The Story of Unbound

Foreword

Many of us have ideas. Ideas that we think could change the world. Most of us don’t get to make them a reality. Our dreams never see the light of day because not all of us can take the leap to put everything in on one bet. We end up with a few “what ifs.”

Instagram quotes and business coaches often make us feel small cause we didn’t make the leap. Tell us that you have to lose something to gain something. While this might be true in a lot of cases, not everyone can take the leap due to their circumstances. It's really hard to keep believing in your ideas when everyone else says otherwise. We believe that at least some of you reading this can relate to that.

However, these “other people” are not the entire world. Sometimes, they are just people who want to cash in with your labor. They fear that if your ideas get out there, you might be able to create something that they couldn’t. We have no hate for anyone. Because we do not think it's true. Web3 has proved time and time again that it is not a zero-sum game. You can have an amazing idea and make it a reality, even if you don’t have big companies backing you up. Even if you don’t have millions in VC funds. Even if you don’t have a “successful” YouTuber pumping your token. All you need is to put in the work and believe in your ideas. The Web3 Community will do the rest.

Team Unbound is a group of builders that chose to believe in their ideas. Hoping that other people will see what we see. So, this part of the white paper will focus on how Project Unbound was founded, why it was founded, and what it aims to achieve. It will also speak about how you, as a community member and $IMAGE token hodler, have a big role to play in Unbound’s journey and growth. And, how we’ve designed the token mechanics of $IMAGE to incentivize our hodlers for the long run.

We’ve put a lot of work into designing the token mechanics because we didn’t want $IMAGE to be a token just based on hype. We wanted to build a proper, strong economy within our ecosystem that works with the market to deliver results for $IMAGE Hodlers as well as our product users. To us, every community member is important. To us, community is limitless. Community is everyone. Even you, reading this white paper are an integral part of our community.

The Timeline

Team Unbound is a group of engineers and sales professionals who came together for the love of building great products. We had a lot of ideas on the table but one thing that caught our attention was how good AI Image Generators were getting. Solutions like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were so popular because they allowed everyone to create images for their projects faster and easier than before. Midjourney really caught our eye because of how easy it was to use. When every other product out there was just focusing on the images, Midjourney seemed to focus on making it easy to use in everyday workflows. Discord is a great platform for that.

Ideation

However, we wanted to take this a step further. For example, many designers use Image Generators today and removal of backgrounds from graphics such as logos was not easy. You sometimes have to use multiple tools to achieve this. We wanted to provide a solution for creators, marketers, and builders like us who wanted to create images and graphics but reduce the number of steps they had to take to achieve this. This is how we started work on Unbound.

One other aspect that we wanted to address was censorship. This is where it gets a little tricky. Since AI Image tools are so advanced now, it's easy for bad actors to misuse these tools. For example, it's easy for someone to generate an NSFW image on a generator and then use a face swap to defame someone they know. At the same time, many artists such as models may want to do this deliberately for their content.

To solve this, some tools out there have added restrictions where the person generating the images can only use their own photos to do a face swap. However, this is not a perfect solution because you can always use multiple tools to achieve these results. And, we noticed that tools with these safeguards in place were not always easy to use. The ones that were easy to use sometimes didn’t offer usable results.

The Solution

To solve this, we decided that Unbound was going to use multiple ML Models to achieve the desired effects. While the Image Generator itself will use multiple models trained on specific styles, we also started building an AI Computer Vision solution that could detect how safe the generated images were. For example, if a person is generating an NSFW image, it is important that it should not depict someone underage.

We also wanted artists and models to be able to generate artistic NSFW images for their content creation needs, but this meant that we needed a way to restrict them from using anyone else’s images, which could lead to misuse. We were not happy with any existing solutions because the internet is a big place, and a photo once leaked can be out there forever without the bad actor ever getting caught. This challenge motivated us to create a KYC solution that works on Blockchain Technology. Integration of blockchain meant that anyone out there could verify the source of an image even outside of our system.

Possibilities

Now, we are working on 3 solutions Unbound Image Generator (which we have now named Unbound Canvas), the AI Computer Vision solution (Unbound Vision), and the blockchain-powered KYC solution (Unbound Identity). After working on them for a while we soon realized that we had stumbled onto something quite amazing. We originally intended Unbound Vision and Identity to be security layers for Unbound Canvas but there were many other possibilities for them.

Unbound Vision can be used in multiple industries for different use cases. Since it is an AI Computer Vision solution, it could be used to analyze traffic patterns or detect certain objects or people. It could be used in airports to detect suspicious behavior, in elderly care to detect falls and much more. The more we worked on them, the more we realized how powerful they could be together.

For example, Unbound Vision can be used to monitor crowds inside any establishment that has a surveillance system. What if we could use that to provide better security for the public? Let’s just say that a bad actor enters a retail store and Unbound Vision detects them using facial recognition. It could alert the authorities immediately.

There are challenges here too because some of these bad actors might have committed crimes in other countries. This would mean that the AI would need access to databases overseas and that is very difficult to do. So, the system has to be connected but it cannot be monolithic. Different countries have different laws and systems.

Our solution to this was Unbound Network. A multichain blockchain solution where any organization can create their own chains using Substrate (Rust) and connect to a main chain where they were part of a large network. This is similar to other blockchains such as Polkadot but specifically for organizations.

This also gives us a way to solve the data-sharing problem because we can now easily verify data from multiple sources without actually viewing the data using something called ZK-SNARKS (Zero-Knowledge Proofs).

We’ll discuss more about this in later parts of the White Paper. But this is how Unbound was created.