Meet Peeranha.io,

Back in 2017, when Sergey Illin, Forte Group’s developer with 12 years of full-stack coding experience, was scrolling through a Q&A resource looking for an answer to a software development question. Suddenly, he had an idea. 

Online resources are valuable for developers when they need to quickly find an answer to technology and process questions. Most popular knowledge-sharing platforms are free — by providing relevant content, users can earn upvotes and convert them into virtual value. 

But what if there was a Q&A space that could compensate people for their answers, financially? Sergey pitched his idea to Steve Kreynin, Founder and CEO of Forte Group, an IT entrepreneur with a constant drive for improvement.

In 2018, Peeranha was born: A Q&A startup co-founded by Sergey and Steve. Peeranha is built using blockchain technology, ensuring safe, transparent, and secure operations. But most importantly, the platform has a game-changing feature that allows every user to earn blockchain tokens by answering questions and contributing to the platform.

What makes Peeranha unique?

If you take a look at the most popular Q&A platforms, like Quora and Stack Overflow, you’ll see that all user-generated content is in the hands of a single organization. If the website shuts down for any reason, years of knowledge is lost. The flipside of the coin with shared knowledge concentrated in one place is intensifying control. Censorship and moderation can affect the quality of the content, as well as users who abuse a platforms’ link polices for promotional purposes rather than sharing knowledge.

Peeranha leverages blockchain technology to create a decentralized application, where all the data is immutable, public, and owned by the community. All digital records are guarded by cryptography that can limit and log who makes changes or additions. The economic model of this project gives ownership of the content to the users of the platform and financially rewards those who help peers find their answers. Rather than just gaining a reputation, likes on their posts, or the warm and fuzzy feeling of helping others, Peeranha users receive real-life, tangible, valuable rewards for their contributions in the form of PEER tokens.

Who is Peeranha’s target user?

The platform is designed for savvy techies who work with complicated products in fast-changing industries, who are always on the cusp of something new. First and foremost, Peeranha targets development communities building projects with blockchain technology. The blockchain projects are rife with uncertainty. As anyone who has struggled to set up a blockchain app will confirm, there’s a huge need for niche information.

Developer communities usually have chats in Telegram or Discord, but over the course of a project, it gets harder and harder to navigate the huge amount of information that’s contained in a chat thread. This is why having an organized blockchain “think tank” will help IT engineers cope with the quirks of a project faster and easier.

Why use blockchain as the core of a Q&A platform?

Peeranha is the first fully decentralized Q&A web application plugged into the Telos blockchain network on the EOSIO software system. Smart contracts which record all posted content to the Telos blockchain are used to process the most important components — application logic and user data. The Peeranha team also leveraged IPFS — the InterPlanetary File System — increasing ease of access to the text and images contained in the app by creating an infrastructure where people in the most remote areas of the globe can connect. As the application is decentralized, moderation and governance of the website are in the hands of the users. The collective knowledge on the website, as well as the website itself, belongs to all participants.

Why should developers or anyone from the tech crowd join Peeranha? Most Peeranha users are interested in the success of the platform, and with greater popularity, the value of tokens increases—and so do the rewards. Peeranha’s co-founders note that the initial users of the platform are extremely important, as they make a big contribution to the future of the project and bootstrap the community. 

Peeranha features

Peeranha’s contributors can access the platform using either a responsive mobile website or a web application. Users’ e-wallet keys are protected with passwords, and every time a user signs a transaction, their keys are used by the platform only in their deciphered form. The platform itself doesn’t store these keys—decoded, they are available only to their respective owners.

Blockchain is the backbone of the Peeranha app, and the platform has been infused with cool features that easily enable:

• Posting a question, answer, or comment
• Voting for questions and answers (likes/upvotes)
• Creating new communities (so far, Peeranha has 18 communities)
• Ratings and user statuses, and privileges on the site depending on user status
• Signing up with Scatter wallet
• Authorization using our online wallet, using e-mail and password, but still keeping 100% ownership of keys by the user
• Post oderation by users
• Content indexing by major search engines and basic site search
• Weekly rewards in the form of PEER tokens

 Future plans

On Peeranha’s mission statement, Steve Kreynin states, “We see a future in which people who contribute their knowledge are rewarded fairly depending on how valuable their contribution is.”

Sergey Illin sheds more light on the startup’s future monetization plans when he says, “As soon as we gain enough credibility and recognition from industry leaders, we’ll enable ad placements and allow qualified IT companies to promote their vacancies across hundreds of communities. These will help us attract additional sources of income to gratify the most active users.”

As long as the Internet exists, the information on the Peeranha Q&A platform will never be lost and its contributors can be sure that they will always get paid for their content. What’s more, the PEER-powered monetization strategy ensures that the users contributing to the platform first will be the ones to receive the highest dividends in the future. Blockchain is an elegant solution to the engagement and relevance issue, since the true value of a token depends on how many people participate. It is in users’ best interests for Peeranha to do well and earn a name for itself. The investment will keep people motivated to drive value and keep communities alive.

If you want to learn more about how Peeranha works, watch Telos Tuesdays live hosted by Sergey Ilin: