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Prex

What is Prex

Prex (PAID Request EXchange) facilitates the matching of client requests with PAID (Permissionless Autonomous Incentivized Decoupled) services, aiming to establish an efficient market for requests and services through a limit order book. It seeks to offer a monetization model that is an alternative or complement of advertisement-based revenue generation for contemporary Internet businesses.

Traditionally, each company is in charge of the generation and serving of contents. For example YouTube and X build all their service separately.

  • Content generation: They each control what contents are recorded in their database (or object storage, whatever, some content storage).
  • Content serving: They each control which data a user can access (access control) and what are recommended to view (recommender system and advertisements).
---
title: Traditional Services
---
flowchart LR
    user(User)
    user--"watch video"--->gateway
    user--"tiew tweet"--->gateway_twitter
    subgraph youtube ["YouTube (NASDAQ:GOOG)"]
        gateway[Gateway]
        db[(Database)]
        indexer(Indexer)
        gateway-->db
        indexer--updates--->db
    end
    subgraph twitter ["X (Musk)"]
        gateway_twitter[Gateway]
        db_twitter[(Database)]
        indexer_twitter(Indexer)
        gateway_twitter-->db_twitter
        indexer_twitter--updates--->db_twitter
    end

Prex will, however, replace the 2nd part of content serving with PAID services. Users pay to these services directly. They buy tokens, then directly access the contents. Each companies only -control- propose contents they generate. Databases store them with the goal of maximizing download for profits.

It aims to provide an alternative or complementary monetization framework to Advertisements for modern Internet business.

See more on the motivation in the documentation.

---
title: PAID services
---
flowchart LR
user(User)
subgraph prex_stakeholder ["Prex Admin"]
    prex[Prex]
end
user--buy token--->prex
subgraph db_stakeholder ["Database Admin"]
    db[(Database)]
end
user--"raw video query w/ token"--->db
user--"raw tweet query w/ token"--->db
subgraph twitter_stakeholder ["X (Musk)"]
    twitter(X Indexer)
end
subgraph youtube_stakeholder ["YouTube (NASDAQ:GOOG)"]
    youtube(YouTube Indexer)
end
twitter--updates--->db
youtube--updates--->db

Service providers submit sell orders for their offerings, while users place bids and specify quality requirements for their requests. Upon a successful match, the order is executed, granting the user an access token to utilize the service. This entire process is automated and transparently managed for the user through a user agent program, requiring only periodic budget deposits like monthly.

sequenceDiagram
actor User
participant User Agent
participant Prex
participant Database
participant YouTube
YouTube->>Database:Update video
User->>User Agent:Monthly budget $10
User Agent->>Prex:Deposit $1 for 3 days
User Agent->>Prex:Buy YouTube token
Prex->>User Agent:Access token
User Agent->>Database:View video + access token
Database->>User:video

Further Reading