Interview with Alex Newman, Protocol designer

What partnerships are the team working on?

The first mission we had was in the image labeling space – after bringing CAPTCHA systems on-chain, it will be Intel CVAT and INCEpTION. This was really about bringing human judgment and discernment on-chain. That work has gone well – and the existing partnerships continue.

The Foundation has added a new focus to be more crypto-centric. We want to create HUMAN applications which are particularly useful for projects in the DeFi space. As much as HUMAN is meant to reward Workers, it is built as a protocol level solution of real utility to new and existing projects. All we need is code and tokens, and we can do everything that a big company can do. The first step is to help produce better on-chain pricing.

But partnerships will continue in any way that human perception can be tokenized and brought on-chain. Take, for example, our recently announced grant to VeritaTrust, to bring customer reviews on-chain.

We have seen a lot about Pyth – could you explain this partnership?

We are working with Pyth network to produce better on-chain pricing. This is a really great collaboration. If you read the Pyth whitepaper, you will see how integral they view the HUMAN system to fetching and securely relaying pricing data on-chain. We are programmatically allowing Pyth to send our HUMAN workers out to verify that the prices contributed to the Pyth price feed are accurate. When there is a disagreement in pricing, they can use this as a way of figuring it out.

Who is Pyth going to trust? They can’t just trust Coinmarketcap, for example, which doesn’t have the price of an asset on Coinbase 14 minutes ago. You have to get it from the exchange itself. HUMAN offers a way to get data directly from exchanges. A human powered oracle. 

Right now, Pyth has centralized ways of grabbing the data from the exchange, such as trusted partners who are going to FTX, grabbing a price and submitting it to the network, but what if they contribute incorrectly, or if there is a disagreement? 

What is amazing is that the very same technology that is used to verify humanity can be used to provide this pricing information.

Tell us a little about HUMAN and Gitcoin 

It’s really our way of out-sourcing great work from the dev community, and building a great community who can earn for helping others looking to build on HUMAN.

We have had a lot of success in Proof of HUMANity. One developer, Alex Bakoushin, has come up with different ways to prove humanity other than just via CAPTCHA, which could allow for different implementations of the tech for different blockchains. 

We also just announced the HUMAN maintainer program to reward devs looking to deploy and maintain HUMAN integrations on new chains. We already have four maintainer roles filled.

We’re going to be scheduling a lot of hackathons to help deploy HUMAN to more chains.

Which apps are currently contributing to the Protocol?

Currently, the HUMAN App, hCaptcha itself, and Proof of HUMANity are all contributing to transactions on the Protocol. This suite of apps is just the beginning; we have many other potential applications and uses for HMT, like the recently announced grant to VeritaTrust.

What excites you about the future? The next 6 months, and next year?

Over the next 6 months we expect to build a whole bunch of new apps for DeFi and NFTs, to become a core protocol level project. Right now, with the proliferation of Play to Earn, there has never been a more important time for a good, robust, on-chain bot blocker. Bots can ruin games, and really mess up these ecosystems, so we want to focus on Proof of HUMANity adoption.

In general, though, it is about finding ways to apply HUMAN perception tasks to provide real utility. We plan to collect a whole bundle of apps which can work together, and combine, to do more powerful things together. Because each new app can share its data – for instance, the prices provided to Pyth can be put to work with other applications; if they are on-chain, open, and easily consumable, that opens up, for instance, an arbitration tool for all DeFi services. One integration brings many possibilities. 

For the latest updates on HUMAN Protocol, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord. Alternatively, to enquire about integrations, usage, or to learn more about HUMAN Protocol, get in contact with the HUMAN team.

Legal Disclaimer

The HUMAN Protocol Foundation makes no representation, warranty, or undertaking, express or implied, as to the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or reasonableness of the information contained here. Any assumptions, opinions, and estimations expressed constitute the HUMAN Protocol Foundation’s judgment as of the time of publishing and are subject to change without notice. Any projection contained within the information presented here is based on a number of assumptions, and there can be no guarantee that any projected outcomes will be achieved.