By popular demand, I'm finally ready to do a complete Mithril review. I've read their whitepaper, downloaded the Lit app, built a profile and played around with it and I'm now equipped to do a complete analysis of it.
So...What Is Mithril?
Mithril is a social media platform that launched in March 2018 by a Taiwanese team of developers. The project, for now, is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and uses a token distribution mechanism that they've called social mining. Just like so many all the other social media dapps they aim at disrupting the big social media titans by rewarding their users for creating value on the network. In this particular project, the social mining is designed to bring rewards to those who accumulate the most views and likes.
Mithril Services
Mithril Reward: The concept of rewarding people for creating valuable content is not new, many other dapps are working on the same idea. But Mithril is the first one to take into account the number of views a piece has. It seems, according to the whitepaper, that "likes" are worth a lot more than views. (5X more in the example they give)
Vault Application: At first, the vault is a wallet where users store, transfer and exchange their tokens. They are hinting that it will do much more than that...including analytics and earnings projection.
The Mithril Vault will feature reward estimation tools that can estimate a user's Mithril reward based on their recent contributions. The reward estimation tools will show users a rough estimate of their potential Social Mining Rewards.Connecting with Brick-And-Mortar Merchants: They seem to be very focused on the adoption of their local market in Taiwan and China. In their white paper, they talk about how they are currently working with clothing merchant to accepting their tokens.
My Review of Mithril
Pros
The Lit App is Really Cool
After downloading the app, I was amazed at the quality of it. It's like an Instagram that only focuses on the story feature. If you are not familiar with the concept of "stories", it's like an automated news feed. Once you have a user with many uploaded photos or videos, you can just have "his story" displayed one image at the time.To be honest, it seems like a great app to get people to use blockchain without knowing it.
They Are Blockchain Agnostic
Currently, they are using the Ethereum blockchain to power their token. But, according to their whitepaper, they are not ideological about it. In time, they will use the blockchain that best fit their needs or even start their own blockchain if necessary.
This is a smart choice because if they need to scale fast, Ethereum might just not cut it at this point in time to deal with a large volume of transactions.
Focused on Mobile
Their user experience is based on the mobile market, which is where most of the social media world actually live. Many social media dapps forget that fact and therefore missing a huge opportunity to gain users. Focusing on a mobile app also forces the development team to make sure the user experience is great...otherwise bad reviews will come.
Cons
Easy target for abuse
If the only identity verification is a phone number or a social media network profile, their "views + like" social mining is totally ready to be abused by a network of bots.
Not censorship resistant
From reading the reviews on the Google Play Store, I discovered that certain users were banned. That means that each app as the ability to ban any user they want. For many blockchain enthusiasts, that's a big no-no.
Don't get me wrong, there as to be a way to deal with bad behaviors and doing moderation. But when an app can ban user outright, take their content, lock their funds and boot them out...not cool.
Where is the data stored?
As far as I know, its stored on the servers of that Lit App. There is no way it's hosted on Ethereum and their whitepaper doesn't mention where it is stored. After reading the Personal Data Protection Policy of Lit, I'm fairly sure of it.
Conclusion
We have to keep an eye on the development of this project. In my opinion, it is the best contender to the Steem Blockchain...even though they have 2 years of development to catch up on(Scaling is tough). Actually, their marketcap is not too far from the one of Steem. As of today, STEEM is at $367M while MITH is at $223M
Resources:
Website: https://mith.io/
Whitepaper: https://mith.io/whitepaper.pdf
Blog: https://medium.com/mithriltoken
Telegram: https://t.me/MithrilChat
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MithrilToken
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://dappcentral.io/review/social-media/mithril-review/