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How to farm - short guide:

1. Go to the farming page and choose the pool you want to stake LP tokens.

2. Connect your metamask wallet.

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YPRO/USDT pool
USDT/ETH pool
DAI/ETH pool

4. When you've LP's in your wallet balance, then choose how many you want to stake and click the button "Approve & Stake".

That's all! Now you'll be automatically rewarded with YPro Farm Tokens (YPF).

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In the 20th-century economy, most of us had to find a way to fit into the workforce. Passion-driven careers, while lucrative for the lucky few, were not a luxury afforded to the majority of people with bills, debts, and no real knowledge or tools to monetize their personal skills. Job stability and security were wiser and more reachable ambitions compared with the financial risks and uncertainties of exploring self expression.

Journalist and author Adam Davidson calls this period in history the widget economy, which, he says, has reached the end of its technologically-disrupted road. In its place the so-called Passion Economy is emerging and along with it entirely new career opportunities and methods of monetizing that make following passions profitable.

Over the past decade we have already seen a shift towards more self employment through the gig economy. Thought-leader Li Jin writes about the topic extensively and explains how automated digital marketplaces
emerged within sectors such as food deliveries and taxi services with the
advantage that they managed the business side of things, such as setting market prices and driving customer acquisition, while workers could just get on with the job.

The gig economy positioned itself as the way to “become your own boss”, but in reality it wasn’t so different from the widget economy in that it provided a narrow scope of commoditized career options that people had to fit into regardless of their actual interests -- and without the steady security of fixed employment.

These middle-man marketplaces took control of customer relationships leaving little room for workers to nurture their own entrepreneurial growth or business expansion -- the only way to earn more revenue was to work harder and longer.

In the time-honored tradition of digital transformation, the gig economy is now being disrupted by even newer platforms that put people in charge of their own consumer relationships, while providing them with the entrepreneurial tools to monetize their creativity and passion.

Accessible Entrepreneurialism

Emerging marketplaces and SaaS platforms are democratizing the paths to making money independently and -- in contrast to the widget economy -- do not necessarily focus on tangible products or in-person services, but rather digital products and virtual services.

These new SaaS platforms are essentially B2B software solutions targeted directly at entrepreneurial consumers. They give individuals a way to set up independent businesses and grow their own customer bases, appealing to professionals who want to develop their careers. Marketplaces, meanwhile, tend to be more entry-level and appeal to consumers ready to monetize their digital creativity without the need for prior business acumen and with minimal setup requirements to start earning revenue.

Such platforms typically monetize by taking a percentage of a user’s earnings, which grows in proportion with that person’s success. This means that there is an incentive for the platform to nurture the ongoing growth and success of its users rather than purely relying on one-off transactions.

In comparison with the more one-dimensional gig economy and its predetermined career routes and earning potential, that success can grow in many different directions driven by the individuals who use the platforms.

Platforms That Monetize Knowledge

Take the rise of the “knowledge influencer”, namely people who are turning their expertise and skills into online courses. At the more hands-on end, SaaS platforms such as Podia provide professionals with a way to build and grow their own businesses out of online video courses. Marketplaces such as Out school, meanwhile, give people a way to monetize remote learning
classes for children, while tasks such as marketing or paperwork are taken care of by the platform.

Platforms such as these enable subject-matter experts, former teachers, and stay-at-home professionals to continue using and monetizing a broad variety of specialisms and skills via video -- even during a global pandemic -- while reaching an audience far further than in-person classes. The scope of classes and curriculums is determined by the uniqueness of the teachers using the platform -- the more variety the platform delivers, the
broader its potential reach.

Platforms That Monetize Content

Platforms underpinned by a mix of blockchain technology, social media, and cryptocurrencies are also creating innovative entry points into the Passion Economy. Blockchain makes it possible to facilitate micropayments and cross-border transactions, as well as establish decentralized, trustworthy systems, which create fair, transparent gigs and micro jobs out of digital creativity.

Investors are getting wise to this, and VC funds, such as the $515 million Andreessen Horowitz fund set up to invest into crypto networks and businesses, are being established.

Projects are bringing innovation to this space through the monetization of digital content. One example is the social blogging platform Steemit, where creators share content, such as blog posts and videos, and earn STEEM tokens based on user engagement. The more successful a writer becomes,
the greater their earning potential. Moreover, the scope of topics they can
produce content about is limitless, once again showing how the Passion Economy benefits from enabling unique individuality over commodity.

The WOM Protocol is another example of this blockchain-based wave of online economic development, offering people new ways to earn through user-generated marketing. Creators produce recommendation content about products and brands of their choice on participating platforms such as YEAY. Once that content passes a peer-review process where community members rate it on factors such as authenticity and likeability, the creators start earning WOM Tokens based on the level of engagement the content generates.

People who may be entirely new to blockchain and have no previous experience building their online influence now have ways to immediately start monetizing their content and accumulating cryptocurrencies that have the potential to keep gaining value as their prices rise. They also
have a greater incentive to cooperate and contribute towards the success of these platforms in order to continually increase their earning potential.

Platforms That Monetize Community

Musicians have never had the most clear-cut career path and
the events of the past year have created even more financial instability by
compromising one of the industry’s biggest revenue streams -- live music.
Without the ticket sales of tours, festivals and one-off concerts, artists have
to find alternative ways to monetize online.

Creative thinkers are realizing the potential to bring their fan bases into so-called “social token communities” where people can earn and spend cryptocurrencies to access discussion groups that bring them value. One such example is Friends With Benefits ($FWB), founded by musician meets tech start-up founder, Trevor McFedries. Friends With Benefits is built on
community-management system Collab. Land and uses a chatbot integration with Discord so that when community members have enough $FWB tokens in their crypto wallets they can access various Discord channels on topics such as music production or breaking news. Examples such as this show how musicians can capitalize on technology products to gain more control of their incomes.

Passion Can Be Profitable

For those of us born and raised in the widget economy, it takes a leap to faith to imagine that unique passions can be brought to life through digital products and virtual services, and, further still, that it’s possible to make a living this way. One year into a global pandemic that has caused countless business closures and job cuts around the world, however, it seems more necessary than ever for people to gain more autonomy over their sources of income and better access to platforms and tools that make it possible to build revenue-generating businesses.

YEAY - the first platform that has integrated the WOM Protocol - is mentioned in the renowned magazine VARIETY, along with amazing other platforms like TikTok or Pinduoduo. https://variety.com/vip/video-commerce-past-present-and-future-1234789625/

Find WOM Protocol’s CEO Melanie Mohr on the Clubhouse stage discussing Crypto‘s inevitable Ascension with Dave Chapman, Executive Director BC Group / OSL and Maryanne Morrow CEO and founder of 9th Gear Technologies. Melanie is hosting the session together with famous Nasdaq TV host Jane King and Val Nzhie from Bervann Capital.

Find WOM Protocol’s CEO Melanie Mohr on the Clubhouse stage discussing Crypto‘s inevitable Ascension with Dave Chapman, Executive Director BC Group / OSL and Maryanne Morrow CEO and founder of 9th Gear Technologies. Melanie is hosting the session together with famous Nasdaq TV host Jane King and Val Nzhie from Bervann Capital.

The next generation of influencers have arrived at the crypto scene and they are on a mission to oust outdated social media monetization practices and champion crypto-based content revenue models that empower autonomy, authenticity and consumer mass adoption.

Worth $6 billion in 2020 and set to rise to $24.1 billion by 2025, influencer marketing is a scaling industry. Influencers are typically known for making money through sponsored posts and paid brand promotions on social media, but such methods have led to friction between influencers and their audiences. These brand deals usually happen off-platform through agencies and the reliance on advertisers to monetize has bound influencers into contracts and campaigns that stifle creativity. This has tarnished the industry with trust issues: only 10 percent of young consumers have a lot of trust in such promotions and 88 percent believe influencer authenticity should be more important than anything else.

At the same time, social networks have been fueling ads to monetize their platforms, in turn jeopardizing their user experience. Frustrated users are bombarded with sponsored posts from influencers and on top of that, with invasive ads. However, with ad blockers, banner blindness, and an innate sense of when to click the “skip ad” button, audiences have found new ways to circumvent, ignore and spot obvious selling techniques.

Consumer demand for more transparency and trust is nudging a growing subset of influencers to subsequently seek out alternative technologies and content monetization methods. Consumer-facing apps are harnessing blockchain technologies to meet this demand with crypto-based content monetization models. At the intersection of these two trends sits the WOM Protocol, which leverages blockchain technology to incentivize and reward an entire ecosystem of creators, authenticators, publishers, and advertisers through its native WOM (which stands for word of mouth) Token.

Driving Mainstream Blockchain Adoption

The WOM Protocol aims to bring blockchain to mainstream adoption and the WOM network is designed to grow through economic incentive systems that distribute rewards to everyone who positively participates in the network. Its strategic first partnership with video-based social commerce app, YEAY, enables users with absolutely no prior experience in blockchain technologies or cryptocurrencies to set up wallets, stake tokens and start earning crypto-based rewards for authentic content creation. Users can exchange their WOM Tokens for gift cards from major brands such as Adidas, Spotify, Playstation and many more (2,500+ brands across 150 countries). In December 2020 alone, some 153k reward transactions were executed.

This lowered barrier to blockchain entry is encouraging lifestyle influencers to migrate to the YEAY platform. Currently, more than 45 influencers, with a combined reach of more than 47+ million, are monetizing their product recommendations on the YEAY app, receiving WOM Token rewards for recommending the products they love. The highest earner so far received a payout of more than $2,000 in WOM Tokens — despite earning nothing from the same activities on TikTok.

Some of the influencers on YEAY include the famous 13-year-old gamer, Faze H1ghsyk1, successful Youtuber and Streamer, GrantTheGoat, growing TikTok/Youtube and Instagram lifestyle influencers, Corey Campbell, Derek Trendz, Aya Tanjali, famous European songwriter and musician, Lukas Rieger, and many more.

The crypto scene is, of course, no stranger to influencers. There are many revered names leading the crypto and blockchain conversations on Twitter, with significant followings and a celebrity-status within the community. Even the most notorious of crypto influencers, however, whose reach typically extends into the hundreds of thousands, or at the upper end a million, would be considered a micro-influencer in the lifestyle scene, where followings typically reach into the millions. This makes lifestyle influencers the more powerful accelerators of blockchain adoption precisely because they can reach further into consumer markets far beyond blockchain and bring their young audiences over with them.

Growing Organic Market Demand

Aligning interests between creators, advertisers and platforms is actually possible, as enabled by the YEAY app and underlying WOM Protocol. On YEAY, creators are not paid to promote brands per se. Instead, they choose to recommend the brands and products they truly love and get rewarded specifically for those recommendations.

The more the YEAY app fills with quality product recommendation content, the more it boosts the supply side of the WOM marketplace. This in turn fuels organic market demand from brands, who can purchase WOM Tokens to gain access to authenticated recommendations for marketing and sales initiatives. Tools such as the WOM Campaign Manager enable such brands to launch campaigns to promote and boost the visibility of authentic content with the explicit consent of the creator. Meanwhile, plugins that can be placed directly on partner websites give brands and ecommerce platforms the ability to capture and feature this organic word-of-mouth content directly on their product pages.

At the same time, platforms have the opportunity to monetize their interface by using word-of-mouth content instead of invasive ads, which are more trusted than any other form of advertising.

Driving Network Growth

On YEAY, users get rewarded with WOM Tokens depending on the content engagement and a peer rating their content receives. This peer rating process — where members of the community stake WOM Tokens to rate content for its authenticity — means that fake or insincere content is naturally filtered out of the marketplace. For influencers looking for an alternative means of monetizing their content without compromising trust, this model provides an opportunity to rebuild more organic mutual relationships with their communities.

Mutuality is a fundamental pillar of the WOM economy, which has been built to encourage value-sharing as a key driver of network growth. This can be seen through features such as the Team Feature, which gives select creators the power to onboard friends and followers onto their team — and increase everyone’s WOM Token earning potential.

Crypto In Consumer Hands

Lifestyle influencers with no background in blockchain are turning to cryptocurrency monetization methods that have simplified the process of earning and spending crypto. These apps enable them to be rewarded for their “mindshare,” while staying true to themselves and their communities. Fairer distribution and mutual reciprocity are important ideals for this new class of social media monetizers — and their migration to consumer-friendly blockchain apps, bringing along their communities — may represent the tipping point to blockchain mass adoption.

Authenticity is the marketing buzzword of the moment, but judging by current consumer attitudes it’s still missing from the majority of brand marketing efforts.

The latest report by Stackla found that 90 percent of consumers want to see authenticity from brands, and while 92 percent of marketers think their content resonates as authentic with consumers, less than half of consumers would actually agree. The same report showed that user-generated content has 9.8x more impact than influencer content when driving consumer purchase intent, which will no doubt be disappointing news for brands given that the very purpose of their influencer marketing campaigns is to generate something close to user-generated content.

So how did marketing end up with such a big authenticity gap? Perhaps people are just jaded by sponsored posts, paid promotions and brand advertising deals and the uncomfortable feeling that it’s a trick with no real transparency over what’s happening, what brand relationships really look like for influencers and how they are monetizing.

Perhaps the bigger question is whether authenticity and marketing can ever really go hand-in-hand when one is the pursuit of truth and the other of sales. We’ve spent the past three years working on the answer. Our solution, the WOM Protocol, combines blockchain-based technology, crypto-economic incentive models, and good old-fashioned word of mouth to deliver an alternative marketing channel that rewards people for behaving honestly and gives influencers a way to monetize without compromising their authenticity.

For our second podcast episode we invited Head of Operations, Jeremy Lindström, to unpick a topic at the very heart of our project: authenticity. You can listen to the podcast here and you’ll find the full transcript below.

Authenticity is important, it’s what we want to see, but what do we actually mean by authenticity?

When you’re authentic people feel that what they see is the real deal and not just a facade. Topical to marketing and this podcast, authenticity is recommending, promoting or otherwise talking about products and services and brands that you sincerely enjoy and not because you received a paycheck to talk about it. It’s, “hey I ate at this great place last night, you gotta check it out,” because I actually did eat at a great place last night, and I actually want you to check it out, because I believe you’ll love it. The motivation is not because the restaurant is paying me to say that.

The paycheck is the issue here though, isn’t it? Surely the moment you decide to monetize, you compromise your authenticity, so can you monetize your content and remain authentic?

It’s about transparency. Getting paid or otherwise rewarded because I recommended something isn’t inherently wrong, nor does it automatically compromise authenticity. If you are recommending something to someone, you are bringing value to that company and quite frankly much more value than any of their corporate polished marketing campaigns. So why not be compensated for it? Companies aren’t obligated to get free advertising.

Authenticity only comes when people believe in what they are recommending, and when they choose the products they want to recommend. If people are driven purely by the money, they won’t succeed in the long run. That’s what we see now with the current trends in the influencer marketing industry.

There are issues with the current industry — there’s a clear consumer trust problem. Would you say that one of the biggest problems here is that you have an industry that has encouraged and rewarded people for behaving in an inauthentic way?

There is a motivation or incentive for influencers to work the system, which we’ve seen as influencers buy followers and likes to boost their metrics and land more lucrative deals, or in not disclosing their partnerships. Or even on the flip side posting not sponsored content as sponsored to make it seem like they have brand deals. All of these things happen because of the incentive mechanisms that are put in place by brands that focus on these mostly arbitrary minimum follower counts and other metrical requirements. It’s led to these dishonest and inauthentic practices by influencers. If someone has too few followers they won’t get paid to recommend a brand or product, it’s that simple. The same goes for brand deals, if I want to get paid for recommending something, I have to have a contract or deal beforehand.

If I love adidas, for example, but I don’t have a contract with them, I won’t get paid. If Puma approaches me, now I have this incentive to talk about a brand that I may not necessarily care about. There are lots of recent reports, including those published by Stackla and Morning Consult, that state similar sentiments from consumers. We can see that people are increasingly sceptical and have been for some time. Influencer marketing is mainstream enough now, that the general consumer has become jaded to these promotions, simply because they know that the influencer is getting paid to talk about the brand and therefore they can’t be sure that the influencer actually likes it.

If we have an industry and a model that encourages people to behave in the opposite of an authentic way, then surely we need to shift that so that we have models that reward and encourage behaving honestly? Shouldn’t practices that lead to faking and insincerity get disincentivized?

Certainly, since the current incentives reward inauthenticity then the logical step would be to create incentives that reward authenticity. Of course it’s easier than it sounds, otherwise brands would already be doing it, because that’s ultimately what they are looking for anyway. That said, it is what we are doing at WOM. If people make recommendations just because they love a brand or a product, which people do more than two billions times a day, and if they do that without a brand deal, without a minimum follower account and with no guarantee of a reward, and they are potentially rewarded only after their peers feel the recommendation is authentic, then we have an economic incentivization model that rewards authenticity.

The current marketing model can be changed, paid recommendations don’t have to be inauthentic. The incentives just have to be in the right place.

OK so if we have an influencer marketing industry that then shifts to incentivize and reward authenticity, do you think that this will have the benefit of creating more accountability?

Absolutely. What we’re talking about is not just fixing something that’s broken, that’s a really worn out phrase that people love to use. We’re not fixing something that’s broken, we’re talking about improving what’s happening and improving the way that people are rewarded for their brand advocacy. We’re talking about improving the way that companies interact with consumers and bringing authenticity and transparency and honesty more to the forefront.

Certainly as those values are the values that become incentivized, then not only will the marketing industry improve and get better, but all industries as a whole would also get better. If this up-and-coming authenticity-savvy generation are being rewarded for recommending only the products they love, with no incentive to do otherwise, then naturally the companies that match their values will be talked about.

If consumers only value, “this product is cool and I don’t care how it was built,” then those companies will be the ones that get talked about and succeed. But if we have a consumer base that is very aware of social and environmental and political situations, they will expect corporate entities to take more responsibility. They are more likely to recommend products from the companies they believe are taking that responsibility, and those are the products and brands that will get talked about and popularized and come to the forefront.

Conversely, those products that don’t match these values would naturally fade into the background, thus improving these brands and the entire industry as a whole and bringing accountability far beyond the influencers and marketing alone. This would also go far beyond what legislature might try to do as well. Legislature is necessary at times, but ultimately it forces companies to do something, whereas as consumers have more of a say in what is being marketed or what is being talked about and what’s being recommended, then companies will have an incentive to change and change for the better.

Tell us what you think about authenticity in influencer marketing or share your questions with Jeremy in your local Telegram community

*Read the legal disclaimer: https://womprotocol.io/disclaimer/