The old fashioned dating industry was one of the first sectors to be disrupted by technology with interaction shifted online already in the first phase following the growth and establishment of the Internet.
Some platforms and killer applications soon thrived given their easy-to-use interface and improved user experience.
Some evidences? Think about Meetic, the French online dating service founded in November 2001 which became publicly quoted in October 2005. Beyond Meetic, Tinder, Badoo, Happn, just to name a few of them, have brought the dating process online and mobile.
THE PROBLEM
Nevertheless, a lot of people are afraid of using online and mobile dating services because of such issues as lack of privacy and relationship unfairness (inherent to centralized systems). But dating is an intimate experience and developers have been working to solve these issues ensuring users benefits of using an app can overcome the risk perceptions with uneven progress made, anyways.
While a centralized platform requires as much information as possible in order to optimize the matching process of participants with more data points leading to higher probabilities of generating qualified matches, users also expose more information based on the trust that they will get better results.
Furthermore, spam issues (zero cost for messaging) and bots/fake profiles (identity verification) are deeply intrinsic in legacy dating apps.
THE SOLUTION
Given all this, blockchain technology can help make dating more secure and effective. This is why a transparent and decentralized dating app, called Hicky, has been launched.
Hicky leverages the blockchain to create a network with an underlying token economy, incentivizing individual user and community good behavior.
The privacy of user information is secure through the use of a decentralized database (initially BigChainDB and in the future Swarm Protocol) where all data is secured through encryption. For messaging, a decentralised approach will be taken by using the Whisper Protocol. Messages will be private and users will pay microtransactions for the interactions, thus limiting spam.
Verification will work through two factors building a biometric identification process combining both voice and face scan as well as matching. This effectively prevents the use of bots while simultaneously creating a network of trusted participants.
THE TOKEN SALE
In order to fund the development of the platform, Hicky is holding a token (HKY) sale that is organized around smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain.
The contribution period has begun on February, 14th, 2018). Participants can send either Ether, Bitcoin or Litecoin to the designated address and receive HKY at a rate of 7.500 HKY per ETH. The gathered funds will be sent to a multisig address that is controlled by Hicky. HKY received by contributors will be transferable 7 days after the end of the contribution period.
The company will allocate the tokens to:
– public contributors who send ETH, BTC, BCC to the smart contract address (60%),
– core developers (20%), founders and team, locked in a smart contract with a 18 month vesting period, and 6 month cliff,
– platform operations and updates (10%),
– advisors (5%) and
– marketing (5%).
The company intends to launch the app in the second quarter of 2018 and expand iternationally later during the year.
TOKEN SALE SUMMARY
– Start date: 10:00 AM (CET) on February 14, 2018
– Payment methods: ETH, BTC, LTC
– Soft cap: 3.000 ETH
– Hard cap: 36.000 ETH
– Token exchange rate: 7.500 HKY per ETH
– Total token supply (max): 481.500.000
ABOUT HICKY
Website: https://hicky.io/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hickydapp/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HickyDapp
Whitepaper: https://hicky.io/assets/pdf/Hicky_Whitepaper.pdf
Medium: https://medium.com/hickynews
Telegram: https://t.me/getpicky
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Hicky/
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2759286.msg28186180#msg28186180
Github: https://github.com/HickyToken/hickycontracts