Introducing Boson Protocol v2, launching in Q4

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BosonProtocol

5 min readAug 3, 2022

Web3’s Commerce Layer

In this article we introduce the core concepts driving the planned upgrade to the Boson web3 commerce infrastructure, outlined in the recently published whitepaper, which you can download here

TL;DR

Boson Protocol v2 is the foundational primitive for decentralized commerce, which enables the trust-minimized and automated exchange of off-chain assets, by tokenizing commitments to trade as redeemable NFTs.

Boson has been widely recognised as a technology pioneer with the potential to transform the existing fractured and monopolistic e-commerce landscape, into a single digital market for physical things, built on Web3.

In July 22, we unveiled the v2 design and whitepaper at EthCC[5] in Paris.

Boson v2 whitepaper unveiling at EthCC[5]

Boson v2 launches at the beginning of Q4 2022, and will enable anyone to sell physical items as NFTs in a decentralized way.

The problem with Smart Contracts

The purpose of smart contracts is to automatically execute agreements, ensuring compliance with contractual terms, whilst minimizing exceptions and displacing intermediaries.

Despite this promise, smart contracts are inherently disconnected from the real world.

Smart contracts are unable to view the real world on their own, because they cannot trust external data sources. Instead they require data oracles in order to trust off-chain data.

Similarly, smart contracts cannot reliably affect the real world, because they cannot trust that a given action will be executed off-chain. We refer to this as the physical asset oracle problem.

Boson Protocol: decentralized actuator oracle

We present Boson Protocol v2 as a decentralized actuator oracle. That is, a decentralized protocol which enables the trust-minimized, automated execution of off-chain actions; which in turn can be seen as a general purpose solution to the physical asset oracle problem.

The design of Boson’s core smart contracts is unopinionated, and therefore supports the execution of any type of off-chain action. Boson is therefore extensible to a wide range of domains and can support myriad use cases. However, the initial focus for Boson Protocol v2 is decentralized commerce (dCommerce).

Boson v2 represents a foundational primitive connecting Web3 with real world commerce. That is, Boson Protocol enables smart contracts to execute off-chain commercial transactions with strong and verifiable guarantees about payment for and receipt of assets.

The Boson Vision for web3 native commerce

Boson’s vision is to enable a single digital market for physical things (think ‘Uniswap for e-commerce’); where all the world’s products and services are listed and searchable, with commerce automated via code (think TCP/IP for commerce).

Boson is built on decentralized infrastructure as a minimally extractive coordinator, with value mediated by the $BOSON token, ensuring that participants can share in the value they create.

Three primary problems to achieve the vision of Boson

In order to achieve the vision of a single digital market for physical things, Boson addresses three primary problems.

Firstly, the physical asset oracle problem: if Alice tokenizes her car, and Bob buys the token; how can Bob be sure he will receive the car?

Secondly, the fair-exchange problem: if Alice wants to remotely buy an item from Bob, how can they ensure that the exchange happens atomically (i.e either both parties receive what they are due or neither do)?

Thirdly, how to digitally represent physical items.

Physical asset oracle problem

To address the physical asset oracle problem, instead of attempting to tokenize physical assets directly, Boson tokenizes commitments to trade. The protocol locks up parties’ commitments to execute a commercial exchange as a type of forward contract, encoded within smart contracts and tokenized as a redeemable non-fungible token (rNFT).

Solving the fair exchange problem

Boson represents a novel solution to the fair-exchange problem and is described formally as a decentralized optimistic fair-exchange protocol.

The protocol is optimistic, because it assumes that the exchange has successfully executed unless a dispute is raised within a specified period. This and other optimizations lead to efficient execution on decentralized infrastructure.

The main payload of dispute resolution is handled by an automated Mutual Resolution process which leverages algorithmic game theory to affect local remedy between parties. Exceptionally, unresolved disputes can be escalated to an independent (and potentially fully decentralized) Dispute Resolver, who will assess the agreement, evidence and claims before deciding on the division of locked-up funds. Dispute Mutualizers assess dispute risk and offer Sellers the option to spread the cost of disputes across multiple transactions.

Digitally representing a physical asset via Redeemable NFTs

Redeemable NFTs address the problem of how to digitally represent a physical asset, by providing assurances to the bearer of an rNFT that either they will receive the item or their money back. rNFTs represent the right to redeem physical assets on-chain, thus enabling the vision of:

“a single, digital market for physical things, built on Web3 infrastructure”

Read on: Download our v2 whitepaper

Boson enables the decentralized exchange of physical assets- tokenized as redeemable NFTs.

The launch is planned later this year, and over the coming weeks, we will be releasing additional information about what Boson is, how it works, and how you can build on the protocol, and participate as either buyer, seller or integrator.

To read more in our white paper, you can download it here

About Boson Protocol

Boson Protocol enables you to build commerce applications that anyone can use and everyone can trust. Decentralized Comerce enables a new world of commerce that bridges the on-chain and off-chain world.

Easily add dCommerce capabilities to your dApp, build a web3 marketplace or even create your own loyalty program where your customers can redeem real-world rewards in a Web3-native way.

Want to Build on Boson?

Keen to learn more?

Download the Boson Protocol v2 whitepaper
Watch the Boson v2 whitepaper keynote at EthCC[5]

Got more questions?

Our FAQs ought to have you covered.