Boson Protocol
Boson Protocol is a foundational primitive for connecting smart contracts to real world commerce. By representing future commitments to trade as stateful NFT vouchers governed by a dynamic game mechanism, Boson eliminates intermediaries and minimizes arbitration cost and friction. We call this decentralized autonomous commerce. As such, Boson Protocol is dcommerce lego for enabling an ecosystem of dcommerce applications.
Contents
Background/History
Justin Banon, the CEO and Co-Founder, is a physicist who graduated from the Imperial College London and holds two Master of Science degrees in Digital Currency and also E-business & Innovation. As MD, Justin previously built a $1Bn revenue platform (Priority Pass Group), 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 1,000 banks worldwide. He is now bringing this experience to crypto with Boson Protocol. Justin is also a strategy consultant and a researcher within innovation and blockchain, focusing on token-powered network effect business models.
Gregor Boroša, the Tech Co-Founder, is a blockchain technologist who holds a Master of Business Informatics and a Master of Science in Digital Currency. Gregor previously worked in central and commercial banks as the lead engineer of core payment system development. He was also a teaching fellow of multiple blockchain technology courses at the University of Nicosia.
While studying for a blockchain master's course, Justin met Gregor at the University of Nicosia. They discussed the idea of a world where trading physical goods will be as easy as trading digital assets, which led them to co-found the Boson Protocol. Boson Protocol provides a practical workaround to the physical asset oracle problem. [1] Instead of tokenizing real-world products and services themselves, Boson tokenizes future commitments to transact using stateful NFT (non-fungible token), governed by a novel exchange mechanism.
Together they also developed the idea for a crypto native rewards program to help differentiate and grow crypto brands and co-founded Redeemeum in 2019, a decentralized rewards platform. Redeemeum will be the first application to be built on top of Boson.
Product
Boson's mission is to create the foundational infrastructure for the emerging decentralized commerce system, empowering builders and partners to reinvent commercial exchange as we know it. Boson is pioneering the dCommerce revolution and enabling the ecosystem to unbundle monopolistic market intermediaries and make commerce programmable and more equitable to all network participants.
As the basic plumbing of decentralized commerce, Boson Protocol is a foundational Web3 primitive that:
- Enables smart contracts to exchange digital value for physical products and services with minimized arbitration, cost and trust
- Exchanges and monetizes secure Web3 customer demographic and product preference data equitably
Boson Protocol provides the necessary middleware infrastructure that enables digital and decentralized apps to be easily developed and integrated. As the first application to be built on top of Boson, Redeemeum provides a user experience and abstraction layer that enable customers to swamp crypto-native tokens for real-world products and services.
Boson Protocol's universality spawns a wide range of use cases:
Online commerce
- An open digital marketplace where any type of item can be offered, searched and exchanged with minimized trust and cost.
Crypto exchanges
- Enabling exchange tokens to be redeemed for real-world rewards to differentiate on rewards rather than compete on fees while increasing token value.
- Enabling exchange users to purchase real-world items directly from an exchange marketplace without touching fiat.
Loyalty and rewards
- Enabling loyalty programs and credit card rewards to offer any digital or physical thing in a standardized, composable and interoperable digitized format, without the cost and friction of intermediaries.
Voucher distribution of non-monetary value
- The COVID 19 pandemic has increased the requirement for distributing food or essentials to those in need. Boson NFT vouchers enable this distribution in a highly automated, auditable and low-cost way.
Machine-to-machine commerce
- Enabling autonomous cars to purchase tires or servicing with autonomous management of disputes and redemption.
Games
- Enabling video games to gift or grant permission to buy rare or special items. For example, on reaching Grand Wizard status, a player has the right to buy a special t-shirt.
Gaming
- Enabling blockchain gaming applications such as on-chain bingo to pay-out prizes in Boson NFVTs, redeemable for off-chain products.
Service bookings
- Enable bookings for any service from restaurants to a collection of groceries secured via two-sided deposits to ensure that Buyer and Seller meet their commitments to redemption and terms.
Tokenized networks
- Enabling users to exchange their network tokens for digital and physical goods and services to increase user-perceived value and token value.
Team
- Justin Banon, CEO & Co-Founder
- Gregor Boroša, Tech Co-Founder
Competitive Landscape
The competitive landscape of decentralized commerce is proliferating. Tech startups have been actively exploring opportunities to decentralize the commerce value chain from protocols and platforms to decentralized marketplaces and solutions such as loyalty/reward and payment. Boson is trying to find the highest peak (a local optimum) within a fitness landscape [2] through combining exploit (e.g. known maxima – crypto exchange and crypto credit card) while exploring further afield.
SWOT
Strengths | Weaknesses |
|
|
Opportunities | Threats |
|
|
Updates
- November 2020: New website launched. Accelerating expansion of the core team with competencies including blockchain tech development, marketing, business model design, commerce and business leadership.
Goals/Results
Goal Set | Goal | Target Date | Result |
---|---|---|---|
Q4, 2020 | Develop MVP application. | By Q1, 2021 | Pending |
Q4, 2020 | Build a full core team | By Q1, 2021 | Pending |
Q4, 2020 | Demonstrate traction with partners and customers | By Q1, 2021 | Pending |