Reality Check

Quick check the correct facts

I helped with the branding, product design, and front-end development of Reality Check, an information platform built on Ethereum blockchain technology. Blockchain is the core technology behind digital currencies such as Bitcoin, and it can record data securely and immutably without any central authority. Reality Check applies this technology to offer a Q&A service with built-in financial incentives, aiming to gather highly accurate information.

The home page on a laptop — Reality Check — Home

The full home page alongside the question and answer screens

Reality Check is a Q&A web application built around the exchange of money. Asking a question requires setting a Reward, and answering requires setting a Bond. If an existing answer is wrong and you know the right one, you can overwrite it by setting a Bond at least twice that of the previous answerer. The poster of the answer that is finally confirmed receives a payout of the Reward plus the Bonds of all the answerers. Conversely, a wrong answer means losing the amount you set as your Bond, which holds those who answer to a degree of responsibility.

UX demo of RC Browser

A Q&A site is both a medium to be read and an application for asking and answering questions. Reality Check in particular has unusual features that earlier Q&A sites lack, such as Rewards, Bonds, Arbitration, and Step Delay (the answer deadline), which tend to make the UI cluttered. So I effectively separated the window that serves as the medium from the window that serves as the application (the RC Browser), recreating in the web browser the relationship an operating system has between the desktop and its applications, and designed a UI that is intuitive to use.

A question screen for choosing an answer and entering a bond — Detail of question (RC Browser)

A question screen showing the current answer — Question has answer

The field for adding a reward, opened — Add reward

An error message for an invalid bond amount — Error

A question under arbitration, with the answer history for choosing the final answer — Arbitration

A resolved question showing the final answer and the answer history — Resolved

The form for posting a question with a reward, an answer deadline, and other settings — Post a Question

Your questions and answers, with notifications — Your Q&A

At its core, Reality Check uses the defining property of the blockchain, a tamper-proof ledger independent of any authority, to record facts on the internet. In practical terms, it was envisioned for uses such as settling the outcomes of bets, automatically executing insurance contracts, or simply as a game. At the same time, it is a project that questions the very nature of journalism in the face of the populism inherent in the "democratization of digital technology," as exposed in 2016 by Brexit, the US presidential election, and the DeNA curation-site scandal in Japan. The project's goal is to become the last line of defense for the reliability of information on an internet where fact and fake are tangled together.

Client: Social Minds Inc
Branding: Kazunori Miura
Logo Design: Kazunori Miura
Copywriting: Kazunori Miura
UI/UX Design: Kazunori Miura
Front-end development: Social Minds Inc, Kazunori Miura
Blockchain development: Social Minds Inc
Launch: Work in progress
Website: Live site coming soon