KuCoin AMA With Boson Protocol — Creating the Building Blocks for dCommerce

2021/04/16 16:56:00

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: April 14, 2021, 10:00-11:10 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Boson Protocol in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Project Introduction

Boson Protocol automates digital to physical redemptions with minimized arbitration, using NFTs encoded with game theory.

Boson Protocol’s core technology disrupts e-commerce platforms by tokenizing Things and commerce data within a liquid digital market, built on DeFi. They call this decentralized autonomous commerce.

Boson Protocol’s vision is to enable a decentralized commerce ecosystem by funding and accelerating the development of a stack of specialist applications to disrupt, demonopolize and democratize commerce.

Official Website: https://www.bosonprotocol.io

White Paper: https://docsend.com/view/dji32gp25wi5929i

Light Paper: https://docsend.com/view/p7g9u8d8wiwnf9jn

Follow Boson Protocol on Twitter and Telegram.

Guests:

Justin Banon — CEO and Co-Founder of Boson Protocol

Matt Law — Chief Strategy Officer of Boson Protocol

Q&A from KuCoin

Q: Can we start with an introduction of yourselves? What is your background/experience both in the traditional space and crypto space? Can you also give a short intro for some of the other Boson Protocol team members that aren’t able to attend today’s AMA session?

Justin: Sure. My name is Justin Banon. I am one of the Co-founders of Boson Protocol.

As MD, I previously built a $1Bn pa revenue platform (Priority Pass Group, grown from $50m), which represented physical products and services as digital vouchers and sold them to consumers and businesses globally.

This included global deals with CeFi giants such as Amex, Mastercard, Visa and over 1000+ banks worldwide. I am now bringing this experience to crypto with Boson Protocol.

The Boson team has grown by several dozen over the past few weeks. Our team comprises some of the greatest minds in the industry and we really are assembling an all-star team.

We have the likes of Dr Akaki Mamageishvili http://mamageishvili.info, Sebnem Rusitschka, Anish Mohammed, Aditya Asgaonkar (Eth 2) and Marina Markezic to name a few.

Matt: My name is Matt Law, I’m Chief Strategy Officer. My focus is on developing the community and product strategy to bring Boson Protocol to market. I’ve recently worked on the token launch, and can answer any questions regarding the go-to-market strategy and community development activities we’re taking on.

Prior to Boson I worked with Fetch.ai, as well as being a partner at Outlier Ventures, a UK based web 3 VC and accelerator, where I met Justin, Gregor and the team.

Some of our advisors:

Dr. Trent McConaghy, Founder, Ocean Protocol Advisor, Investor - Strategic advice on tokenized ecosystem design pattern, application of Oceans token model, Web 3 sustainability model and datatoken ERC20 and NFT model

Dr. Michael Zargham, Founder, Blockscience, Token Engineering Advisor - design of overall token model and design pattern

Dr. Zeynep Gurguc, Imperial College London, Cryptoeconomics Advisor - design of behavior economics for the core exchange mechanism sequential game

Jamie Burke, Founder, Outlier Ventures, Advisor, Investor - overall strategy

Marina Markezic, Legal and Governance Advisor - governance

Anja Blaj, Legal and Governance Advisor - governance

Jordan Lyall, DeFi Product and ConsenSys - Product strategy

Anish Mohammed, Protocol Design - Core Protocol

Gregor Boroša, our Tech Co-Founder, was previously the lead engineer of major bank and payment systems, including Central Bank of Slovenia. As a Blockchain technologist, Gregor taught masters blockchain courses at the University of Nicosia and also was a blockchain architecture consultant and developer.

Q: What is Boson Protocol? What are you building?

Justin: Boson Protocol is a foundational primitive which solves the digital to physical redemption problem to enable decentralized autonomous commerce. Boson disrupts closed ecommerce platforms with an open, tokenized economy of things, powered by NFTs and DeFi.

At the core of this are Commitment NFTs which represent future commitments to trade, governed by a dynamic game mechanism, this novel mechanism eliminates intermediaries and minimizes arbitration cost and friction. We call this decentralized autonomous commerce.

Matt: We envision a decentralized commerce ecosystem made up of different composable modules, “dCommerce legos”. To foster this stack we will fund and enable the development of a stack of specialized modules to disrupt, demonopolize and democratize commerce.

We are creating the building blocks for dCommerce.

Justin: As our advisor Jamie Burke likes to say “Boson Protocol is to dCommerce what stablecoins were to the DeFi stack — the Catalyst for an ecosystem of highly specialised, yet complementary and composable protocols”

Matt: When we say “foundational primitive” we mean “the basic plumbing” that builders can work on top of. “Web3” is the new internet — powered by decentralized networks where people are not separated from the data and value they create, allowing for protocols that value privacy and self-sovereignty as first principles, not an afterthought.

Our technology disrupts legacy e-commerce platforms by tokenizing things and their data within a liquid digital market, built on DeFi.

Q: You just had a successful TGE, what’s next for Boson?

Matt: We are now in a very strong position to be able to deliver on the goals that we set out to achieve, and more. We are building the dCommerce stack which makes decentralized trading better for all parties in the value chain. From selling goods, through to delivery and everything in between.

We're releasing a paper next week on the strategy for D-commerce which we look forward to sharing.

Our technology disrupts legacy e-commerce platforms by tokenizing things and their data within a liquid digital market - to execute on that, we will be using some of the funds to further expand our expert team, both in terms of Web3 and legacy ecommerce and web2 expertise.

We need the greatest minds to deliver on our goal: the ones that know the status quo inside out, but also the ones who are crypto native and capable of helping us render our vision.

We are hiring: https://boards.greenhouse.io/bosonprotocol

Justin: We have released a roadmap previously, but as there are many new people interested in our work, it's worth sharing once - our core focus areas are built on building for the users now - with a focus on fast-growing areas of web 3.0 - so DeFi and NFTs, as well preparing the ground for what we believe will be a generational shift in how commerce transactions are managed.

Our initial target go-to-market segments are focused on four main areas:

- Metamall - an inWorld mall for the decentralized exchange of physical things, think Sears for the Metaverse

- NFT art - physical delivery of digital art, enabling the decentralized exchange and delivery of physical twins of NFT art

- Gaming - enabling in-game items for physical things + collectibles

- Crypto-exchanges + credit cards - Rewards + loyalty proposition

Also, Project Multiverse | Exchange Anything - enabling the decentralized exchange of any physical, digital or on-chain thing, in a common, interoperable format.

Check out and RT here: https://twitter.com/JBanon/status/1380807801887465473

Q: What challenges do you see ahead?

Justin: Adoption and education is always something that we must prioritize. In order to truly realize our mission, we need people to build on top of Boson Protocol and have real users using the dApps built on our Protocol.

We are building a strong foundation of communities within Token Engineering and also in Developer Relations so we can help foster the growth of knowledge within these verticals and be able to continually attract the very best minds to contribute to Boson Protocol.

Matt: The critical challenge a protocol faces is adoption and ecosystem development. In addition to the dev relations mentioned above, we also have been investing a lot of time architecting the foundation of the dCommerce ecosystem.

Our goal is to release a robust report about the dCommerce ecosystem in the coming weeks, that basically outlines the interconnectedness of multiple players in the space being repurposed with commerce in mind. It's fascinating to see how much of the infrastructure is actually built, and how reframing the role of each participant goes a long way.

Building for the markets of today, and enabling the creation of trust minimized and cost minimized apps in web 3.0 while also keeping an eye on the long term and building interest from large global corporates is also a big focus.

Q: You recently announced your Boson Guardians program, can you give us a high-level overview on how this works?

Matt: We are looking to build a flourishing community that believes in our vision and contributes to the success of the protocol. To support our community we created the Boson Guardians program.

The first version of the Guardians program is a Token holder rewards program, that rewards longer term token holding to support our committed investors. More initiatives such as NFT drops, loyalty rewards and more are following.

Check out the blog here: https://medium.com/bosonprotocol/boson-guardians-community-rewards-program-launch-5dd22c2ad47f

Core rules:

Number of Tokens distributed in total: 500,000 $BOSON

Taking place from: 12.04.2021–30.09.2021

Wallets must hold a minimum of: 1000 $BOSON (Please note, tokens held on exchanges will not be included)

Minimum holding period of: 30 days

The longer the holding period, the greater the share of total rewards

To account for new tokens vesting, the rewards pool is allocated to participants pro-rata on a monthly basis

Check out this tweet as well: https://twitter.com/BosonProtocol/status/1381647864946905090

Q: In your whitepaper, it mentions stateful NFTs to tokenize future transaction commitments. How can you really tokenize “future commitments”, could you explain in more detail? And how would this take trading to another level?

Justin: We like to explain Commitment NFT’s as future contracts for any Thing.

Similar to how you make a commitment to buy or sell a standardized commodity with a futures contract a Commitment NFT represents the commitment to buy or sell a certain good at a future date, essentially tokenizing a future exchange.

The real big idea here is that by tokenizing these commitments to transact within a stateful Commitment NFT embedded with game theory, we allow for minimized arbitration, which dramatically reduces cost and friction.

That reduction of cost and friction allows for a step-change in the number of transactions, in the same way that moving from letters to emails have created a stepchange in the amount of exchanged messages between parties.

We believe that by decentralizing, minimizing arbitration and freeing commerce from excess value extraction, commerce will be unleashed and new applications, use cases and business models will emerge. Exciting times.

Q: As I understand it, there are two main things which Boson Protocol will change about ecommerce:

1. Make it cheaper by decentralization

2. Make it more liquid by tokenization

Can you elaborate on how this will work in practice?

Matt: Think about it this way - Commerce transactions require coordination in order to handle disputes and reversals. This coordination can be performed by centralized platform intermediaries, but they have a commercial imperative to abuse their trusted position by extracting excessive rents and exploiting consumer data.

As part of the big trend towards automation and decentralization in the economy, driven by the information revolution, and now crypto as part of that, decentralized commerce is an alternative, but existing solutions retain the cost and friction of human arbitrators. This limits the scope of ecommerce, and disconnects smart contracts from the multi-trillion dollar commerce market.

When we remove arbitration, the costs to transact reduces, so there could be a step change in the number of transactions and the blossoming of new business models enabled by that new paradigm.

Anyone would agree that the evolution from snail mail to email caused a step change in the number of messages exchanged. We believe the same will be true for commerce when it's unleashed.

Q: You mention that Boson allows smart contracts to exchange digital value for physical products and services with “minimal” arbitration. Could you expand on minimal?

Justin: Yes - the protocol captures revenue by leveraging a minimally extractive fee and monetization data, if this revenue is not reinvested into the protocol it goes to Token holders.

Also, the deposits escrowed mean that Boson can be thought of as a DeFi protocol that mines liquidity via commerce. More on how we intend to make escrowed funds work will be released later.

Boson Protocol is encouraging an ecosystem rather than a platform business model. Other ‘first generation’ decentralized commerce projects essentially replace one intermediary with another.

Our model is that the protocol represents a minimally extractive ‘thin slice’ of technology that automates and disintermediates commercial transactions.

Our game theoretic mechanism minimizes the need for human arbitration, but for some cases this may be needed. Then we will enable escalation to a human arbitrator.

Q: You have lofty goals in front of you. What are you currently doing to make your plans a reality?

Justin: We’re currently hiring brilliant people and also building up our ecosystem in order to deliver on our ambitious goals.

We’re building up the time and ensuring we have the best minds in the business. One or our newest hires is Adytia Asgaonkar, a researcher on Eth2 and one of the world’s top mechanism designers to work on Project Multiverse: https://twitter.com/JBanon/status/1380807801887465473

Matt: We have signed up a number of pilot users for our products as they launch, including

NFT art + gaming: Crucible, Royale, Blockchain Game Alliance

Rewards: Gather Network, Eidoo, Coinburp, Lead Wallet, Coinpass, Moneyfold, Orion Protocol, bitHolla, Animoca Brands, Fuse, Krowd, Bridge Finance.

Data markets: Ocean Protocol, Swash

Launch partners will amplify and advocate the Boson project as it scales, providing invaluable feedback through proof of concepts, delivering market ready products, and connecting and growing demand and supply.

Q: In the near term, where do you see the key areas for growth within Boson Protocol?

Justin: One very exciting area of growth is expanding Boson to be a DEX for any Thing.

That's the decentralized exchange of any physical, digital or on-chain item.

Imagine receiving a bundle of Boson commitment NFTs, one for a baseball game Baseball, another for a halftime meal Hot dog Cup with straw, then access to exclusive digital content Film frames and replays, and even scarce NFT Playing card joker and physical memorabilia.

More to follow. But this changes everything.

Our vision is for Boson Protocol to be the TCP / IP for exchanging anything.

Think about that....Collision symbol: https://twitter.com/JBanon/status/1380807828080852995

Matt: The ultimate scope of Boson is transformative for the world economy, but that long-term goal can only be achieved with managed small steps, each one of them creating value in the world. We're doing that with our core protocol, and making that more developable, and we have our first release onto mainnet in the coming weeks.

Then we have a few areas where we are focusing on - with digital to physical redemption, as well as digital-to-digital in metaverse and digital gaming environments.

The key is to find markets where the audience and the technology is ready - we're seeing this strongly in gaming, NFT art and collectibles space.

There are also standalone projects with huge traction - like NiftyKey rewards which is pulling in a lot of commercial interest which will be built out over the summer.

Q: Can you please tell us a bit more about how the staking and staking reward mechanisms work on your platform? The whitepaper mentions something called a Gluon token - could you please explain how this works?

Matt: Yes of course - there are 3 main uses for the BOSON token:

Incentivization

Governance

Staking

All of the value created in the network accrues to the $BOSON Token. The Boson design pattern is a minimally extractive coordinator of commerce transactions, combined with a global commerce Web 3.0 data marketplace.

Let me summarize each of these 3:

Incentivization

$BOSON tokens are used to incentivize actions across the system in a number of ways. Firstly on the supply side, $BOSON reward supply acquisition via Aggregators and Sellers, and supply quality via Curators. Secondly on the demand side, Relayer marketplaces earn fees in Bosons to incentivize distribution of inventory. Thirdly for data sharing, Buyers are incentivized to share their data in return for an equitable cut of the value it creates.

Governance

$BOSON tokens are used by participants to govern Boson Protocol, ensuring consensus around critical decisions and the issuance of funds from the dCommerce DAO.

Staking

By using $BOSON to make commitment deposits, Buyers and Sellers may reduce their network fees for coordination of transactions. This locks-up $BOSON and reduces circulating supply.

We will provide staking rewards to network participants who contribute with essential work for the system to function properly. Curation of offers is an example of what we intend to incentivize. In this curation market, someone who is certain that the quality of the products and services of the seller is high, can stake on the products and services to assure others that this is a high quality set of offers. We called the staking tokens of this curation market “Gluons”.

As Boson Protocol is quite a complex system there will be multiple ways to contribute capital and work for rewards.

We are incentivized for the long term, and we want builders and the community to join us for the long term.

Free-Ask from KuCoin Community

Q: What is your vision and the goal you want to ultimately achieve with BOSON since we have similar projects who claim to be doing the same thing as what you’re doing?

Matt: Boson Protocol is encouraging an ecosystem rather than a platform business model. Other ‘first generation’ decentralized commerce projects essentially replace one intermediary with another. Our model is that the protocol represents a minimally extractive ‘thin slice’ of technology that automates and disintermediates commercial transactions.

Q: Right now issuing a token is a rather simple process. However, building the system and ecosystem is the most difficult part. My question is, how will this token be used within the ecosystem?

Matt: The $BOSON token is the core economic unit of the Boson ecosystem. Growth in the value of the token is driven by establishing an economic flywheel, following the Web3 sustainability loop as first implemented by Ocean Protocol.

As I mentioned before there are 3 main uses for the BOSON token:

Incentivization

Governance

Staking

Q: Boson Protocol Token Generation Event is a month away. So can you tell us more about this? What are the roles and requirements in participating in your TGE?

Matt: We issued our token last week, and is available to purchase now on KuCoin

https://trade.kucoin.com/BOSON-USDT

http://trade.kucoin.com/BOSON-ETH

Q: Boson Protocol is a wonderful project but we know that sometimes tokens will be burned and it helps to increase the value of the token. Does Boson TOKENS have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems or any Token Burn plans to increase the value of tokens and attract investors to participate in investments?

Matt: Yes we are exploring this in the network incentives design. Network rewards incentivize workers to develop platforms and marketplaces on BOSON. Revenue generation from these platforms is funnelled back into the network with a % of all revenue being used to buy and burn $BOSON. Demand is increased by the utility of diversely emerging marketplaces and equitable access to data monetization for all network participants.

$BOSON can be staked in a multitude of ways to reward participants for curation, aggregation, and distribution of products. Value is captured through the monetary to non-monetary transactions facilitated by the protocol.

Justin: For our system design we adopted the Web3 sustainability loop (first proposed by our advisor Trent McConaghy) and designed it for dCommerce.

The dCommerce sustainability loop is a DAO driven model in which revenue is collected through a minimally extractive fee on exchanges and data monetization. This revenue is then used to fund further development of the protocol and buyback/burn $BOSON Tokens.

As revenue will be low initially we created our Network rewards token pool that will fund the loop initially, until we get the virtuous cycle going.

https://medium.com/bosonprotocol/introducing-the-dcommerce-sustainability-loop-1d72026636d0

Q: I am an investor and staker. Is there any option to stake in Boson or farming? If it has please let me know, I am very much interested.

Matt: Please take part in our Boson Guardians program running now: https://medium.com/bosonprotocol/boson-guardians-community-rewards-program-launch-5dd22c2ad47f

Q: How do you mitigate bad actors/counterfeit physical goods, etc when digitally tokenizing a physical product?

Matt: This is a question of game theoretics. Check out the description of the core exchange mechanism here: https://docs.bosonprotocol.io/core-concepts/core-exchange-mechanism

Boson Protocol implements a 2-sided deposit structure within a sequential game, which automates the mediation of disputes and mitigates reversal losses by ensuring that both agents are incentivized to behave fairly. However, first we conceive of an ideal system which is highly automated, has minimum viable functionality for coordinating commercial exchange, and in which disputes and reversals are mediated by an ideal arbitrator.

The objective function of the system is: "to maximize the supply of no-complaint voucher redemptions."

Q: Adoption is one of the most important factors for all blockchain projects to be more attractive in investors' eyes. So, can you tell us what the $BOSON team has planned to achieve adoption in reality?

Matt: We’re really delighted at the way the market is reacting to Boson Protocol. Our vision of creating a world where dCommerce is part of the natural order aligns well with a variety of ecosystem partners. Whether it’s gaming, NFT art, metaverse platforms, exchanges or dCommerce marketplaces, all of the partners share the belief that Web3 requires a different way of looking at commerce, data, insurance and the way that value is perceived and exchanged.

Boson Protocol is not a platform itself, so it relies on partnerships and collaboration with ecosystem partners. We’re doing the groundwork with some amazing ecosystem partners to build the foundation of dCommerce.

Worth adding that we have announced details about a very important partnership recently: Ocean Protocol: https://medium.com/bosonprotocol/announcing-boson-protocols-partnership-details-with-ocean-protocol-b6cd3178af18

Q: At the moment, where are you focusing right now? Building and developing products or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Could you share it?

Matt: We mentioned our focus on our initial target go-to-market segments are focused on a few main areas:

Metamall - an inWorld mall for the decentralized exchange of physical things, think Sears for the Metaverse

NFT art - physical delivery of digital art, enabling the decentralized exchange and delivery of physical twins of NFT art

Gaming - enabling in-game items for physical things + collectibles

Crypto-exchanges + credit cards - Rewards + loyalty proposition

In terms of focus for delivery:

In 1 year we're looking to be an established protocol for commerce in the blockchain ecosystem, seeing the first use-cases break into the mainstream (like what we see today with art NFTs).

In 5 years we plan to be the building block of a vibrant dCommerce ecosystem, the TCP/IP for commerce.

Q: Returns and refunds are a crucial part of e-commerce. How would it work in dCommerce since blockchain transactions are irreversible?

Justin: We have an extension to the core protocol which enables a buyer to request a return/refund which is then handled by an additional transaction within the mechanism.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?

Matt: Yes - Please follow us at http://twitter.com/bosonprotocol and join us on Telegram at https://t.me/bosonprotocol

Justin: Thanks for having us, it's been a pleasure.

Matt: Thanks to everyone for joining.

Giveaway Section

KuCoin and Boson Protocol have prepared a total of 500 BOSON to give away to AMA participants.

1. Red envelope giveaways: 188 BOSON

2. Free-ask section: 12 BOSON

3. Post-AMA activity: 300 BOSON

Activity 1 — Quiz: 200 BOSON

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 100 BOSON

. . .

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