Boson Protocol | Decentralized Commerce Lego in the Web3 Economy
Creating the underlying infrastructure for real-world commerce and its data.
Bosons are subatomic particles that permeate the entirety of the universe. Think of them as a grid that provides the foundation for all physical matter to exist. Boson can be viewed like this: a universal protocol for the people that will facilitate the exchange of goods and services in a fair and democratic way.
Bosons are the connecting link between the symmetric (2-D) and asymmetric (4-D) particle realms, between the “virtual” realm of particle-antiparticle pairs, and the “real” realm of matter particles.
Decentralizing Commerce and Unlocking Data
As most commerce transactions become electronic (eCommerce) it’s becoming apparent that most successful companies like Amazon are turning into giants who control everything by the power of monopoly. Blockchain-based decentralized technologies aim to remove intermediaries from most industries, bringing freedom and economic fairness to the interactions between people in a p2p manner.
Trading is one of the oldest professions and it’s what constitutes the basis of our society. Since ancient times merchants were traveling from the West to the East and from the North to the South to exchange products & services. This instinct is deeply rooted in our primitive senses. How would you survive and make money off the earth? You’d grow food, create products, or work for someone else with the goal of bartering products & services.
Conscious hard work can bring wisdom but most people, being employees in modern corporate businesses, have lost their sense of freedom and sovereignty. Entrepreneurs with a strong strategy and ambition manage to outperform their competition and become one of the few dominant lead players in their industry.
This results in two things:
1) companies accumulate power and unwavering dominance
2) centralization of decision making, profit concentrated in the hands of the few with an unfair allocation of wealth.
Online commerce coordinates the exchange of money, for non-monetary value like goods & services. Today, eCommerce typically remains intermediated by two types of trusted third-parties:
- Financial intermediaries for processing payments (e.g Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, etc.)
- Market intermediaries for facilitating exchange (e.g Amazon, eBay, etc.)
Boson Protocol enables smart contracts to perform on-chain financial transfers in line with the off-chain, often physical, delivery of goods and services.
Boson can be viewed as a Web3 ‘lego brick’, enabling digital and decentralized apps to be easily developed and integrated. It can be conceptualized as a decentralized commercial oracle. As a set of smart contracts, components, and standardized interfaces- Amazon’s APIs as a decentralized protocol. Or in the words of Trent McConaghy, “thing tokens flowing around in a thing economy”.
Summary — Vision
Use-case: Boson enables the creation of open digital marketplaces for online commerce where any physical & digital thing and services can be searched and exchanged in a decentralized manner. It features an escrow between two parties (buyer and seller) which is secured by 2-sided deposits and automated resolving of disputes. The tokens will be used to pay without fees, to purchase access to data at the Ocean marketplace, to stake behind items (like Ocean’s data tokens curated proofs market/reputation system), and for buyer/seller commitment deposits.
This tech can be used by crypto exchanges and crypto credit cards for loyalties & rewards. Exchanges that use Boson can make their tokens redeemable for real-world rewards and users can purchase items from an exchange’s marketplace without touching fiat. Further use-cases include buying gaming items, machine-to-machine commerce, and service bookings.
Boson does the two things eCommerce intermediaries such as Amazon do but in a decentralized way. Boson Protocol allows for:
- The execution of real-world commerce transactions
- Access to secure Web 3 customer feedback data
Boson Protocol’s vision: “To be the world’s open, public infrastructure layer for commercial transactions and their data.”
What excites me about Boson Protocol:
Boson is aiming to become a component, or a ‘lego’, of the Web3 ecosystem. This means that, as a middleware, it can be used by anyone that wants to create an e-store or a big e-commerce platform, as it works in the backend, and front-end applications can be built on top of it.
Beyond that, it also utilizes and unlocks commerce data which is currently siloed in the hands of huge commerce giants. This is achieved by utilizing Ocean Protocol’s data marketplaces.
You definitely have to keep your eyes on this. If Boson is successful it will bring one of the biggest utilities to crypto. There are some other crypto projects in the e-commerce field but Boson is creating a holistic protocol, the underlying infrastructure on top of which multiple marketplaces can be built.
So, what is exactly Boson’s tech?
Blockchain & Autonomous Commercial Exchange
Blockchain technology’s utility has always been to eliminate intermediaries, allowing two individuals to transact with one another in a “peer-to-peer” manner over the Internet establishing trust in a decentralized way. When you digitally transfer value from one account to another you’re trusting the underlying blockchain system to both enable that transfer and provide sender authenticity and currency validity.
How is it ensured that both parties (buyer & seller) will be safe when transacting and what incentivizes them to act righteously in a decentralized protocol like Boson?
When looking at the project my first thought was that two-sided insurance deposits in the escrow would be a great idea for security, and this is exactly what Boson is doing. Both the buyer and the seller are required to make insurance deposits which could be lost if they act maliciously, therefore, they have an economic incentive to successfully complete the transaction.
If problems arise, the arbitration system of the protocol is initiated to resolve the dispute. In addition, there will be various levels of deposits, you can look at the pages 14–29 of the whitepaper where the arbitration system is fully explained in detail for instances where the seller or buyer is at fault.
At first, the protocol will operate with admin rights (like Ocean Protocol) and disputes will be solved by third-party arbitration. Later on, it will evolve in a more decentralized governance DAO-style and will rely on automated resolving of commerce disputes.
NFTVs (Non-Fungible Token Vouchers) — Items & Services as Stateful NFTs
Boson features stateful NFTVs (Non-Fungible-Token Vouchers): the escrow transaction is represented by an NFT that changes its state as the transaction goes through various stages. (payment, delivery, completion, etc.)
Why Commerce Data is Important
Data collected from commercial transactions by centralized intermediaries is locked-away and used to strengthen anti-competitive market dominance which imperils the interests of the consumer, other firms and even governments.
When the giant internet companies of today were emerging a couple of decades ago, it was almost impossible to believe that artificial intelligence would play a big role in human society. Advancements in processing power, internet speed, and the overall tech blossoming we’re witnessing in recent years have enabled programmers and data scientists to improve and accelerate the development of AI. Machine learning in the ‘90s was possible but at a much slower pace than today, meaning that it would take centuries to achieve the growth that nowadays we’re seeing over the span of 2 years.
Justin Banon, the founder of Boson Protocol, was previously COO of dexFREIGHT and is still their strategic advisor working on their overall strategy, token, and business model design pattern. dexFREIGHT is partnered with Ocean Protocol to monetize the data of logistics and transportation.
Boson is building a planetary-level Web 3 product data marketplace on top of Ocean‘s tech.
AI algorithms need data.
E-retail sales account for 14% of all retail sales worldwide and e-commerce continues to grow fast, especially in 2020 because of Covid-19. Statista forecasts that these figures will keep growing and reach 22% in 2023.
China is the world’s biggest exporter and is also the world’s top e-commerce market, with online sales reaching close to $2 trillion in 2019. Together with the United States, these two largest economies are responsible for over $2.5 trillion worth of online e-commerce sales, which make up more than 70 percent of the total generated worldwide.
Amazon’s Focus on Data & AI - Why Commerce Data is Important
“Amazon owns perhaps the richest dataset on how consumers consume, how sellers sell, and how developers develop. This, in turn, allows Amazon to optimize its online shopping experience, logistics network, developer environment, and even its voice AI, which in turn make Amazon’s offerings even richer.”
“All of the major tech companies will do this… Right now, bigger companies like Amazon have a bigger advantage especially because of the training data sets required to do this. You need a lot of data to do extraordinary things with the algorithms we have.” — Jeff Bezos
How Amazon utilizes data:
“We’re in the middle of an obvious [trend] right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence. Over the past decades, computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder. Much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface.
Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type — quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.“
Reading the above statements we can clearly see that Amazon bases a big part of its business model on machine learning, AI, and data.
Tech
Boson is currently being built on Ethereum. By checking the whitepaper we can see that the team is looking into layer 2 solutions and is examining the possibility of migrating to other blockchains. (Potentially multiple Ethereum-based Cosmos zones, a.k.a. Ethermint, or fast blockchains like Solana.)
In the future, the full product will have the majority of processing performed off the main Ethereum blockchain on a sidechain that is linked to the main chain by using ZK-Rollups, in order to support the massive numbers of orders. This means that the state updates of the sidechain are published on the main chain, as well as sufficient data and state transition proof.
“ZK-Rollups is an L2 scaling solution in which all funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain, while it performs computation and storage off-chain where validity of the side chains is ensured by zero-knowledge proofs.”
Boson is using the ERC-1155 and ERC-721 NFT standards and also ERC-2477, to guarantee token metadata integrity for all tokens— fungible and all non-fungible ones.
Team
Justin Banon is the founder of Boson Protocol, he previously headed-up Collinson Travel Experiences Division, a group of global loyalty rewards platforms including Priority Pass, LoungeKey, and Mastercard Airport Experiences. He scaled this business 20x from $50m to $1Bn pa revenue, through business model innovation and digital transformation.
Gregor Borosa is the tech lead and co-founder of Boson. He was a Lead Software Engineer at the Bank of Slovenia and a teaching fellow at the University of Nicosia, teaching courses in the MSc in Digital Currency degree. He has the technical skills and blockchain knowledge required to ensure Boson is up to date with the latest advancements in DLT. (distributed ledger technology)
Advisors
One of the most notable advisors is the co-founder of Ocean Protocol, Trent McConaghy. He’s an early supporter and investor in Boson Protocol. His token engineering ideas and innovations in decentralized data marketplaces will add a lot of value and key-advantages to Boson’s future development.
Backing — Token Sale
Boson Protocol raised $350,000 in its funding round. The sale was oversubscribed and saw participation from eight partners including the Venture Capital firm Outlier Ventures as well as Trent McConaghy, founder of Ocean Protocol, and Po Tang ex-CFO of Priority Pass Asia.
Outlier Ventures is a cryptocurrency-focused VC that plays an important role in the emerging ecosystem of Web3. They’re not only supporting blockchain projects with capital backing but also connect them with other key-players in the industry. So far, they have invested in notable projects like Fetch AI, IOTA, Ocean Protocol, Secret Network, DIA, Cosmos, Ethereum, and others.
For more details, you should read this article by Justin Banon, founder of Boson Protocol, to dive deeper into the project:
Also, don’t miss OddGems’ AMA with Boson on December 17th:
More details about the private and public sales will be available soon on Telegram.
Boson Protocol Links
Website: https://www.bosonprotocol.io
Telegram: https://t.me/bosonprotocol
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BosonProtocol
Whitepaper: https://docsend.com/view/boson-whitepaper
