Boson Protocol: say hello to decentralized autonomous commerce.
Imagine a world where trading physical goods is as easy as trading digital assets. Where you can run a commerce business without having to interact via a centralized monopoly. Where customers actually own their data and can choose to keep it private or to monetize it as they see fit. Where smart contracts can execute real world commerce transactions in a decentralized and autonomous way.
None of this has been possible — until now.
TL;DR
Boson is a peer-to-peer system which replicates the benefits of a market intermediary, without the disbenefits of centralized systems- which abuse trust by extracting excess profits and hoarding data, and arbitrated decentralized systems- which add cost and friction.
Boson Protocol is the foundational primitive that the decentralized web has been waiting for: a provably secure end-to-end system to carry out real-world commerce transactions and to record reliable data from these transactions on the blockchain.
Problems with commerce
The development of Bitcoin and other decentralized currencies means that, at least in theory, the need for financial intermediaries has been eliminated. But the coordination of commercial transactions also requires either centralized market intermediaries or decentralized arbitrators to manage dispute mediation and transaction reversal. This adds cost, trust and friction, which limits the scope and reduces the efficiency of commerce.
A further problem with centralized market intermediaries is that data collected from commercial transactions is hoarded and used to strengthen anti-competitive market dominance. This imperils the interests of the consumer, other firms and even governments.
This is the moment when all that changes.
Our technology provides the solution by:
- Enabling the coordination of commerce between buyers and sellers in a decentralized and autonomous manner, minimizing value capture and the need for arbitration.
- Allowing buyers and sellers to monetize their commerce data equitably and keeping centralized entities from hoarding their data.
We connect smart contracts to real-world commerce and its data. While doing that, we eliminate intermediaries, minimize arbitration and rent extraction. We make dCommerce frictionless and allow people, organizations and machines to transact frictionlessly.
Physical asset oracles, stateful NFTs and a game-changing exchange mechanism
A further challenge with off-chain asset exchanges, is the physical asset oracle problem. That is, if Alice tokenizes her car and sells that token to Bob, how can Bob be sure that Alice will also transfer the physical asset- the car? Boson Protocol represents a practical workaround to this problem. Rather than tokenizing real-world products and services themselves, instead Boson tokenizes future commitments to transact. These futures contracts are represented as stateful NFT (non-fungible token) vouchers which are governed by a novel exchange mechanism. The Boson mechanism, which relies on a two-sided deposit structure, is analyzed as a dynamic game that evolves while allowing its participants to build reputation. The simplistic happy path is depicted in the diagram below. A fuller representation of the mechanism can be found within the Boson Protocol white paper, with ongoing theoretical and applied economic research steering the mechanism’s evolution.
This novel exchange mechanism is what enables smart contracts to exchange digital value for physical products and services whilst eliminating intermediaries and minimizing arbitration cost and friction. Boson also allows customer demographic, satisfaction and preference data to be monetized equitably via an Ocean Protocol Web3 data marketplace.
Our mission is to create the foundational infrastructure for the emerging decentralized commerce ecosystem, empowering builders and partners to reinvent commercial exchange as we know it. The ecosystem we are enabling will unbundle monopolistic market intermediaries, and make commerce programmable and more equitable to all network participants.
The age of Composability
DeFi (decentralized finance) is sparking a revolution in financial services. As the arc of decentralization touches more and more aspects of our lives, the next logical question is “how can we apply the lessons of DeFi to real-world commerce?”
In terms of progress and development, nothing exists in a vacuum. Inventions are normally created when someone looks at existing technologies and finds new ways to iterate or combine them. As complexity scientist W. Brian Arthur observed, technology is made up of building blocks which recombine in novel ways to form increasingly complex hierarchies of technologies.
DeFi is modular for a reason. No one designed a DeFi system from the ground up. No one conceptualized the idea of an entire parallel, decentralized financial system and started planning how the structure would look.
DeFi’s composability enables developers and entrepreneurs to add further components that can interact with what is already there. This opens the roadmap to anyone with an idea and the capabilities to build new components that interlink with the existing architecture, giving the whole ecosystem new superpowers.
‘Money Lego’ — the modular smart contracts and cryptographic primitives which are mashed-up to enable a constellation of new products on permissionless networks — are the building blocks that have been the catalyst for the DeFi revolution.
Just as the prerequisite for DeFi to become a challenger to CeFi (centralized finance) was the availability of these building blocks, the emergence of a new decentralized commerce paradigm will need to be powered by the commerce version of these Money Legos.
This is the beginning of the Age of dCommerce Lego.
In order for dCommerce to take off in the same way as DeFi, we need the components that will allow the physical world to be mapped to the digital realm.
If you are a builder, visit our website to learn more, read our whitepaper, or join us on telegram.
The Unbundling of Centralized Commerce
Boson Protocol is that foundational dCommerce Lego block, and our vision is that an entire ecosystem of protocols and a swarm of hyper-specialized dApps and network participants will emerge. We are pioneering the dCommerce revolution. This is how, together, we will challenge the extractionary incumbents and rebalance the distribution of value across the commerce value chain.
Freeing ourselves from the constraints of existing commerce networks will allow builders to innovate new business models that are productive for every network participant and mindful of the importance of data, without allowing hoarding to take place. The explosion of interest in token economies and Web3 technologies show that there is a huge amount of value to be unlocked, that is currently being captured and controlled by intermediaries that have an extraction imperative.
In a later blog post, we will explore in detail exactly what makes commerce data so desirable, and what is to be gained from this unbundling. But for now, let’s focus on how Boson taps into this added value.
Value Creation Potential
As the foundational primitive or basic plumbing of decentralized commerce, Boson Protocol has the opportunity to unlock two planetary-scale value pools:
- By executing real-world commerce transactions, Boson becomes the global decentralized network for coordinating commerce
- By enabling buyer and seller data to flow in a secure, compliant manner that prevents hoarding and exploit, Boson becomes the planetary-level Web3 marketplace for commerce data
Boson’s status as the first true dCommerce primitive with minimized arbitration enables digital and decentralized apps to be easily developed and integrated, and we anticipate for this reason that the Boson middleware will rapidly become a key pluggable feature of the whole Web3 experience.
We are building the foundational infrastructure for a dCommerce ecosystem that will provide an alternative to the existing monopolies, allowing parties to truly transact peer-to-peer and opening up new market structures that haven’t been imagined yet.
Let’s rethink how companies, humans and machines transact.
Learn more about Boson at www.BosonProtocol.io
Check us out on Twitter.
Join our Telegram discussions here.
Want to dive deep? Read our whitepaper.
Lastly, if you’re a decentralization enthusiast, please follow us here, on Medium. We will post frequently about our dCommerce journey and would love to hear your comments!
