Dog Fooding Factland
Crypto, the war on drugs and Russia were the top misinformation narratives on Factland this week. Juries received four claims and resolved three at the time of this email, issuing 1650 $FACT tokens to the winners and participants.
Top claims
Russia sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines
1150 $FACT staked
This week two leaks were detected in Nord Stream 1 and one leak detected in Nord Stream 2. Neither was in use shipping gas but they were pressurized with natural gas and saw pressure drop. Given the depth of the pipelines (~50m) and the complexity of such an attack many people presume a state actor was responsible. Both Russia and the US have been named as potential suspects.
UNDECIDED
This was an open claim at the time the newsletter was sent, you can still stake on the outcome, submit evidence and comment here.
Drug dealers in the US are targeting children with 'rainbow fentanyl' 900 $FACT staked
Customs agents recently seized a large shipment of fentanyl at the border including brightly colored pills resembling candy. The DEA, Sen. Chuck Schumer and others now contend these pills were meant to target children and lure them into becoming drug addicts. Some influential people have uncritically picked up the story, warning parents to be on the lookout for rainbow fentanyl this Halloween.
DECIDED
See the evidence and the verdict here.
The Wintermute hack was an inside job
450 $FACT staked
Security researcher James Edwards aka Librehash published new research claiming to show the $160M hack of Wintermute, a leading crypto market maker that provides liquidity for crypto traders, was not the result of an external attack but facilitated by insiders.
DECIDED
See the evidence and the verdict here.
Arbitrum will launch its governance token in 2022
300 $FACT staked
Many people have argued that it will not be in 2022. What do you think?
DECIDED
See the evidence and the verdict here.
Founders' note
Building product is a humbling experience. Creating the Factland beta and @FactlandDAO has been a journey, a volunteer effort by a few people passionate about solving an important social problem. We keep repeating it, and more and more people seem to agree: Fact checking is broken. We need to invest in more radical experiments to beat the misinformation crisis. Web3 and crypto offer the tools and features to create new approaches that offer a way out.
To recap: Factland uses staking, adversarial debate and anonymous random sample juries to review and issue verdicts on claims and issue rewards to the winners and participants. We are gamifying fact checking, and building a decentralized consensus network to resolve disputes over what's published online. We don't know if this will work, and we are OK with change.
Right now we are dog fooding. We know we have not nailed the product or the content but we prefer to build in public and get insights from our users about what is working, what is not working and how to improve. To that end, we've committed to publishing and staking on at least one straw man claim a day starting this week in order to generate verdicts and learn more about what we need to build. To get involved and see how Factland works join our beta, follow us on Twitter at @FactlandDAO, join our Discord.
We can't thank you enough for taking an interest in what we are doing and, we hope, help us get to the next level.
The Factland team