Press release

HUMAN Protocol Launches To Make The Internet Human Again

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Sponsored by Businesswire

HUMAN Protocol, a decentralized solution for organizing, evaluating and compensating businesses and individuals for performing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), launched out of stealth today. The formerly private protocol is currently used by 10 percent of the internet and 10 percent of the crypto-community and is overseen by the HUMAN Protocol Foundation, an ecosystem of industry stakeholders who share its vision of creating a more ethical, private, and secure internet. HUMAN Protocol’s first application, hCaptcha, is actively being used by thousands of different websites, including the Canadian government, Rakuten, Gartner, Craigslist and most blockchain exchanges to ensure they are receiving genuine human traffic and engagement. Nearly all cryptocurrency users have interacted with HUMAN Protocol technology, whether they are aware of the interaction or not.

The HUMAN Protocol Foundation is an independent open source community that developed a blockchain solution for use in the full-scale distributed HITs. The open-source developer community created the HUMAN Protocol to support and guide a hybrid blockchain infrastructure via the Human Token contract. This extends the capabilities of existing blockchain solutions by implementing a Bulk API. The API will support efficient micropayments via one-to-many bulk transfers. This payment system is 50x more efficient and will remain EIP20-compatible, enabling globally distributed human review, at scale.

“More than 50 years ago, humans launched the internet, and now it is overrun by bots,” said Alex Newman, co-Director of the HUMAN Protocol Foundation. “We engineered the HUMAN Protocol not only to combat bots, but for a larger purpose — to take back the Internet and help news publications rebuild brand integrity and trust with their audiences. This ecosystem we’re building through the HUMAN Protocol Foundation will allow publishers to be compensated for using hCaptcha to detect and block nefarious bot activity in the coming months.”

Bots masquerading as humans are responsible for 52 percent of web traffic. HUMAN Protocol’s hCaptcha application is used by websites and digital news publications and blocks bots at a rate of 10 million requests per second. hCaptcha labels immense volumes of data; flags label-farms; determines if a website is getting genuine, human traffic; and detects unbalanced data sets. hCaptcha labeled data is an example of a HIT, a task that can be used to prove humanness and can be used to improve machine learning capabilities. For example, hCaptcha labeled data can be used to teach computers to more accurately identify images – like an orange, a car, or a specific type of dog.

Websites that host hCaptcha are paid based on how many of their users click through hCaptcha and answer questions – successfully completing a HIT. Currently, when hCaptcha blocks bots, websites and publishers earn money and can cash out via a PayPal account. The growth and demand for hCaptcha strained the traditional payment systems previously used to incentivize website owners and highlighted the critical need for more efficient systems that could support the immense scale of payments in real-time.

To improve upon this infrastructure and expedite payments to network participants, the HUMAN Protocol Foundation will adopt a hybrid approach using the EIP20-compatible HUMAN token, $HMT, for quicker settlement, easier management, and better compensation in the future.

“The HUMAN Protocol Foundation will provide a backbone to support a full-scale distributed human review system to help defend authentic Internet traffic,” James Roy Poulter, COO of the HUMAN Protocol Foundation. “Together, we aim to build the necessary infrastructure to allow humans and machines to collaborate on solutions together, like arbitrary labeling tasks with hCaptcha.”

For more information about how to integrate hCaptcha, click here.

Read HUMAN Protocol’s whitepaper here, and a litepaper will be released in the coming weeks.

About HUMAN Protocol Foundation

HUMAN Protocol Foundation is on a mission to usher in the next evolution of machine intelligence: letting machines ask people directly for the data they need to improve, at scale. Focused on teaching computers to be more human, the Foundation democratizes access to machine learning technologies. The Foundation is focused on mainnetting the infrastructure which has enabled the labeling of massive datasets with hCaptcha, a bot blocking Captcha technology that asks users to label what they see in different images to prove they are human. The entire Foundation ecosystem is powered by its native cryptocurrency – The HUMAN Token (HMT) – which runs all of the Foundations applications and serves as the medium of exchange in the HUMAN Protocol. For more information visit the Foundation’s website here.