The road ahead: an update
It has now been a month since the token distribution and work continues to deliver a decentralised commerce ecosystem. With turmoil in the wider crypto economy over the past days, we are very privileged to have received the endorsement of our community to focus on building in the coming months, and building value for our whole ecosystem of stakeholders.
This post is about exactly that — what we are building, our focus for the coming months, and how you can get involved.
Our product vision
Since our inception, we have been focused on one of the big problem categories in the crypto space.
How do you connect on-chain value with off-chain value?
This has been looked at from a data point of view by the likes of Chainlink, but Boson is aiming to go further, to enable a trust minimised and cost minimised exchange of any Thing, with the transfer happening atomically, and with software layer providing a trust layer, rather than a centralized intermediary acting as an arbitrator.
The goal for our efforts is to be the decentralised exchange for anyThing, governed by participants who share in the value they create.
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.
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 which high level is the direction for our product and engineering effort.
Protocol development
The Boson Protocol is at its heart a decentralised escrow contract, that supports the exchange of on-chain value for off-chain items, by means of a game theoretical model to incentivise constructive behaviour for all parties involved in the exchange.
To do this, there are a number of layers that need to be developed in order for the protocol to fulfil its potential. This was expanded upon in our recent dCommerce Stack paper
The essence of our approach with the protocol is to progressively build the functionality while delivering value in verticals.
With the core protocol delivered in MVP, our focus now is to progressively build the protocol while delivering value in different verticals.
We see the evolution of the protocol in three versions.
V0.1: Core protocol contracts
We built a minimal version of Boson Protocol based on the specifications in the whitepaper. We will deploy this v0.1 on an Ethereum testnet with a reference app allowing developers and enthusiasts to learn about the protocol functionality.
V1: Metaverse Commerce
Following our strategy of progressively building protocol functionality while delivering value in different verticals, we identified Metaverse commerce as the first use-case that we’re pursuing.
We are adding functionality to the protocol in a range of ways to allow in-game to in-store redemption:
- Web 3 apps | Collect in store commerce — based on our reference app, we are building a Web3 application, that will allow customers to buy Commitment NFTs in-game and redeem them in a real world store.
- MultiCoin support — We are adding support for different tokens for payments and deposits.
- Seller deposit optimization — We will allow sellers to make the Seller deposit once a buyer commits, decreasing the need to lock-up excessive capital upfront.
- Conditional commit — For Metaverse commerce we want to give sellers the option to only allow buyers who fulfill certain conditions to commit to an offered Commitment NFT. This enables exclusive offers and loyalty programs.
After these changes are fully implemented we’re deploying the updated contracts on Testnet, as well as getting them audited by leading blockchain security experts. When we feel comfortable enough we will deploy these changes on Mainnet.
V2: Generic Exchange Mechanism
For the transition to a fully functional protocol that can achieve mass adoption we’re redesigning the core protocol. Among the biggest changes to the protocol is designing the generic exchange mechanism. This ties into our ongoing “Project Multiverse” where we’re adding functionality to the protocol that will allow Boson to facilitate the exchange of “anyThing”, physical, digital or on-chan. You can read more about Project Multiverse and the generic exchange mechanism here.
With the launch of V2 we’re looking to foster active and open community participation and governance, following our governance design principles. We will deploy our first governance module, as well as creating the first bounties to build modules of the dCommerce stack.
For anyone wishing to get involved in supporting the development of Boson Protocol, our developer docs are at docs.bosonprotocol.io and the Boson github is at github.com/bosonprotocol
Protocol Growth strategy
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.
To do this, we must start by establishing Boson as the TCP/IP of commerce, first in the crypto and decentralised technology space, and then breaking out of this niche as a generalised technology.
There is a huge opportunity in the whole economy for a disintermediated and decentralized “software layer” for commerce, however, in the short term we are focusing on areas where web 3 users are already transacting, and where there is market potential for digital to physical transactions.
For us — our focus is twofold, firstly the market for today, we are creating products in the market for gaming, NFTs and metaverses which are experiencing rapid growth, and genuine d2p (digital-to-physical) utility now. Secondly, we are building a dCommerce stack strategy with tools and services for traditional businesses.
Therefore, as we have previously announced, we are focusing on three main market segments for this strategy, which focuses on where users are now, to enable us to learn: metaverse commerce, digital art and collectibles, and rewards and loyalty.
Metaverse commerce
Open virtual worlds are rapidly growing, and we see our relationship with physical and virtual environments as one in a state of flux. 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.
Working in partnership with major voices in the Blockchain Gaming community, a series of MVPs and software tooling is being developed to enable digital-to-physical transactions to connect the metaverse with the universe. The first stage of this is to deliver a digital to physical retail solution enabling users to purchase NFTs in-world and redeem them for physical goods in-store. We are working on this and will announce more soon.
Our focus on NFT collectibles, as well as in-game items is now focusing on delivering software and tooling to enable digital to physical redemption. In line with the protocol roadmap, the first stage of this is to enable retail focused integrations, first with a collect-in-person mechanic, and building intermediated fulfilment later.
Rewards and Loyalty
To support Boson Protocol adoption and use across the metaverse and to help create valuable customer experiences we are developing a broad ecosystem wide Loyalty and Rewards platform and programme.
Over the past few months we have had a number of partners helping us in driving the NiftyKey product track. This will offer partner brands an enhanced ability to engage their audiences, drive activity and reward and recognise behaviours and contributions to the community.
For these customers and our own $BOSON token holders, initially via the Guardians Programme, we will extend further benefits to them via an access key-based membership token that will activate across many different environments to invite them to special product drops, exclusive events and other privileges, both fully online and also for Decentralised/Physical cross over (DePhy) experiences.
Our aim is to make this programme the prevalent cross-ecosystem customer engagement mechanic for Boson Guardians, metaverse visitors and also the High Meta Worth (HMW) wallet owners who we are able to identify directly from wallet addresses and in collaboration with our metaverse partners.
How we will deliver
Since the token distribution, we have been formalising the operations of BVoucher, the funding body for the development of Boson Protocol, and setting it up for long term activities of supporting and stimulating a diverse ecosystem of builders and maintainers of the codebase and broader network.
BVoucher is the source of the ecosystem funds that will build Boson Protocol for the community. Over the past weeks, we have been building our team to deliver, including Redeemeum UK, the primary developer and maintainer of the codebase, as well as a number of other partners focused on creation of tooling, software and prototypes of Boson infrastructure.
Developing our impact
Over the coming weeks, we will be giving updates on our Governance framework, and giving a briefing on how proposed protocol enhancements will be implemented.
During the summer, there will also be updates to the public grants and ecosystem development funds which will be unlocked by the token vesting schedule. In the meantime there are plenty of ways to get involved in building or supporting the Boson Protocol mission
How you can get involved
There are a number of ways you can join in the mission of Boson Protocol to decentralise and democratise commerce.
Learn about dCommerce
We are running a series of courses on the essentials of dCommerce, along with the global Token Engineering community. We invite participants from various backgrounds such as e-commerce, data science and analytics, marketing, digital product, operations and fulfillment, and business finance.
This program is the perfect starting point for digital pros looking to enter crypto and build the future of commerce. Do you have an engineering and/or economics background, or even first experience in Token Engineering? Great, join Engineering dCommerce and put your skills to work in a field that impacts the lives of many.
If you would like to get involved, apply for a spot on the next program
Join the conversation on Discord
We are also dialing up our community activities, and in particular engaging more deeply with communities of interest around developing the Boson Protocol’s policies and initiatives.
Join us on Discord to get information and support on our initiatives around dCommerce, engineering communities, governance policies and the planned progressive decentralisation and jobs
Monthly community meetup
We are also launching a monthly “town hall” style update presentation and community Q&A. Our next session is today (Thursday 27 May), with updates on:
- The progress on in game digital to physical transaction from Holly Atkinson, Head of Metaverse Technology
- A showcase of selling and inventory management of physical goods across different blockchains through a mechanism to transfer a given quantity of an ERC1155 token, from a low to a high demand chain from Ludovic Levalleux, Lead Engineer and Heather Swope, Blockchain Engineer
- Update on the Boson Protocol strategy and roadmap — Justin Banon, Founder, Boson Protocol
Register for the online event, and join us on Thursday 27th May, and monthly thereafter.
Have an idea & want to build it?
Having done the above, if you have a concept that you would like to explore, we will shortly be opening a process for reviewing and enabling community members to receive Foundation Ecosystem grants. In the meantime, if you wish to engage with our team, please join the Ecosystem Development group in our Discord channel, or email info@bosonprotocol.io
