Hashgraph has partnered with the Chopra Foundation to develop a mental health platform that they hope will scale to 1 billion users within five years. The platform’s initial focus will be on suicide prevention, though they hope to eventually turn it into a broader mental wellbeing network. According to the press release, the “Never Alone Initiative” will “serve a global community, delivering secure access to scientific research, the work of mental health and wellness experts, and pragmatic tools and practices for everyday use.”
We asked Hashgraph CEO Mance Harmon whether the fact that Deepak Chopra has been accused of promoting pseudoscience and quackery presented a challenge to the partnership. Harmon acknowledged that he was familiar with the controversy surrounding Chopra’s methods and added, “I think that the platform that is being created can be of value.”
Harman believes that if the initiative becomes a success, it will be an import use case for the Hashgraph technology, and Distributed Ledger Technology in general. The company’s technology will be used to authenticate content, track its consumption, and remunerate creators with a token. Most blockchains struggle when it comes to storing large media files; however, according to Harmon, Hashgraph’s unique design makes it highly suitable for this challenge.
Hashgraph’s Hedera Consensus Service or HCS that serves as the base layer, organizes transactions into consensus order. The Chopra Foundation will also be running its own nodes, wherein the data will be stored. They claim that the data stored on the private network remains temper-proof:
When the content gets created, it gets hashed and the hash gets submitted to the HCS, gets its timestamp and then gets streamed back to this private network that stores everything.
Harman said that the comparison to Steemit is apt, adding that he likes the design of the Never Alone platform:
I really appreciate the model that the Never Alone Initiative is bringing to market here. And that is the model of combining crowdsourcing of content, curating that content, having the community at large effectively reward the content creators through there, through their participation and usage and remuneration through a token.
Although Chopra’s teachings may be questionable, he is a bonafide salesman – he serves as an adjunct professor of marketing at Columbia University Business School. If he manages to scale the platform to even one-tenth of its stated goals, this will be quite an achievement.
