Shrine House

At Shrine House we believe that the biggest asset an enterprise can have are its people. For us that means artists, producers, engineers as well as the users that build the Shrine House community. We have developed a platform that ensures artists are supported in a symbiotic relationship with the community members who invest in them. This human-centered approach places Shrine House within the vanguard of the future of blockchain technologies as the first decentralized, community governed record label. A record label where users share in the glory and profit from an artist’s success. A record label where artists are no longer having 80% of their revenue taken by a centralized corporation. Decentralization was created to tear down barriers and limitations found in the old way of doing business. It’s our belief that Shrine House is the next logical step forward. [Artist Staking] After an artist has gone through the verification process investors are able to stake $Shri in them as a validation node. Staking in an artist yields a variable APY based on the artist's performance on and off of the platform. The artist grants a higher yield to investors proportional to the amount of new followers and users they get during any individual validation circuit. Investors are further incentivized to stake in artists by receiving $Shri when staking Ethereum and are gifted air drops when their artist participates in community held events sponsored by Shrine House. We believe crypto communities should be fun just as much as they are profitable. While we are aiming for our protocol to main-net before the end of fiscal quarter four 2021, there are a myriad of things we are pursuing to facilitate the ideology and vision of Shrine House before the label aspect of it is even functional. The total amount invested in one artist goes into their own liquidity pool that they can borrow from to cover costs of their project. This could be recording costs, music videos, marketing budget etc. The artist can only borrow funds relative to the amount of collateral they provide. This is done to hold the artist accountable. [Validation] A validation circuit monitors the balance of an artist's allowance. After an artist’s proposal for a loan is accepted the funds are borrowed from the pool investors have staked in the artist. The artist, now in debt, means the node they represent becomes entrenched. There are only two ways the node can become valid again. The artist can either manually replenish the balance of the pool or they can fulfill the Proof of Progress criteria to automatically restore the balance. This method incentivizes artists to grow their following and bring people onto the platform as Shrine House ambassadors to avoid the interest fees of their loan. Once the validation circuit is complete the APY offered to investors increases relative to the artist's new amount of followers and investors. By incentivizing new users to be brought onto the platform we create the conditions to facilitate a network effect. A network effect will drive up demand for the utility token in orders of magnitude. By having a token with strong utility and demand $Shri is an investment that will have a strong price bed and be able to thrive even under the duress of a bear market. In later iterations we will facilitate collaboration between artists, engineers, producers and influencers to further drive up the utility of $Shri. [Proof of Progress] -Serves as a means of validating loans for the protocol -Ensure artists are acting in good faith and using funds appropriatelyIsolate performative weaknesses of the artist. -Without financial limitations, there must be a problem that needs addressing if they are under-performing -Determine the APY granted to users who are staked in the artist -Allow artists to repay loans at discounted rates Proof of Progress is a validation protocol that pulls data from the artist’s social media and streaming accounts in real-time and weighs that against their performance on the platform. At the time of verification, this data is grabbed to establish a baseline for the rest of the artist’s time spent as a validation node*. Throughout each validation circuit this data is continually audited and the percentage of growth is reflected in the yield each artist node can offer an investor. If the artist is underperforming the interest rate that artist grants will also go down or get slashed. The platform is designed, however, to ensure users do not lose funds, they only lose potential gains. Investors are incentivized to share the artist with their friends and community because the artist’s growth results in a higher APY they receive from that artist. Artists are incentivized to grow their following and bring new people onto the platform. The protocol automatically detects fraudulent growth patterns and any artist found to be using bots to pad their numbers will be immediately banned from the platform with all funds refunded to their investors and none being returned to them. After one month of listing onto the platform the artist nodes APY will be locked. From this point on the artist will be able to draft up loan proposals to be approved by the users staked in them. The proposals can vary in the length of time that the artist must either repay the loan or complete the required PoP circuit. At the beginning one month, two month, and six month loans will be available. This method effectively turns the users on the platform into Shrine House’s label executives.
*Artist, Validation Node, Artist Node and Node can be used interchangeably [Verification] After registering an account and going through the verification process, artists will be able to list themselves and their creative pursuits onto the platform. It is here that community members will be able to view available music, a brief bio, social media links, and demos of future projects. The verification takes place in two steps. The first is that users who are staked in the Shrine House platform must approve of each artist that’s submitted for verification. After that an artist must go through our KYC process. All of this is done to ensure confidence in our verified artists, hold artists responsible and grant staked users more responsibility. Social Media LinksStreaming LinkFunding Plan (What the artist needs funds for)Related ArtistsKYC We are investigating ways to make our protocol more and more decentralized as time goes on, however, security is something of utmost importance. To make our protocol as secure as possible we will require verified artists to go through a “KYC” or “Know Your Customer” to ensure the identity of artists that are going to be featured and able to apply for loans. While any artist can list on the platform, only verified artists will be insured by our safety modules. This way, users will be able to make investments wisely and mitigate potential risk. The platform will offer precedence for artists who have been verified and verified artists are more likely to be featured in community events held on Twitch and on the front page of the platform. Unverified artists are unlikely to receive featured spots and their account will be limited.

Shrine Token Contract

In addition to implementing the standard ERC20 methods, the Shrine token contract allows users to stake artists and for artists to receive loans.

Artists can request to borrow up to 50% of their total delegated stake. If approved, tokens are sent and their profile becomes entrenched.

While entrenched, users are unable to remove or delegate additional stake to the artist until the full loan amount has been repaid, including accrued interest. Each time an artist interacts with the contract, interest is calculated based on the predefined interest rate and the duration of time since the loan balance was last updated.

When a user stakes or unstakes an artist, their staking earnings are automatically calculated for the elapsed time since rewards were last distributed. In addition, a 3% staking fee is applied to the transaction to fund the Shine House platform.

Staking reward interest rates for each artist are based on their increase in popularity metrics, which we refer to as proof of progress.

Proof of Progress and Chainlink Integration

So in order to supply the artists' data that we needed to drive our proof of progress concept, we used Chainlink with an external adapter built from the NodeJS template provided in the Chainlink documentation, and configured it to return the value of the artist's popularity index, which is a metric from Spotify itself, that scores artists on a scale from 0 - 100. In our token smart contract, we can use this and calculate a variable APR for the staking rewards that is based on each individual artists' growth in this popularity index over time. In the near future, we are planning to use more metrics from other relevant social platforms so that the source of the data is a little more decentralized.

To actually use this information within our smart contracts, we're using Google Cloud Platform to host our external adapter, and our Chainlink Node, which uses Moralis's Speedy nodes as our Mumbai Matic Testnet Node provider. The Chainlink node is configured with the external adapter as a bridge, and it has the necesary jobs to communicate with it and retrieve data to use in our smart contracts.

We plan to use Chainlink more when we build the app out further and use data from more APIs as I mentioned earlier, and need to do more off chain computations that integrate with future smart contracts.