Sandblock — White paper highlights
Our objective with Sandblock is to create the first worldwide open coalition of merchants and customers using the advantages of cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology
The ecosystem
The Sandblock ecosystem is composed of 3 types of stakeholders:
- Participating businesses
- Their customers
- Solution providers/other third parties
These stakeholders interact with each other through the Satisfaction Protocol using the Satisfaction Token, a universally tradable crypto-currency (ERC20).
Joining the ecosystem requires that SAT be acquired. Before the launch of the ecosystem (late Q1 2018) a given amount of SAT will be made available through channels such as the pre-sale, the crowd-sale and bounty campaigns. After the launch, they will have to be traded on compatible exchanges.
Obviously, stakeholders that buy SAT during the pre-sale and crowd-sale will benefit from a much lower price as an incentive to bolster the start of the ecosystem.
Sandblock.io develops all the components of the infrastructure required to allow the ecosystem to function seamlessly, such as :
- The decentralised Satisfaction Protocol
- Mobile applications for customers
- A desktop/web dashboard for merchants and other professional actors
- SDKs and widget/plugins to enable custom integrations in payment terminals and various e-commerce solutions so as to make integration as quick and easy as possible for everyone
While sandblock.io will steward the ecosystem in its early stages, our goal is to ultimately reach a point of equilibrium where the ecosystem can stand on its own and be governed by the partner merchants in a decentralised fashion.
The Satisfaction Protocol
The Satisfaction Protocol is the core, open source protocol of the Sandblock project, and underlies multiple sub-protocols, such as the Loyalty, Feedback and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) protocols. It is decentralised, based on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and handles the project’s most important and sensitive aspects such as the economy balance, the rewards attributions as well as the various merchant rules.
The satisfaction Protocol relies on two types of crypto-currencies, the SAT token and the merchants token. SAT tokens are the fuel of the ecosystem and are universally tradeable (ERC20), while the merchant tokens are the abstraction built on top of the SAT that enable building loyalty and rewards programs and are captive to the Sandblock ecosystem.
The SAT acts as a bridge between the coalition of merchants (and their tokens) and the rest of the economy.
A business wishing to take part in the Sandblock Ecosystem will proceed according to the following steps:
- Choose the name of its Merchants Tokens, preferably named after its brand.
- Decide the nominal value for its merchant tokens (e.g 1 SAT = 100 Merchant tokens)
- Lock/Stake a given amount of SAT to create its merchants tokens.
After they have been created, the Merchant token can be used within the framework of the various protocols and traded against tokens of other merchants by customers (with peer-to-peer transfer).
Peer-to-peer trading
The following schema shows the process by which a customer (C1) can exchange Merchant Tokens A (MTA) to a customer (C2) against other Merchant Tokens B (MTB). The SAT ratio of MTA is 1/10 and the SAT ratio of MTB is 1/100, MTB/MTA is equal to 1/10, therefore, C1 must send 10 times less tokens than C2 so that there is an equivalent amount of SAT being traded.
The Feedback protocol handles the marketing research aspect of the Satisfaction protocol. It gives merchants the capability to seamlessly conduct research about the satisfaction of their customers and reward them for their engagement.
When setting up a feedback program, businesses can choose a type of feedback (review, 5-star rating, survey, etc), the subset of customers they want to target, the conditions of the feedback as well as the reward. Once validated, the feedback protocol generates a smart contract that will autonomously handle everything.
The Loyalty protocol handles the customer loyalty aspect of the Satisfaction protocol. It gives merchants the capability to easily setup and manage complex programs that reward their customers for their loyalty.
The power of smart contract enables all existing types of loyalty programs as well as previously unmanageable ones. The first type of loyalty program implemented will be a cash back scheme. The flexibility of the Loyalty protocol makes it possible to run loyalty programs with a degree of granularity previously only available to the biggest merchants, and for a fraction of the setup and administration resources. The smart contract generated will autonomously manage all aspects of the programs according to its parameters and will be immutable, so as to prevent the policy roll-backs and sunsetting that are common in some industries and harm customer trust in loyalty programs.
So as to ensure liquidity in the ecosystem, customers will be able to convert their merchant tokens to SAT, so as to switch to different loyalty programs. Contrary to the case of peer to peer exchange, trading one’s MT for SAT will incur fees as well as burn a small amount of SAT so as to guarantee the stability of the ecosystem, and prevent gaming its mechanisms
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