What Is Everipedia?

Everipedia is a blockchain-based encyclopedia and decentralized platform that permits anyone to contribute to its knowledge repository. The goal of the protocol is to decentralize information curation and access on the web completely. This article will dive into what Everipedia is and how it works.

The platform is quite similar in function to Wikipedia, except that it runs on the EOS blockchain. Everipedia intends to improve on the Wikipedia model by offering information creators monetary incentives and allowing for a more varied repertoire of content.

Rather than having a centralized body control the flow of information on the internet, individual contributors who own the protocol's native IQ token can create articles about anything as long as they have provided credible sources.  

Everipedia has created a handful of blockchain-based DApps to achieve its goal of neutralizing centralization in the information sector. Some well-known products of the protocol include the Everipedia encyclopedia, their blockchain-based encyclopedia; PredIQt, a prediction market and automated market maker (AMM); HiIQ, meant for staking IQ tokens; and Everipedia OraQles, a blockchain Oracle.

What is IQ (Everipedia)? Quick facts:

• Everipedia is a decentralized encyclopedia that began as a fork of Wikipedia and runs on the EOS blockchain.
• Everipedia allows users to create and edit informative content and rewards them with its native IQ token.
• The protocol allows users to stake their IQ tokens, granting them the power to vote on matters concerning the platform's future.
• Everipedia has several other innovative products in its ecosystem, such as PredIQt, HiIQ, and Everipedia Oracles.

How Does Everipedia Work?

Everipedia was built on the EOS blockchain and is powered by the IQ token, which is used in its governance and reward system.

Everipedia has a three-module system that helps the network eradicate centralization and ensure the immutability of its blockchain. They are the token module, the governance module, and the article submission module. These three modules work hand in hand and are the foundation on which the protocol stands. 

Despite its decentralized and open-source nature, Everipedia has gone to great lengths to prevent misinformation from its contributors. So, how does Everipedia ensure that all content on its platform is unbiased and of decent quality? Editors thoroughly screen every piece of content created on its platform before being accepted.

Furthermore, the protocol has a practical framework to curb the actions of malicious participants. Before submitting write-ups to Everipedia, users must stake a fixed amount of the IQ token. If the governing team approves the write-up, the number of tokens staked is refunded to the creator. However, if the content is deemed unacceptable, the creator loses his stake.

Where Is Everipedia (IQ) Used?

So, what is IQ, and what are its uses? IQ is Everipedia's native token, and it has various services, some of which are listed below:

Rewarding Network Participants

One notable thing about IQ is how prevalent it is in Everipedia's ecosystem. In Everipedia’s decentralized platforms, the IQ token is used to incentivize contributors and users. A portion of the platform’s fees is distributed to creators and editors as compensation for their contributions. 

Trading

People speculate on the price of IQ tokens in an attempt to make a profit by using exchanges like OKX. OKX offers its users the most cutting-edge trading tools and an excellent overall trading experience.

Governance

The IQ token is also used in the governance system. What is IQ's role in governance? Users can stake their IQ tokens to obtain voting power, granted proportionately to members. The value of tokens held by a user and their holding period determines how much voting power an individual has.

Staking

IQ token holders can stake their tokens in HilQ, Everipedia's staking product, to earn staking rewards. What is IQ staking? Well, usually, staking is the process by which holders of a token lock away their tokens on a decentralized platform (in this case, HiIQ) to help validate transactions or for other reasons in return for a reward. The longer a stake is held, the greater the reward. 

Collecting Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Every IQ holder who stakes their tokens with HiIQ can win raffle tickets in a contest for digital collectibles. The more HiIQ, a user has, the higher their chances of winning a raffle ticket.

Additionally, Everipedia has been disbursing NFT rewards to token holders. Earlier this year, the protocol collaborated with the NFT project "Supernormal" and distributed non-fungible tokens to IQ stakers, whose cumulative value was $120,000.

History of Everipedia

In 2014, software programmers Sam Kazemian and Theodor Forselius founded Everipedia. Both were driven by their will to improve the superior internet knowledge and information repository, Wikipedia. Sam, who once tagged Wikipedia a “non-inclusive platform”, and Theodor were inspired by one of the famous writer and entrepreneur Paul Graham’s blog posts published in 2008, which called for more innovative internet knowledge pools besides Wikipedia.

The project kicked off as a fork of Wikipedia, and four years after its founding, the team implemented blockchain technology into its Everipedia platform. From a small project that started in Sam Kazemian’s dormitory, Everipedia has now grown to be used by millions of people all over the globe daily. 

Everipedia’s Tokenomics

What is IQ token's tokenomics? How does Everipedia work to supply IQ to its users? 

Everipedia currently has a total supply of about 12 billion and a circulating supply of over 11.1 billion tokens, meaning only 11.1 of the 12 billion tokens in existence are in the hands of the platform's users. The token has a maximum supply of 21 billion—21 billion tokens are all that can exist. New tokens are created to reward creators and editors for their work.

An interesting fact about IQ is that, in the past, the token had a maximum supply of 100 billion. However, in 2021, the Everipedia community decided to reduce the token’s maximum supply to 21 billion to pair it with Bitcoin's number.

How Is Everipedia Created/Minted?

One unique thing about IQ is its creation process. IQ tokens are minted to reward editors and curators for their contribution every half-hour. IQ token holders vote on whether or not an editor or curator's contribution is to be rewarded with new IQ tokens. It incentivizes them always to make high-quality contributions. Voters can also vote to partially re-allocate tokens to developer funds, bug bounties, and the like. If no tokens are to be rewarded or re-allocated, no new tokens are created for that half-hour.

Everipedia’s Competition and How It Fares

Perhaps Everipedia's greatest competitor is its own ancestor Wikipedia, but while Wikipedia still has a considerably more significant number of users than Everipedia, the latter has seen quite remarkable growth over the past few years, having over 3 million monthly active users (MAUs) in 2017.

In addition, while the bulk of the blockchain networks aimed at Web3 content creation is focused on animated media, a few, like the Graph (GRAPH), not built for animated media, have been tipped as potential competitors to IQ. The Graph is an indexing protocol for data and information validation with a vetting framework similar to Everipedia's. The Graph, however, plays a slightly different role in the Web3 ecosystem, indexing and validating data from sources. 

Everipedia’s Partnerships and Investors

BrainDAO

In December 2021, the protocol launched BrainDAO, dubbed the first Web 3.0 Metaverse Knowledge fund. BrainDAO, known initially as Brainchain and powered by the IQ token, intends to connect blockchains with real-world information and build a decentralized fund dedicated to preserving and funding the creation of such knowledge.

Funding

Everipedia Inc, the company behind the Everipedia protocol, has raised funding to support the protocol's development several times. They raised their first seed fund in 2015 from Mucker Capital and raised almost $130,000 on the crowdfunding platform Wefunder. In 2017, they raised a further $700,000 from various angel investors and raised $30 million in 2018 from financial services and investment firm Galaxy Digital's EOS ecosystem fund.

SWOT Analysis for Everipedia

Strengths

Everipedia’s greatest strengths are perhaps its highly decentralized model, highly varied content repertoire, and suitability for the Web3 ecosystem. Also, the platform's incentivization of contribution and curation of its platform and various other offerings, such as NFTs and staking rewards, could give it significant advantages over its competitors.

Weaknesses

The open-source nature of the protocol means that almost anyone can have a say. As a result, content on the platform may sometimes be biased. Everipedia has been criticized for promoting content from an unbalanced perspective on several occasions.

Additionally, open-source contributions bear a measure of misinformation risk. In October 2017, an Everipedia editor misinformed the public about a mass shooting in Las Vegas. The editor identified the perpetrator of the shooting as Geary Danley, while Geary was innocent.

While this got to the notice of Everipedia on time, and the post was brought down within 10 minutes from the time it was shared, some damage had already been done. Numerous social media users had spread false information, tarnishing the name of Geary. The protocol has since then exercised even more caution before approving content.

Opportunities

As one of the first decentralized protocols focused on informational content creation and with very little competition, Everipedia stands to benefit from the growth of its own industry and the broader Web3 economy.

Threats

Competition from more established information repertoires like Wikipedia poses a significant threat to the budding Everipedia platform. Furthermore, with the attention span of internet users decreasing each day and people preferring media content over written content, the relevance of an encyclopedia to internet users may be called into question in the future.

Everipedia’s Roadmap

PredIQt Earn

PredIQt Earn is a lending market that will function similarly to lending protocols like AAVE. It will enable peer-to-peer lending and borrowing of IQ tokens. It will allow users to take out token loans in return for interest payments to the lenders. The IQ tokens will be borrowed from the funds in the prediction market (PredIQt) contracts.

PredIQt Smart Assets

The PredIQt Smart Assets product will allow users to collateralize their IQ tokens and use them to generate synthetic assets such as iqBTC, iqETh, etc. These synthetic assets can then be traded, lent, borrowed, or just held for exposure to their underlying asset. Something to note about IQ is the Everipedia team's commitment to not limit its use in their ecosystem, despite being able to do so. 

Everipedia’s Updates, News, and Highlights

1inch Listing

On July 21, IQ was listed on 1inch, a leading DeFi aggregator with over 250 liquidity sources. The listing of IQ on 1inch will give holders the option to provide liquidity and swap their tokens in exchange for all the other tokens listed on 1inch. The platform took to its official Twitter account to make the announcement.

AP Elections

In late 2020, the non-profit news agency Associated Press (AP), recorded its election results on the Everipedia database, marking the first time the news agency will record its election data on the blockchain. Blockchain Oracle Chainlink was chosen as the intermediary between AP's data and Everipedia.  

Wikipedia Co-Founder’s Move to Everipedia

In 2017, Dr. Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, joined Everipedia Inc. as its Chief Information Officer. A long-time critic of Wikipedia, he expressed his belief that Everipedia could someday disrupt Wikipedia's model.

The Everipedia Ecosystem

The Everipedia ecosystem comprises three significant products, which are PredIQt, a prediction platform; OraQle, a data aggregator; and HiIQ, its staking platform.

PredIQt

PredIQt is a platform that allows users to speculate on any future event and earn rewards based on the outcome of their prediction. It enables users to speculate on issues concerning politics, business, finance, sports, and more.

Users earn IQ tokens when they correctly predict events. The platform utilizes a share structure. Users can purchase shares for the outcome of future events. The user earns one cryptocurrency unit for each share representing a favorable outcome. Participants are also allowed to sell their shares if they change their minds about the likely outcome of an event.

OraQle

Everipedia’s oracle provides smart contracts with information from the outside world and obtains information from only trusted sources.

In November 2020, the Everipedia OraQle was used by the Associated Press (AP) to publish the results of the United States Presidential Elections on-chain. That would be the first time any blockchain protocol would be used for publishing political data.

Also, in March 2021, the Associated Press again used Everipedia’s OraQle. This time, however, OraQle was used to publish sports data. The AP published the March Madness basketball score on the Ethereum chain. With Everipedia’s OraQle software, the Associated Press could publish the schedules and results on the blockchain within minutes.

HiIQ

HiIQ is a decentralized platform for the Everipedia community that supports the staking of IQ tokens. With HiIQ, IQ holders can stake their tokens to earn a passive income, the size of which is proportional to the staking period. The platform also rewards users with NFTs.

Where To Buy IQ Tokens

IQ tokens can be purchased on cryptocurrency exchanges that support it, like OKX. OKX has good support for IQ and lets you buy cryptocurrency with your local currency and a convenient payment method, such as your credit or debit card or a bank transfer. You can purchase cryptocurrency on OKX with other cryptocurrencies as well.

How To Store IQ Tokens

On an Exchange

You can easily store your IQ token on the centralized exchange where you purchased it. Centralized exchanges like OKX offer digital wallets with support for multiple cryptocurrencies that can be more easily recovered than other wallet types in the event of a loss.

In a Software Wallet

IQ coins can be stored in digital or software wallets. IQ tokens are available on the EOS and Ethereum blockchains, so you can easily store them on any Ethereum-compatible wallet like Metamask or an EOS-compatible wallet like Exodus.

In a Hardware Wallet

You can also use a hardware wallet compatible with ETH or EOS. Hardware wallets are widely recognized as the safest way to store cryptocurrency, but they can be expensive and technical to use.

How To Stake IQ Tokens

All IQ token holders can stake their token on HilQ, a DeFi staking platform that rewards IQ token holders with more IQ tokens or NFTs when they stake their IQ tokens in its staking pools.

FAQs

What Is the Difference Between Everipedia and Wikipedia?

Everipedia(IQ) is a fork of the world-renowned encyclopedia known as Wikipedia. Everipedia, however, runs on a blockchain, is completely decentralized, and allows for a much wider variety of content than Wikipedia.

What Is IQ’s Maximum Supply, and How Is It Distributed?

According to Coinmarketcap, IQ tokens have a total supply of 21 billion coins. 49% will go to Everipedia and its investors, while the remaining 51% was distributed in 2018 to all EOS token holders in an airdrop. 

Who Founded Everipedia (IQ)?

The idea was born in December 2014 by Sam Kazemian and Theodor Forselius in their college dormitory room while they were students at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The project was launched in early 2015; later that year, Travix Moore joined them as a co-founder, Mahbod Moghadam followed as a co-founder in July 2015, and Christain Deciga joined in 2015 as a co-founder.

Where Can I Stake Everipedia?

HiIQ, a DeFi staking platform, offers all IQ token holders the chance to stake their tokens in its staking pool and get rewarded with either more IQ tokens or NFTs.

What Makes Everipedia Unique?  

Everipedia represents the first major to successfully attempt to bring real-world knowledge onto the blockchain. Furthermore, they intend to branch into other information-related sectors with products such as PredIQt and OraQle, to create a compelling platform with quality as its backbone.

What Can I Do With Everipedia?

You can do a host of things with Everipedia, from staking IQ on it to earn passive income to creating and editing the content on it. You may also just browse content for information or pleasure.