tune.fm today announced it has officially deployed to mainnet a new token protocol for Hedera Hashgraph. This protocol utilizes a sharding architecture that is necessary to scale token smart contracts on distributed public ledger provider Hedera Hashgraph. The token protocol architecture for the JAM token was designed to make it possible to scale token smart contracts on Hedera Hashgraph in a decentralized way
A token on Hedera offers unique advantages like finality and fairness for consensus ordering, fast transaction time and consensus speed necessary for dApps, and low fee structure making micropayments possible. The JAM token is specifically built for micropayments for every second of music streaming so when the music gets played the artist gets paid.
The JAM token is the cryptocurrency developed and used by tune.fm to allow listeners to support artists directly by simply streaming their music. Artists can earn JAM tokens as their music is streamed and they can also promote their music to first-time listeners using JAM tokens to incentivize discovery. Fans can earn 100 JAM tokens for signing up and spend JAM by streaming music or earn additional JAM tokens for discovering promoted music.
tune.fm is a decentralized application for music streaming developing a global music economy and decentralized marketplace for artists and fans. tune.fm features over 5K artists from around the world including Grammy award-winning artists from Mathew Knowles’s label Music World Entertainment featuring Beyonce live instrumentals.
When the MWE catalog was first launched on tune.fm the surge in new signups caused the original smart contract to max out its state size and not accept additional user wallets. This put the team back to the drawing board to re-architect the token smart contracts and develop a new protocol for scaling smart contract tokens on Hedera. The new architecture involves a ‘parent’ smart contract which wraps around various ‘child’ smart contract shards. As the state is filled for individual shards, new child shards are added to the parent smart contract, which intelligently maps and routes all incoming transactions to the relevant child shards.
As new payment technologies make way for new business models to be possible with micropayments and cryptocurrency, new platforms like tune.fm will transform how media is consumed in ways that are fairer to the creators and more engaging to consumers. New habits will form as tokenized economies organically spread and change the landscape with more efficient and rewarding means of media consumption. The JAM token and tune.fm aim to decentralize media marketplaces that disintermediate the transitional media business models.
