Introducing Operator
Today we’re excited to announce Operator — an open and decentralized protocol for e-commerce — and shed more light on what we’ve been hard at work building for the last few months.
To introduce myself, my name’s Arjun Bhargava, Co-Founder and CEO of Operator. As a software developer, I’ve moved around a lot in my career — I started in TradFi at Goldman Sachs, worked at Reddit during its hyper-growth phase, and founded a few Web 2.0 companies — but nothing has made me more excited than what we’re creating right now.
I’m a builder at heart and was always attracted to tech that can disrupt the status quo, so naturally crypto took over my life. Technology’s common theme is that, over time, it’s constantly evolving to replace incumbents with new tools and systems that trend towards efficiency and transparency. Take finance for example, in TradFi, big banks and institutions that owned financial data and controlled how retail users interact with markets were slowly replaced by FinTech companies who sought to make finance more accessible. Now, with the advent of web 3.0 technologies, DeFi is providing an alternative where all financial transactions are transparent and faster.
The biggest and most inefficient industry that was born from Web 2.0 is e-commerce. Like TradFi, so many pieces of the e-commerce world remains opaque to the layman. Pricing is often confusing, user experiences haven’t changed much from 20 years ago, and there’s often a war between buyers, sellers, and the incumbents who control all the data. So we started asking: how could web 3.0 tech disrupt that industry? That’s the basis for what we’re building at Operator — to build a better world for e-commerce. One where the incentives for all parties: buyers, sellers, and platforms were aligned.
What is Operator?
Operator Protocol (OP) is an open and decentralized protocol for e-commerce. Anyone can participate as a buyer or seller, and the network will be governed by the marketplace participants. Instead of a giant, monopolistic rent-seeker owning the customer and taking a large toll on every transaction, OP is a no-fee alternative for buyers and sellers to diversify off Amazon and other centralized marketplaces.
We started Operator with a vision: what if all product data and inventory was accessible on the blockchain? In this future, merchants have full control of who can use their data and how their data gets used. Affiliates, bloggers, influencers, taste-makers, and anyone who could generate a demand for a product would be able to pull data directly from the protocol without a centralized middle-man dictating how much they get paid and when they could use the data. In addition, Merchants would be able to interact directly with both people who drive demand and consumers, meaning merchants would actually own their brand.
At the core of Operator will be the community. We want to co-create the future of e-commerce by directly engaging with users and builders of Operator.
Start by joining early access.
Early Access
To begin with, we’ve built the Operator API Explorer — a tool to help developers preview API requests and expected responses from a library of Shopify products we’ve collected. We will also be announcing several reference apps to showcase the potential of what can be built using the API.
Our goal with early access is to test out key parts of our future vision and to assemble a community of developers to build it.
Whether you’re a developer that wants to join the Operator team or be a community developer that builds experiences using the API, get in touch with the links below for early access.
Operator Team
The rest of the Operator founding team consists of veteran founders: Justin Kan co-founded Twitch and Fractal, has been investing in crypto since 2013, and has been an advisor to decentralized projects like Theta and Audius; Jamie Quint comes from an e-commerce background but has also led Growth @Notion and monetization @Reddit; Robin Chan co-founded Fractal and Operator v1, founded and sold a mobile gaming company, XPD Media, to Zynga, and was previously head of Zynga Asia; and Tikhon Bernstam founded and sold the cloud application platform, Parse, to Facebook, and also founded Scribd.
There’s way too much to communicate about Operator in a single Medium article. We’ll be releasing more information in the coming weeks. Stay updated by joining the OP Discord.
We can’t wait for you all to start building the future of e-commerce with us.
— Arjun
Talk to us
If you want to follow along and be the first to know when we go live:
If you are a developer who wants to get early access to Operator:
If you want to join the team:
