Boson Protocol's Governance Design Principles
“Boson Protocol enables a commerce ecosystem which is resistant to capture by monopolies and where participants are not farmed by platforms.” — Justin Banon, Boson Protocol Co-founder
Boson Protocol is building the core parts of decentralized autonomous commerce. Following the revolution DeFi brought to the decentralized web, we believe the next phase of its development is commerce. Ecommerce, rebuilt with the disruptive design pattern demonstrated by DeFi: an open tokenized economy.
Existing ecommerce is made up of powerful platforms that have captured the market, extracting excess value from consumers, firms, and supply chains. This is why Boson’s 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.
In the same way that DeFi is disrupting banks with money tokens flowing around an open tokenized money ecosystem, and Ocean Protocol is disrupting Facebook and Google with data tokens flowing around an open tokenized data economy, Boson Protocol disrupts ecommerce platforms with Thing tokens flowing around an open Thing economy.¹
A protocol to democratize commerce
Building Web3 permissionless technology will not be sufficient enough to create a new ecosystem. Community participation and governance will be crucial in achieving Boson’s mission. When it comes to the governance of the protocol, the long term vision is very clear: we aim to be a protocol that will be capture-resistant, resistant from centralized, extractive entities in commerce and its supply chain.
Boson Protocol’s vision is to enable a decentralized commerce ecosystem by funding and enabling the development of a stack of specialized applications to disrupt, demonopolize and democratize commerce.
Progressive Decentralization
We are going to achieve this mission by building Boson protocol as a decentralized system and introducing composable primitives such as Thing Tokens & Commitment Tokens. The decentralization of the ecosystem enables design practices that prevent the value capture we want to overcome. Due to the current development state of the Web3 infrastructure, we are following the path of progressive decentralization.
The Web3, the peer-to-peer, private, and censorship-resistant technology² is not yet fully developed. To fulfill all the requirements for a system like Boson Protocol, enabling automation of digital to physical redemption, built for consumers that are already used to seamless, but extractive e-commerce platforms, we are of the opinion that the Web3 technology has not yet come to the required maturity level.
The Boson governance is going to be implemented and modelled across the three phases of start-up, scale-up and DAO. Progressively, it will enable the fair and equitable distribution of ownership, value and control. By using permissionless systems, we are creating a capture resistant design not controlled by centralized, extractive entities. With decentralization, increased community ownership and operation will be introduced.
We believe progressive decentralization is the most pragmatic and long-term sustainable strategy, as it allows us to find protocol-market fit, design for equitable value distribution and sustainable value capture. Furthermore, it allows us to avoid the current uncertainty of the technical, business, legal, and social reality that surrounds us. Regardless of, or precisely because of it, we need to be clear about our vision brought to light by the Boson Protocol’s founders which will become a reality through the Protocol’s core community that will expand and will ultimately be governed by the crowd.
The dCommerce DAO
The long-term goal for Boson Protocol is to be governed by its community. Through the dCommerce DAO, the community will decide which projects to fund and what applications to build. The role of the core community is to develop an ecosystem that supports it. Governance design will play a vital role; both on-chain and off-chain governance will be coexisting in an aligned manner and developed over time. In this emerging ecosystem, using state of the art technology and following best practices, eg. token engineering is essential. Realizing this governance design goal has been attempted by many, but achieved by few.
Boson is not an experiment: we are building a sustainable and equitable ecommerce ecosystem. However, within the Protocol, a high level of automation, especially the automation of digital to physical redemptions, will be one of the core features and competitive advantages. When it comes to the automation of the protocol, we believe that the Boson Protocol governance will not be fully automated. For a system as complex as Boson, full automation is something not yet technically achievable, or to put it another way, it’s very hard to predict possible outcomes.
The role of the community will be increasingly evolved over time, aligned with our values and principles: it will progressively reach the level of decentralization; that will be the biggest factor preventing value capture, the opposite of what we can observe today with powerful ecommerce platforms.
“Commerce is a human
endeavor that should not
have its value captured by
the few.”Justin Banon, CEO — Boson Protocol
Our decentralization approach is to enable easily accessible community governance of the Boson Protocol. Unlocked with the $BOSON tokens, the community will govern Boson Protocol and the issuance of funds from the dCommerce DAO.
“We call this Decentralized Autonomous Commerce”
Following the principles of a Web3 Sustainability Model⁴, the dCommerce DAO will be a community-governed DAO for funding the growth of the dCommerce ecosystem. The role of the community is going to be essential for the dCommerce DAO development. Curated by the community, the dCommerce DAO will fund projects which build core Boson Protocol software, applications, tools and integrations, as well the growth of the ecosystem via supply, demand and developer initiatives. To kick-start this dCommerce stack, Boson is developing a library of developer tools and a number of reference applications including a decentralized marketplace for Things and p2p reference application for real world redemption.⁵
How are we going to achieve it?
The process we are in right now is the vision transfer process, where the founders are transferring their vision of the Protocol to the core community. We have begun the realization process with several iterations in tandem with the progressive involvement of the community. We aim for the technical and the governance basis of the Protocol allowing as much community involvement as possible for them to join the co-creation and decentralized transformation of the Boson Protocol’s reality.
This blog is the first of the series of our governance updates.
We’ll be presenting our governance strategy and core concepts as we are building the Boson ecosystem. In the next blog post, we’ll introduce the idea of the Boson ecosystem Constitution and the written Preamble with our core principles and values.
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[1]: Trent McConaghy: Datatokens 1: Data Custody, https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/data-tokens-1-data-custody-1d0d5ae66d0c.
[2]: Lawrence Lundy: Technology as a political act aka Web3, https://outlierventures.io/research/technology-as-a-political-act-aka-web3/.
[3]: Roberto Mancada: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), https://medium.com/overtheblock/decentralized-autonomous-organizations-daos-in-decentralized-finance-defi-f02acee4bf2a.
[4]: Trent McConaghy: The Web3 Sustainability Loop, https://blog.oceanprotocol.com/the-web3-sustainability-loop-b2a4097a36e.
[5]: One of the applications already developed is the first crypto native rewards platform powered by Boson Protocol: NiftyKey, https://medium.com/bosonprotocol/rewards-reimagined-for-the-decentralized-web-2e7e9ce41145.
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.
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