Video Startup Lino Raises $20M to Create Decentralized Video Community With Blockchain

"We believe that blockchain has enormous potential to empower video creators by decentralizing how their content is distributed and ensuring that their earnings go directly into their pockets," said Wilson Wei, CEO of Lino.

Lino, a video startup based in Cupertino, California, has secured $20 million in funding through a private token sale. Led by ZhenFund, the new funding would help Lino build its YouTube-like video distribution network with blockchain technology.

Lino utilizes blockchain technology to ensure content value can be recognized efficiently and all contributors can be incentivized directly to promote long-term economic growth.

“We believe that blockchain has enormous potential to empower video creators by decentralizing how their content is distributed and ensuring that their earnings go directly into their pockets,” said Wilson Wei, CEO of Lino. “We want to eliminate the middlemen in video streaming.”

The funding will be used to develop Lino Blockchain and Lino’s video streaming DApp, both of which will be launching later this year, as well as expand marketing and operations. This round was led by ZhenFund and other investors including FBG Capital, DFund, and INBlockchain.

Lino decentralizes video content by providing 5 key infrastructure components:

  • Free Transactions – Users can use LINO tokens (LINO) to pay content creators.
  • Incentivized Currency System – Lino’s incentivized model creates a sustainable digital content economy by incentivizing all community contributions including content creation, content redistribution, and infrastructure services.
  • Proof of Human Engagement – Lino prevents bots from manipulating the reward distribution and prevents potential attacks.
  • Proof of Content Value – Lino measures the revenue generated from content as its value reflected in the market, taking several measures to prevent the system from being flooded with fraud.
  • Auctioning Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Storage – Lino offers a peer-to-peer, auction-based CDN. Lino also stores video and live stream playback in a decentralized manner by using an auction approach to achieve decentralization.

Lino has plenty of competition. Streamspace, Viewly, Stream, Viuly, and Flixxo, are also video sharing platforms for content creators cutting out the middleman.