With this idea in mind, we started, with a global community of creators, a citation graph based on data collected from indie magazines and social media. The concept of the citation graph was inspired by the PageRank algorithm, a directed graph with recursive centrality measure for scientific papers, later used for the trillion-dollar Google search engine. We had no idea where this idea would take us, but we had an intuition that it would lead to something groundbreaking.

Throughout 2018, we were looking for a business model and eventually landed in the crypto space, where nascent ecosystems such as Ethereum and the ideas around data dignity introduced by Jaron Lanier made a lot of sense for Newlife.

Starting as a web app, the project evolved into a web3 social protocol inspired by Steemit, but instead of staking for content writers, you would stake for creators and data training sets. Newlife was very gamified: you could earn points based on your taste, either by posting content, identifying new talent or by curating and predicting the success of an aesthetic or a creator.

We released a mobile app on Apple AppStore and Google Play Store, collecting data from 40,000 creators worldwide with the goal of tokenizing it and making it universally accessible to creators based on their reputation. The prototype for the Proof-of-Creativity algorithm was called Nuvi.

It was featured in the specialized press for cultural producers including organic features on Dazed, Paper, Coeval and Vice among others as the New Tumblr, with a stamp of approval from creators worldwide. Our plan was to sell taste data and distribute data licensing to creators based on their score, and we called this the Universal Creator Income, or UCI.

As the app was growing and blossoming within the fashion ecosystem and in the midst of the bear market, we applied and got accepted by the Dream Assembly accelerator by Farfetch, the leading luxury retailer in the world, and the NVIDIA accelerator, the leading AI infrastructure ecosystem. We were blessed by receiving a small investment from Farfetch and a 100,000 USD grant from Amazon AWS.

We were using weighted human feedback to shape a creator's reputation and to train AI models from NVIDIA to generate fashion and visual art imagery based on human feedback. Without knowing it, the combination of our consumer app with the injection of human feedback to improve the model, we had invented RLHF, the secret sauce behind ChatGPT.

All of a sudden, in the midst of the global pandemic, the word "creative economy" started to emerge in the startup world, and we thought our time had come to shine. Little did we know that the crypto bull market would attract a plethora of founders backed by massive funding rounds, taking over the media landscape as leading brands in this nascent design space, with all sorts of platforms from web2 subscription services, to NFT marketplaces, to social tokens.

After running RLHF on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) we realised the power of a self-improving system and had a big idea:

That's how the idea for Newcoin was born. In June 2021, we organized a private sale of tokens and the following months recruited a team of 7 engineers to build the Newcoin protocol. While everyone was selling millions of dollars of NFTs, we knew that it would end the same way as the ICO craze in 2018, and we kept building in accordance with our thesis; in the digital world, data is creative energy and creative energy is data.

As expected, it all ended like the ICO craze: the collapse of the Terra/Luna and the contagion to other financialized crypto services, the crypto-space was a scary place to be. We were still in the process of building Newcoin, which was already in testnet, with more than 100 projects building applications on top of it. We managed to secure funding from crypto-networks to fund our team of 26 working on the technology and building an ecosystem of startups. With the collapse of FTX in November, crypto-podcasts became bearish, VCs froze their investment in crypto-startups. Most of the startups building on Newcoin started to go bankrupt one after the other, and everyone was tense. We were running out of cash and most of the team had to leave. In the middle of the darkest moment for crypto, the launch of ChatGPT gave the world a new energy, reviving excitement for a new kind of technology: transformers.

We ended the year 2022 with most of our ecosystem in shambles; what remained was a blossoming community around the Newforum research center, featuring 200+ conversations with Internet visionaries and crypto-builders and all the technology we had built over the years.

As the AI space entered a rebirth, our conviction grew stronger than ever. We oriented the conversations on Newforum around the concepts of digital identity, artificial intelligence and onchain media and organized a hackathon with key partners in the space including 1kx, Lit Protocol, Disco.xyz, Ceramic, Guild.xyz, Sismo, Gitcoin, Intuition, Orbis, Cyberconnect, and Ethereum Attestation Service. The hackathon was a big success, with more than 200 applicants and 31 projects submitted.

As the end of the year nears, Newcoin in the process of integrating its Proof-of-Creativity algorithm into many infrastructures, applications and communities, helping the web be more qualitative and rewarding towards the lifeblood of the internet: human creative energy.

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In the first part of 2024, we focused on building a human interface for Newcoin. An interface where humans and agents can coordinate an learn collectively through the protocolized feedback mechanism.

On NewcoinOS, you can create reinforcement learning mini-apps and take part in this context-aware network of creators and agents at the forefront of innovation in design and culture.
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