How The Bee Token Is Changing Home Sharing With Its BEE Protocols
The Bee Token is changing the future of home sharing. Beenest delivers value to the users of short-term housing rentals by aligning incentives with goals and cutting transactions fees, while ensuring the utmost level of security and trust. While The Bee Token focuses on decentralizing home sharing, its underlying infrastructure is designed to accommodate the growth of innovations in the broader market.
With the Bee Protocols, we are laying the foundation to power any future sharing economy decentralized application. The Bee Protocols are broken down into three pillars: Payment, Arbitration, and Reputation (PAR).
PAYMENT
The Payment Protocol is the core pillar that enables guests to pay hosts for booking. This protocol benefits users in several aspects that are not offered by current sharing models with a middleman. The Payment Protocol ensures integrity over the sending and receiving of tokens by holding those tokens in smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain until service is properly rendered.
Guests and hosts must send Bee Tokens to the smart contract. Once booking goes through without service conflicts, the tokens are transferred to the appropriate addresses. If there’s a conflict, all Bee Tokens are sent to an Arbitration address for conflict resolution. Throughout these booking scenarios, the payments contract keeps track of payments in process until it’s properly paid out.
Thanks to commission-free transactions on Beenest, hosts have a stronger profit potential per booking, increasing their revenue stream. With higher revenue potential, hosts will be able to pass on those gains to guests in the form of reduced rates per night.
ARBITRATION
The Arbitration Protocol is designed to solve disputes through a trustless voting mechanism known as Proof of Judging. There are built-in incentives in this protocol to foster participation that is fair, timely and accountable.
In the event of a dispute after a rental service, funds are sent from the payment contracts to arbitration. Arbiters stake Bee Tokens to the arbitration protocol contract — the higher the amount staked, the higher probability of arbiters being chosen for arbitration.
The pool of arbiters vote on a sliding scale determining the percentage of the disputed amount that should be paid out to the plaintiff. The contract then aggregates the majority of voters’ reward amount to the winning party, while the rest goes to the losing party. Results from the arbitration would update reputation scores of the arbiters.
In exchange for arbitrating cases, arbiters earn additional tokens. Tokens are sent back to arbiters after arbitration is done. If arbiters fail to make a decision, tokens are partially burned and sent back to Beenest for reserves. With this decentralized arbitration process, guests will see time savings, as well as orderly and timely refunds from cancelled booking.
REPUTATION
The Reputation Protocol manages reputation scores for all users in the sharing economy application, and it allows any current or future application to grab the reputation of verified entities from the Ethereum blockchain. The reputation scoring algorithm ensures that scoring is fair and transparent while preventing bad actors from gaming the system. Unlike traditional credit models, the Reputation Protocol is backed by transparent algorithms as defined in smart contracts.
Output from the scoring algorithm feeds into a star user review system. For instance, hosts with positive reviews and no cancellations would receive a higher score than hosts with negative reviews and multiple cancellations. The simple star rating serves as a useful decision guide for hosts to either approve or deny guests based on past guest participation on the platform. Meanwhile, guests have an incentive to maintain better reputation scores which can lower their security deposits.
PROTOCOL FOR CURRENT AND FUTURE APPLICATIONS
As a backbone, the three pillars of the Bee Protocols yield tangible benefits for builders of peer to peer applications. It’s expected to accelerate development cycles, reduce integration costs, and enable faster network bootstrapping. For third party developers, that would translate to increased revenue, decreased costs, and time savings. The cumulative effect will be a sharing economy that has strong growth capacity based on positive network feedback loop.
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Email: team@thebeetoken.com
