Instars - Earn Crypto from Data Exchange (Like Photos of your Grocery Receipts!) [Review]
What is goood crypto fam. Let's dig into it. But as usual, if you don't want to read the entire article here it is in summation: Instars is a "blockchain-based data exchange platform," after you sign up you have the choice to enter some basic personal information such as your work, education, health and more, you volunteer this information to Instars and they use it to better set you up with surveys that match your demographic, with their mobile app you can take photos of certain categories of receipts, write a brief review of the experience, and earn Instar tokens.
https://join.instars.com/gidMZ7qVf3
Introduction
"The goal of Instar is to enable mutually beneficial data exchange between individuals and organizations within the Insights Network." I literally could not have said it any better myself.
Instars operates their own "competitive, viable sister chain for the EOS network." Meaning it is not an ERC-20 token and it runs on its own blockchain.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/instar
In addition to the occasional survey that users can get rewarded for, people can also get rewarded for uploading photos of their receipts with a little review about their purchasing experience.
A few of the receipt categories that you can upload are as follows: Grocery, Travel, Coffee, Movies, Convenience Store, and Pizza Hut. Currently Pizza Hut receipts get a 5x reward bonus.
A user can upload a maximum of three receipts per day, and all receipts need to be uploaded within 24 hours of the time of purchase.
When you sign up with Instars you only give them the data that you are willing to share; if you don't want them to know something then just don't talk about Fight Club.
Anyone can create surveys on the Insights Network with INSTAR tokens but they are mostly created by organizations to perform targeted market research.
On the Instars site they have a section where you can learn more about the project through some pretty high quality videos. It also looks like they plan on giving out some rewards in relation to their educational videos in the future - similar to the Coinbase Earn approach.
They have some pretty awesome plans for 2020 including an automatic move of all tokens currently in users' reward accounts into a staking account that will pay out every quarter.
In early February Instars launched integration with the DAI stablecoin. This means that alongside the INSTARS token you can choose to be rewarded for your data exchanges with Dai instead.
Maybe this feature has not become available yet in Canada, because I am unable to use it on my phone. If any American readers can either confirm or deny this it would be appreciated.
My Experience
I have been using Instars for several months now because, to put it simple: I like getting rewarded for things I would be doing anyway.
The Instars mobile app is where most of the magic is done.
Through the app you can upload photos of receipts, give a little review of your experience, and if it passes the approval process, you get rewarded 1 INSTARS token. Getting paid cryptocurrency to go grocery shopping is pretty sweet in my books.
According to this article, users can alternatively receive between 0.1-0.3 DAI instead but like I mentioned, I have no personal experience doing this so I cannot speak on that.
My experience with getting my receipts approved is unfortunately a little less than stellar. And I ain't talkin lumens baby.
I just did the math and approximately 5% of my uploaded receipts have been "Declined." So attention Instars team, in your next update, please make it possible for your users to know why their receipts get denied. If I don't know what I did wrong it's awfully hard to fix.
At one point I actually contacted their support to bring this up. They got back to me in a timely manner, but essentially they just informed me of the "Upload Receipt Rules" which can be found on their website and within the app.
Maybe I'm just a lot shakier than I like to admit - due to millennia of drug use - and my photos aren't ending up super clear. Which I can definitely understand, because that shit is for real. But also including the option to zoom into my photos so that I could verify this theory would also be appreciated.
Other than that little rant, the overall user experience is pretty solid. The process of signing up was simple, the "Profile Values" aka the demographics type questions were relatively straight-forward and basic enough that I felt safe providing them with all the answers.
Before starting this article I completed my first two surveys. I am unsure if I haven't been getting any surveys because I don't live in the US but regardless of that, those two experiences went very well. And I got a total of 5 INSTARS tokens for completing them both.
Conclusion
After everything is said and done, I will continue to use Instars for as long as business' continue to issue receipts. It really is as simple as that.
I really see the potential of this project especially as the masses become even more aware of big data.
It is a very easy-to-use app and interface with a pretty solid design. Some great features will be coming out this year which will make Instars even better and hopefully foster even more adoption on both sides of the data exchange.
https://join.instars.com/gidMZ7qVf3
*Full Disclosure: This is a referral link. If you sign up via this link, it will not cost you anything - it will only benefit me slightly as the person who potentially introduced you to the platform. I would appreciate it very much. I am Jack's sense of gratitude.*
*This post was posted to Publish0x and Uptrennd.*
Resources
https://blog.instars.com/announcing-dai-instars-partnership/
https://mk0frugalforlesh94so.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/allstars-1.png
https://medium.com/@moarman/instars-com-review-scam-or-legit-crypto-option-cb18b83aa112
https://crushcrypto.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/INSTAR-Logo.jpg
"This is a great development in the field of cryptocurrency" It is a source of online earning. Thank you for sharing this information.