The dCommerce Stack: Disrupting commerce with a web 3 ecosystem
Today we are releasing our latest paper outlining the stack of services which we will need to build a trust and cost minimized dCommerce ecosystem
How did we get here?
With the emergence of Web3, we were given the tools to transfer value over networks much like we transferred information.
This quickly led to fledgling digital economies, where one type of tokenized value was transparently exchanged for another without the need for intermediaries; but, the purchase of physical goods and services still required that we revert to those familiar, yet extractive legacy commerce platforms.
Before long, the first-generation decentralized commerce platforms proved the technical feasibility of displacing their centralized counterparts — but at a price. They retained the cost and friction of human arbitrators, and thus failed to address the needs of consumers.
At Boson, we are making this theory a reality and building out a collectively maintained infrastructure made up of smaller, composable services for commerce: open, transparent, minimally extractive, and resistant to capture. This paper is our vision and framework to build this dCommerce ecosystem.
From platform economics, to ecosystem economics
Recently, with the emergence of more evolved Web3 tools, another concept has surfaced, which begs the following questions:
Instead of building just another platform, what if we unbundled the services provided by eCommerce, and broke them down into basic elements?
What if we rebuilt those elements as Web3 artefacts, individually atomic fragments of functionality, and collectively a composable, decentralized ecosystem for commerce?
What if this ecosystem became, in fact, public infrastructure for commerce: open, transparent, minimally extractive, and resistant to capture?
Most importantly, what will it take to build it?
This is the concept and ethos of dCommerce. In order to build it well, and avoid the pitfalls of the past, we will have to rely on collective intelligence. Great disruption will require great effort, and also a great community of experts, builders, and users.
Because of the potential societal implications and consequences of our design choices, we must be careful not to simply ‘move fast and break things’ just because we can; whilst pragmatic, we must be considered and realistic in the knowledge that, whilst the outcome may yield a net benefit, it will cause huge disruption to the way whole economies function.
Towards a dCommerce architecture
When thinking about the way societies and civilizations have managed the exchange of goods and services, from ancient times until the present day, many commerce primitives seem to have survived the test of time. Depending on the exact market vertical, a well-developed dCommerce stack will need to facilitate some or all of these primitives.
Some of these primitives already exist in Web3, and some are being created. The benefit of Web3-native solutions is that, by virtue of composability, they behave as Legos, i.e. they can seamlessly connect with each other, and thus support the overarching goal of dCommerce: frictionless, transparent and fair exchange of goods and services, where actors benefit if the ecosystem benefits, and behave in its long-term interest.
In other words, dCommerce is not just replacing legacy platforms with decentralized equivalents; instead, it creates structures of improved and fluid capability that, through swarms of highly specialised but composable protocols, gather, disperse, and assume new forms quickly and easily.
In the endeavour to shape different Legos into a coherent dCommerce whole, we must be mindful that not all components will be equally reliable, or important. In other words, when re-designating existing Web3 components and developing new ones, some will be foundational, and others won’t, and some legacy primitives could, in time, disappear. dCommerce primitives such as stablecoins, Thing tokens, and commitment NFTs, which are at the very heart of the ecosystem, will have to withstand the tests of time, markets, and less than benevolent actors.
Much like the foundations of a building, if one of those primitives fails, then everything built on top of it will suffer damage. While collapses are to be expected — as with any nascent technology — they will be limited and won’t deter ecosystem growth. As demonstrated by DeFi, decentralized systems are antifragile, both in terms of technology and utility...
Read on with the full dCommerce paper
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.
Keen to learn more?
Enjoy our Lightpaper.
In a hurry?
Check out our One Pager.
Want to dive deeper?
Read our whitepaper.
Builders, we have news for you:
Our Core Repo is open on GitHub and here’s the Documentation website.
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!
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