Boson Protocol hosted a Telegram AMA yesterday with Justin Banon [CEO and Co-Founder of Boson Protocol] and Jonas Seiferth [Web 3 Director] where we went over the highlights of 2022 and what to expect in 2023.
Here is the recap for those who missed the AMA
Question 1: Could you please give us a quick introduction of Boson Protocol? What’s the vision since the launch of V2 protocol?
Jonas Seiferth – “Boson v2 is all about the decentralized exchange of any physical asset as an redeemable NFT!
At its core Boson solves the problem of fair exchange within e-commerce, without the need for trusted intermediaries or counterparties. Instead, Buyer and Seller make commitments to trade within smart contracts encoded with game theory, and tokenized as redeemable NFTs.
Buyers have assurance, that either they can redeem the NFT for the physical item or their get their money back.
In that sense the vision for Boson hasn’t changed with the release of v2, but we’re even closer to realizing the promise of decentralized commerce!”
Question 2: 2022 has been a rollercoaster ride for those in crypto. What would you say are the highlights from 2022 for Boson Protocol?
Justin Banon – “We got enormous recognition by global businesses as we were awarded World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Status for developing a tech which could transform commerce globally
- then we launched v2 of the protocol in Oct to amazing feedback
- now we are heads-down building integrations for partners big and small web2 and web3”
Question 3: There is a lot of chatter about mainstream adoption happening via Web3 loyalty and d-commerce. Given Boson Protocol’s unique value proposition of enabling d-commerce bridging physical items with tokenized assets, what can we look forward to from the Boson Protocol team in 2023 especially on web 3 loyalty related programs?
Jonas Seiferth – “We have a strong thesis that Web3 loyalty will drive mainstream adoption!
Whereas the Web2 paradigm was to lock-in customers and extract maximum value, Web3 loyalty programs will evolve the relationship from customer to community, from values extraction to value co-creation and sharing. Instead of opaque rules encoded in proprietary loyalty rules engines, rules will be transparently and immutably encoded in underlying protocols like Boson Protocol.
Boson Protocol sits at the core of this as it enables brands to issue redeemable NFTs as rewards and leverage Boson’s programmable commerce capabilities to build custom loyalty program!”
Question 4: We saw a recent tweet from you Justin about a computable economy. How does Boson Protocol fit into the new programmable economy?
Justin Banon – “Today, physical products are available for sale online, but they are represented in myriad incompatible formats across siloed e-commerce sites
What if we tokenize all the world’s physical products into a common, interoperable standard & list them within a single, public ledger?
Today e-commerce transactions have high transaction costs due to monopolistic players and low trust.
What if we could automate market transactions with a low cost of trust?
Today commerce is linear- buyers send money and sellers send goods; and dumb- complex rules require separate loyalty engines. What if we could build Web3 Loyalty Commerce apps with rules encoded within and enforced by the underlying substrate?
Then commerce becomes ‘programmable commerce’, capital becomes ‘computable capital’ and we transition to a ‘Turing-complete economy’. Boson Protocol is recognized by the world’s leading blockchain economists, & the World Economic Forum as a foundational technology for making the transformation to a programmable, computable: ‘turing-complete’ economy
What does this mean?
You can read more about this and RT it here… https://twitter.com/JBanon/status/1600522262842642432?s=20&t=qcwzpI_5rtUu0hTTEkrljA”
Community Questions:
How is your roadmap to have mass adoption on, what have you done?”
Justin Banon – Boson’s objective function for 2023 is: ‘maximize network growth’
We have a number of key strategies for this.
1: Enable self-serve for Web3 users.
Currently we are in closed beta. We will open this up and make it super easy for Web3 builders to build on Boson via SDKs and widgets.
2: Support an ecosystem of Web2/2.5 builders.
We are getting lots of demand from more mainstream Sellers and brands, so we are working with web2/3, loyalty and metaverse builders to enable them to build the apps to meet this demand- simultaneously growing an ecosystem of builders
3: Fund critical infrastructure through grants. There is strong demand from mainstream sellers but they can’t connect to web3 directly and they want to sell at scale. Boson is funding apps to connect to mainstream e-commerce systems to enable mass adoption…
“Do you see the possibility of companies like Nike and Adidas introducing phygitals themselves as a negative for Boson? If not, please explain why.”
Justin Banon – “Not at all – it’s a massive positive. The biggest threat with innovative technologies is that no one wants to use them. This shows market demand for a product which we have spent 2 years developing and have major recognition for”
“What is the vision for v3 and what next”
Jonas Seiferth – “We’re currently working on v2.1 with some exciting new features:
– “Shell NFTs” (Name tbd) – we’re making improvements to allow sellers to use any NFT marketplace for the initial sale of a Boson rNFT. This is huge as it will make Boson interoperable with any NFT marketplace and gives sellers the flexibility to choose the marketplace, storefront or other interface that suits them best.
Sequential commit – currently Boson redeemable NFTs are only backed with the price that was played on the primary market. This means that if you buy an rNFT on the secondary market for a price that is above the primary market price these funds are not secured by the protocol!
With Sequential commit we introduce secondary market trading secured by Boson Protocol – a big improvement that allows for a secure secondary market and perpetual royalties!
These are just a few of the things we have in the pipeline – all driven by market demand and user feedback”