Why staking, and why now?
At Boson, we have now achieved our initial goal to build the decentralized commerce infrastructure for the Web3 economy, comprising: a highly generic decentralized commerce protocol enabling trust-minimized exchange of any real-world assets without centralized intermediaries, just code and independent dispute resolvers; and a domain-specific dCommerce dApp enabling anyone to sell physical things as NFTs online, in-metaverse and on NFT marketplaces.
Staking Alpha release
This short-term, simple implementation of staking for the Boson token is a precursor to much bigger plans that we have for $BOSON.
Our Alpha release of Boson Protocol’s staking will be simple to use. Users will have a choice of time-locked pools to get a rate of return depending on how much of the total circulating supply is in the staking contract.
This program is intended to enable us to calibrate demand and appetite for APY in advance of the the phased roll out of seller pools and ecosystem wide trust-minimized RWAs.
We will be publishing more details in the next week on how to get involved and how to participate in the upcoming staking program. Keep up-to-date on Twitter/X, Telegram, Discord and with our email updates
Read on for further insights on the future development of $BOSON utility and seller pool staking
Reminder: The role of $BOSON in network incentive design
Boson’s vision is to enable a single digital market for physical things (think ‘Uniswap for e-commerce’); where all the world’s products and services are listed and searchable, with commerce automated via code (think TCP/IP for commerce).
Boson is built on decentralized infrastructure as a minimally extractive coordinator, with value mediated by the $BOSON token, ensuring that participants can share in the value they create.
The $BOSON Token is the core economic unit of the Boson ecosystem – used to govern the protocol, incentivize different actors and share in the value created. Token utility falls into a number of key categories:
Governance
Boson Protocol is on a path of progressive decentralization, following a milestone based approach of technology development and community governance.
Fees
Boson implements a minimally extractive fee that can be activated by the Boson Protocol DAO through the Protocol fee switch. Fee’s accrue to the DAO treasury. Marketplaces & Resellers can charge additional fees, allowing a diverse set of business models to evolve.
And now…. Staking
Boson will be implementing a mechanism which enables ecosystem participants to stake behind sellers they trust for a fee.
Future development: resolving capital inefficiency with Seller Pool Staking
One of the common features of crypto economic systems, be they DeFi protocols like Maker or dCommerce protocols such as Boson, is that they rely on locking up funds or ‘stakes’ to game-theoretically incentivise fair behavior. Whilst such skin-in-the-game removes the need for trust – users just trust the game theory and the code – it does result in capital inefficiencies, particularly for the seller, whose payment is locked until the buyer has received the goods.
In order to break this trade-off between trustlessness and capital inefficiency, Boson will be implementing a mechanism which enables ecosystem participants to stake behind sellers they trust for a fee. Stakers will assess the default risk of sellers, then stake funds into a seller pool which will release payment to the seller early. Stakers put their capital at risk, for a fee.
Whilst breaking this trade-off is advantageous for dCommerce, sellers are quite used to receiving delayed payments from payment networks. However, reducing capital inefficiency is critical in the area of financial RWA tokenization.
Future development: Towards trust-minimized Real World Assets
There is a growing sentiment that the crypto spring will be driven by the tokenization of real-world assets in finance. This vast asset class faces a significant challenge: RWA protocols are tokenizing assets in a trusted way. For instance, when you purchase a tokenized gold bar, you must trust that the custodian will honor the redemption when settlement time arrives. However, if we’ve learned one thing from failures like Lehman Bros and FTX, it’s that centralized entities are prone to failure. This is the primary issue that Web3 was intended to address.
Now is the time for the leading decentralized commercial exchange in the market to introduce trust-minimized Real World Assets (RWAs) to the world of finance. We can use Boson to create a permissionless, trust-minimized exchange layer on top of custodial and regulated protocols. This means that if the custodial protocol fails to redeem the asset, for whatever reason, the tokenized asset bearer can get their money back. Yet, the asset exchange can still be fully regulated, providing a bridge between decentralized trust and regulatory compliance.
In both of these examples, $BOSON will be an important component for incentivising liquidity provision into a variety of pools.
Stay up-to-date with Boson
We will be publishing more details in the next week on how to get involved and how to participate in the upcoming staking program. You can keep connected: