By Co-Founder, Justin Banon
Executive Summary
This is a momentous time for Boson!
We’ve recently completed the build detailed in our 2019 (v1) and 2022 (v2) whitepapers. We have achieved our initial goal, which was to build the decentralized commerce infrastructure for the Web3 economy. This comprises:
- Core decentralized commerce protocol, enabling trust-minimised exchange of real world assets, without centralized intermediaries, just code and independent dispute resolvers.
- dCommerce dApps suite, enabling anyone to sell physical things as NFTs online, in-metaverse and on NFT marketplaces.
What’s next?
By early Q4 2023 we will have completed:
- Enabling mainstream users with Web2.5 commerce bridges- building fiat onramps (integrating Moonpay), token swaps (integrating Uniswap), custodial wallets and web widgets.
- Connecting to dCommerce mass adoption- integrating with scaled distribution channels for sellers- starting with the largest e-commerce platform- WooCommerce; and buyers- starting with Opensea.
What’s our mission?
When crypto recovers from the current winter we will be product complete and mass adoption ready.
Our aim is to seize the multi-trillion dollar opportunity to become the decentralized layer upon which future commerce will run.
We founded Boson Protocol with a deep purpose: to shift from the current trajectory where commerce is dominated by a few monopolies, towards a future where the value created by commerce is shared amongst the many. We aim for a world where our children have the opportunity to become dcommerce millionaires, rather than merely working for a handful of ecommerce trillionaires.
We started Boson during the crypto winter of 2019, with a strong conviction that if Web3 were to become a thing, it would need decentralized commerce. Many told us it would be impossible.
We raised a total over $30m at an ATH token price of $5 during the bull market of 2021. We hired some of the best minds in crypto, including a protocol designer from Ethereum, the world’s leading game theorist, the best crypto-legal brains and a team of ninja coders.
We built the v1 of protocol and the dApps and saw strong adoption during the metaverse zeitgeist of 21/22, with brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Hogan and NFT projects like Deadfellaz and Fang Gang. Again our value soared alongside market sentiment.
Tommy Hilfiger in Boson Portal Fashion District – Metaverse Fashion Week
We completed v2 of the protocol in 2022 and Boson was awarded Technology Pioneer status by the World Economic Forum – for its potential to transform commerce globally. (As many of you know my politics are diametrically opposed, but we benefit from the endorsement and the connections this gives us.) We also attracted the plaudits of the world’s leading blockchain academic Prof. Jason Potts, who sees Boson as the infrastructure to enable a new programmable Web3 economy.
Following the crash of 2022 & 2023, crypto earned a similar rep to crack. Adoption waned, big partners cancelled or postponed, but we continued building. Now that we’ve completed a full build, we find ourselves in the deepest crypto winter, with adoption, market sentiment, and our token price at an all-time low. It’s odd that our token price peaked at ~$5 during the bull market of 2021, compared to now with our fully developed, award-winning solution, and a stellar team. But hey, this is crypto — value is decoupled from progress and tied to market sentiment.
Although there’s a chance that the Web3 economy might fail, history shows that tech, especially crypto, evolves in cycles of booms and busts. We see the next adoption wave as being propelled by real-world assets, with Boson being the core infrastructure for the multi-trillion dollar commerce real world asset segment.
Whilst it is a major achievement to have a trust-minimized, decentralized commerce protocol with a backendless dApp, real adoption will come from the mainstream. That’s why next we are building Web2.5 bridges such as fiat onramps, custodial wallets and website integrations, in response to requests from many mainstream sellers.
However, our ambitions are not just to pick-up mainstream sellers one-by-one, we are aiming to become the commerce layer upon which the future of commerce will run, for this we need to scale exponentially. To achieve this we are focussing on integrating with scaled distribution channels on both the seller- and the buyer-side. We will initially focus on e-commerce platforms on the seller-side as they have large numbers of sellers to whom we offer the opportunity to connect with the Web3 buyer liquidity on NFT platforms. (I am well-versed in executing scaled distribution channel strategies as I previously headed-up a Web2 digital voucher platform which I scaled 20x from $50m to $1Bn pa revenues, by partnering with scaled distribution channels such as major payment networks, in order to access thousands of banks and millions of customers worldwide.)
Our first major seller-side channel partnership is WooCommerce. This is for a number of reasons:
- They are the biggest. Latest figures list WooCommerce as having 38% market share versus 15% and 10% for Squarespace and Shopify respectively.
- We are spiritually aligned. WooCommerce are part of the Automattic group who are committed to open source philosophy.
- They are very forward thinking. They deeply understand the benefits and disruptive potential of Web3.
Source: Statista
On the buyer side, we are further developing our integration with Opensea. This will enable sellers to:
- Easily tokenize physical assets on Boson, with buyer rugpull assurance.
- Seamlessly drop physical NFTs on Opensea to acquire Web3 buyers.
- Have buyers redeem physical NFTs back on their own site, in order to:
- develop direct relationships with Web3 customers- rather than ceding these relationships to NFT platforms,
- retain control of the customer experience and develop a Web3 community on their own site.
Next, our aim is to rapidly plug Boson into multiple chains, metaverses, games and commerce platforms, thereby installing Boson as the de facto standard for Web3 commerce.
Protocol development will be focussed on solving capital inefficiency problems, where seller payments are locked-up until post-redemption and dispute period, by creating pools for $BOSON holders to stake behind sellers. Also providing yield for token holders and utility for $BOSON.
So in summary our plan is to:
- Build Web 2.5 bridges to onboard mainstream partners.
- Integrate and partner with scaled distribution channels, starting with WooCommerce and Opensea, in order to scale exponentially.
- Become the decentralized commerce infrastructure for the Web3 economy.