In this article we introduce the core concepts driving the planned upgrade to the Boson web3 commerce infrastructure, outlined in the recently published whitepaper, which you can download here
TL;DR
Boson Protocol v2 is the foundational primitive for decentralized commerce, which enables the trust-minimized and automated exchange of off-chain assets, by tokenizing commitments to trade as redeemable NFTs.
Boson has been widely recognised as a technology pioneer with the potential to transform the existing fractured and monopolistic e-commerce landscape, into a single digital market for physical things, built on Web3.
In July 22, we unveiled the v2 design and whitepaper at EthCC[5] in Paris.
Boson v2 launches at the beginning of Q4 2022, and will enable anyone to sell physical items as NFTs in a decentralized way.
The problem with Smart Contracts
The purpose of smart contracts is to automatically execute agreements, ensuring compliance with contractual terms, whilst minimizing exceptions and displacing intermediaries.
Despite this promise, smart contracts are inherently disconnected from the real world.
Smart contracts are unable to view the real world on their own, because they cannot trust external data sources. Instead they require data oracles in order to trust off-chain data.
Similarly, smart contracts cannot reliably affect the real world, because they cannot trust that a given action will be executed off-chain. We refer to this as the physical asset oracle problem.
Boson Protocol: decentralized actuator oracle
We present Boson Protocol v2 as a decentralized actuator oracle. That is, a decentralized protocol which enables the trust-minimized, automated execution of off-chain actions; which in turn can be seen as a general purpose solution to the physical asset oracle problem.
The design of Boson’s core smart contracts is unopinionated, and therefore supports the execution of any type of off-chain action. Boson is therefore extensible to a wide range of domains and can support myriad use cases. However, the initial focus for Boson Protocol v2 is decentralized commerce (dCommerce).
Boson v2 represents a foundational primitive connecting Web3 with real world commerce. That is, Boson Protocol enables smart contracts to execute off-chain commercial transactions with strong and verifiable guarantees about payment for and receipt of assets.
The Boson Vision for web3 native commerce
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.
