this. Having this permission will allow the extension to read what is in my clipboard, which may contain sensitive information such as passwords.
I have yet to read Snax's whitepaper in detail to understand what they are trying to achieve. But based on their roadmap, I supposed they want to be a platform where social influencers are rewarded for their content and advertisers can make use of SNAX tokens to get these influencers to write about their products. It will be some kind of a decentralized social media advertisements marketplace.
Overall, I think Snax is an interesting project. The cool part is that they did not conduct an ICO and they are distributing their tokens through various airdrops and bounty programs. Just like the one they are running for Steem right now. However, since they are a relatively unknown project with an anonymous team, we need to be really careful when it comes to using things that provided by them (e.g. the Chrome extension). While I see no harm in signing up, I recommend to disable the extension when you are not logging into their site. Just to be safe :)
Thanks for reading and do let me know your thoughts on Snax.
This article is created on the Steem blockchain. Check this series of posts to learn more about it and start writing on an immutable and censorship-resistant content platform:
