Arclet and the Proof-of-Content Protocol

We are very pleased to announce our most recent project: Arclet! Arclet is a new peer-to-peer file sharing network and cryptocurrency that uses an energy-efficient blockchain to pay content creators, reduce piracy, incentivize community-benefiting behavior, and fully decentralize the functions of private trackers.

Arclet does this with a new consensus algorithm dubbed Proof-of-Content. PoC is based on Proof-of-Burn and extends it to require validating file hashes of hosted content and to avoid relying on an external source of entropy. This way, Arclet avoids the massive amount of wasted electricity inherent to methods such as Proof-of-Work and its derivatives, while retaining the concept of having something at stake committed toward a specific blockchain.

Arclet and Proof-of-Content allow the prevention of double seeding, where one party would earn more than the appropriate amount of block rewards by falsely presenting multiple copies of the same data to the network. By requiring a proof of burned coin alongside proof of data ownership, it becomes financially equivalent for mining to seed from one location or a thousand.

Mining power in Arclet scales with burned coin and amount of seeding data instead of processing capacity. This both reduces the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency and incentivizes long-term content retention. Other built-in mechanisms of the network incentivize uploading, creating content, uploading quality content, ensuring data integrity, and early adoption.

The Arclet white paper detailing all the technical aspects of the protocol will be published soon.