The DEX for anyThing
A sneak peek at Project Multiverse
We’re living in a world where the things we own can be digital, physical or both at the same time. We may own a unique item — like a physical artwork or an NFT. Some of our possessions may be mass-produced or unlimited, such as an in-game item or a pair of branded sneakers. We may buy tickets or vouchers that entitle us to a particular event or service, such as a baseball game or a limited-seat lunch with a celebrity or influencer.
No one has invented a common market that is interoperable between all these entities — yet.
The current state of Commitment NFTs & Thing Tokens
Boson Protocol already enables the trust-minimized exchange of digital value for physical goods and services.
We achieve this through the tokenization of a commitment between a buyer and a seller to exchange real-world things, called Commitment NFTs, combined with a novel sequential game that governs the exchange of physical goods and digital value.
We introduce abstraction with Thing Tokens, which give holders access to specific Commitment NFTs, enabling us to take advantage of DeFi infrastructure, resulting in liquid digital markets for any Thing.
But physical assets are not the only area where Boson can enable trust-minimized exchange. In a world where we move fluidly between the virtual and the real, we need frameworks of ownership, commerce, and value transfer that allow assets to flow seamlessly from one universe to another. In other words, we need something that is like TCP/IP, but for exchanging any goods and services, whether these are purely digital, purely physical or a mixture of the two.
We see Boson as enabling a true Project Multiverse, where it is possible to execute the decentralized exchange of any physical, digital or on-chain Thing in a common, interoperable format.
Generic Exchange Mechanism
As we designed these core components, we realized that they are not specific to the exchange of digital value for physical things, but can be applied to the exchange of any physical, digital, or on-chain thing.
Following this discovery, we started exploring the Generic Exchange Mechanism.
Key ideas behind the generic exchange mechanism
- Allow the exchange mechanism to interact with abstract interfaces for products, deposits, and payments, and delivery/redemption methods.
- Create a library of interface implementations for each suitable category of product, deposit, payment, and delivery/redemption method.
- Support complex exchanges (eg. NFT twinning) through fitting those mechanisms into the delivery/redemption method interface.
- This reuses the same mechanism design of the current exchange mechanism while allowing much greater flexibility.
By establishing a generic standard for the exchange mechanism and introducing common interfaces to govern those exchanges we allow Boson Protocol to power any kind of commercial exchange. We call this major endeavour “Project Multiverse”.
The team behind Project Multiverse
To make such an ambitious endeavour happen it takes a group of talented contributors. At Boson, we made a significant effort assembling the right talent and necessary resources to execute such an ambitious project.
Core Team
Akaki Mamageishvili
Akaki is a trained algorithmic game theorist. Working on mechanism design, decision making, and applying game theory to blockchains, in particular, implementing economic mechanisms without trusted third parties as smart contracts. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science at ETH Zurich and is currently a senior researcher in microeconomic theory at ETH Zurich.
Aditya Asgaonkar
Aditya is a researcher who specializes in blockchain protocols & crypto-economics. He has been working on projects in the Ethereum space for the past 3 years, tackling TCRs, consensus & protocol design.
He previously published a paper on dual escrows smart contract for exchanging digital goods, and is currently working as a researcher for Eth2.
Anish Mohammed
Anish is an accomplished protocol designer who has advised and worked for various banks and financial institutions including Banko Azteca, AIB, HSBC, Lloyds, and Zurich, and has been involved in designing or auditing half a dozen blockchain protocols and more than a dozen distributed applications. He was also an early advisor to Ripple, Adjoint, Ocean Protocol, Arteria, Devv, reviewer of Ethereum Orange paper.
Sebnem Ruschitika
Sebnem Rusitschka started her career as a computer scientist specializing in peer-to-peer networks at Siemens in 2006. The application domain was mainly in Smart Grids and Smart Cities. As a senior key expert for cyber-physical systems, Sebnem founded Freeelio in 2016 to understand the paradigm shift of tokenizing real-world assets such as decentralized energy resources. In June 2017, Freeelio became a founding member of German Blockchain Association, in which Sebnem led the Energy and Token Economy committees.
Advisors
Trent McConaghy
Trent is the Founder and CTO of Ocean Protocol, where he is creating the Web3 data economy, unlocking data for more equitable outcomes for users. He is a serial entrepreneur, previously starting and selling two startups in the AI industry. Trent has 20 years of deep technology experience with a focus on machine learning, data visualization, and user experience.
Michael Zargham
Michael holds a systems engineering Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has over a decade of experience applying data to business decision-making applications.
As the founder of BlockScience, and a researcher at the WU Vienna’s Institute for Cryptoeconomics, Dr. Zargham works on the synergies between human and machine decision making through the design and development of cadCAD modeling framework, as well as the adaption of the engineering design process for digital infrastructure.
A look into the future
Building Boson to be a general-purpose protocol for any type of exchange is a major endeavour. We can only imagine what this enables in the future, where commercial exchange happens on public permissionless infrastructure instead of privately owned closed platforms.
This coincides with the change that we see in our relationship with physical and virtual environments. The coming generation will move fluidly between both realms, barely distinguishing between the excitement of being in the audience at a virtual gig attended by a million people, from every country in the world, or a more intimate event in the physical world. Their avatar will share their sense of style, and they will have access to unique items from every country in the world without leaving their own homes.
In a similar way, Boson’s commitment tokens can be mixed bundles of the digital and the geographically delimited. Imagine receiving a collection of tokens that gifts you access to a baseball game, a half-time meal, access to exclusive digital content and replays, and even scarce NFT and physical memorabilia. Or clothes for your avatar from a high-end brand in a virtual world where you receive a unique nail polish or cosmetics in the real world. Or a ticket to a virtual gig like Travis Scott’s Astronomical event in Fortnite, with limited-edition swag to accompany it.
