Founded in early 2017, Upfiring was established to create an alternative to traditional P2P file-sharing protocols by incentivizing seeders through the use of a tokenized file-sharing economy. Traditional P2P file-sharing and networks offer no incentives for seeders and as a result, low file availability and slow downloading speeds are frequent issues. By incentivizing seeding, Upfiring aims to create a healthier file-sharing network that allows content creators and seeders to be rewarded directly for sharing content without any third-party intermediaries.
Upfiring’s first usable dapp prototype launched on mainnet in December 2018, with their full application launching on 5 February 2019. The dapp is cross-platform - available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The application allows users to generate encrypted .ufr files with embedded price data and seed them on the Upfiring network. Users earn UFR tokens in exchange for seeding and keeping files online. Seeder smart contracts deployed to the Ethereum network mediate the movement of files across the network, maintain seeder UFR balances and allow for the decryption of files when warranted.
Upfiring targets content-creators by allowing them to promote their content directly to users without relying on any third-party intermediaries. UFR tokens are used within the dapp to unlock encrypted content. The dapp can be downloaded from https://www.upfiring.com, and the corresponding documentation can be found at https://www.upfiring.com/documentation.html