Creating a planetary-scale Web3 commerce data marketplace
Commerce data is currently controlled by tech giants. We want to change that.
Data is a highly valuable component of online commerce. Market intermediaries capture and take ownership of a wide range of data including buyers’ personal and product preference data, together with seller pricing, ratings and reviews. The value of this data derives from its ability to predict consumer buying behaviour, inform product development and provide market insight. Despite its utility, the vast majority of data is locked-away in the proprietary data silos of tech titans such as Amazon and eBay, or sold privately on the shadow data economy.
Extraction and capture
As they scale, centralized market intermediaries amass competitive advantage via their data troves, network effects and economies of scale. Such networks invariably move from cooperating with their participants to competing, and from attracting customers to extracting. This is neither a coincidence nor a choice, since profit-making entities have a fiduciary responsibility to maximise shareholder value. An extraction imperative, if you will. Amazon is replete with examples. First, the EU alleged that Amazon was using competitively sensitive data gathered in its role as a marketplace — regarding marketplace sellers, their products and transactions — to unfairly advantage itself as a seller. Second, Amazon has used this data to launch competing, Amazon-branded, products. Third, Amazon has vertically integrated into areas such as freight so aggressively that it could soon become the world’s largest freight company. As a result, centralized market intermediaries have the means and motive to capture and dominate multiple markets.
The problem
This centralization of data is hugely damaging to both individuals and the wider economy. Data collected from commercial transactions by centralized intermediaries is locked away and used to strengthen anti-competitive market dominance which imperils the interests of the consumer, other firms and even governments.
The solution
The ambitious vision of Boson Protocol is a future where commerce data is pooled within a secure, privacy-preserving, shared data layer where it can be monetized in an equitable way.
This creates a huge value pool where the value created is recycled via the $BOSON token, allowing for further funding of the dCommerce ecosystem. .
Whereas Web 2 tech titans capture users’ data and separate users from the value their data creates; Boson Protocol incentivizes voluntary data sharing in a secure, privacy-preserving and self-sovereign way by providing users with an equitable distribution of the proceeds from data monetization.
An integration with Ocean Protocol will enable the development of a planetary-level Web3 data marketplace for commerce in which data buyers may purchase personal, product preference, pricing and ratings data to predict consumer buying behaviour, inform product development or develop market insights.
Voluntarily opting into a data marketplace is a critical part of the decentralized commerce revolution and allows consumers to monetize their data, which would otherwise be hoarded by the commerce giants.
Why is commerce data so important?
On its own, it is not. But acquiring customer preference data and then doing something with it is crucial for e-commerce businesses. Digital-native organisations such as Amazon have led the way and many legacy companies have struggled to move to a data-driven decision-making culture, hampered by a lack of expertise in decision architecture and data science.
Hence there is a huge market for this data, especially when aggregated. But until now, there was no easy way for individual users to monetize it, and for regular businesses to tap into it. The unlocking of that value pool changes the game, and creates a much more equitable dynamic between all players in the commerce value chain.
Of course, it will be entirely possible to use Boson Protocol for simply enabling decentralized commerce transactions and to opt to keep your data private.
Worldwide commerce and data, unlocked. The tokenized data economy and tokenized Thing economy have the potential to become two of the most important value drivers the world has ever seen. Let’s build it together.
About Boson Protocol
Boson Protocol’s vision is to enable a decentralized commerce ecosystem by funding and enabling the development of a stack of specialist applications to disrupt, demonopolize and democratize commerce.
Boson Protocol achieves this via an open tokenized economy of things which:
- automates the redemption of digital rights for physical assets using NFTs encoded with game theory.
- disrupts e-commerce platforms by tokenizing things and their data within a liquid digital market, built on DeFi.
Keen to learn more? Read our Lightpaper:
Let’s build an Open tokenized economy together.
- Find out more about us at www.BosonProtocol.io
- Check us out on Twitter.
- Join our Telegram discussions here.
- Want to dive deeper? 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!
