Boson Protocol — Concept Review
BOSON PROTOCOL — CONCEPT REVIEW
This review will provide peep into upcoming ambitious project — Boson Protocol. After reading this concept review one will be able to understand the underlying principle behind the project, its expected features and construct of ecosystem.
Please not this is not a full review which will be released once the project has launched MVP (tentatively in Q1 ’21).
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Boson Protocol — Overview
Imagine a marketplace where you can buy anything and sell everything including your personal data, without any middlemen, and still control it! Well, this is what Boson Protocol aspires to become.
As per the CEO of Boson Protocol, Justin Banon, Boson Protocol is a fundamental primitive for connecting smart contracts to real world commerce. The core of this public infrastructure layer for commercial transactions is independence from financial intermediaries (like PayPal) and market intermediaries (like Amazon). However, Boson Protocol will not act as a marketplace, but as a middle layer that aims to automate the commercial transaction using the game theory and reduce arbitration.
Need for Boson Protocol
In current online commerce there are two type of intermediaries: financial intermediaries and market intermediaries. The problems with these intermediaries are:
a) All dispute management and transaction reversal related to commercial transactions incurs cost and as well as data privacy is breached.
b) Data collected by them are used for anti-competitive market dominance which hurts the customers.
Boson Protocol solves this problem by proposing a decentralized protocol that facilitates monetary transaction for goods, services and even data. This decentralized protocol will minimize arbitration, i.e., human intervention and trust while maintaining practical atomicity and incentivization to the users.
Core Functionality
Core Functionality of Boson Protocol will include
a) Decentralized infrastructure that tokenizes promise made between two parties for future transactions through NFT Vouchers.
b) Core mechanism for autonomous co-ordination of commercial exchange. Boson Protocol implements Dynamic Game theory mechanism to reduce the need of human intervention for arbitration. Game theory will be used as scaffolding mechanism to keep arbitration in check when the system starts. As system grows, the decaying arbitration will be replaced by automation.
c) Token model that incentivizes supply sized acquisition, demand side distribution, early adopters, curation, and redemption of quality inventory.
d) Web3 marketplace for monetizing data by recycling user data within the community via Boson tokens.
e) Evolving governance system for directing and controlling the protocol through its life cycle.
Boson Protocol has wide range of use cases. It could be an open digital marketplace and/or voucher distribution for non-monetary value or for running Government based schemes for masses. It could be used for exchanging network tokens for digital goods or service such as booking an appointment or reservation at a restaurant. The use cases of Boson Protocol can also be extended to games and for gaming experiences. In nutshell, it can be used anywhere and everywhere that involves online buy and sell model.
Speculation on Boson Ecosystem
As of now nothing much is known about Boson ecosystem except the fact that they are in partnership with Ocean Protocol and Origin Protocol. However, looking as the structure of the upcoming project we might see strategic partnerships in below mentioned fields:
a) Universal Login for managing decentralized identities (already hinted in whitepaper)
b) Trustology for custodial wallet (already mentioned in whitepaper)
c) Torus or Argent for Key Management Services. (Why not go for NuCypher?)
d) Moonlet Portal for fully featured SDK to interface with web3 (already mentioned in whitepaper)
e) Biconomy for relayer infrastructure. (already mentioned in whitepaper)
f) Fetch.AI for machine-to-machine commerce
g) NFT projects such as Rarible and TVK for NFT commerce
h) Crypto exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin and BITMax
i) Crypto Credit cards such as Swipe, Crypto.com because of their large, aggregated pool of crypto users
j) Though Boson has hinted of launching its own BosonDAO however, we might see partnership with independent DAO projects such as Argon.
SWOT Analysis
Strength: The core strength of the project is its team. Justin Banon, himself has experience of building a billion-dollar company, Priority Pass Group, which represent physical products and services as digital vouchers. Also, the use case of project in online marketplace is strong and has certainly hit the right cord. As of now, no other platform, even in decentralized space is providing a marketplace without middle-man arbitration.
Weakness: Even though the idea of automating the commercial transaction using the game theory and reduce arbitration is unique, the implementation of NFT Vouchers and 2-sideed deposit structure might make the practicality of the concept complex. With these complex features, how likely will it be for projects like Travala.com, Socios, Utrust, Openbazaar, Loyyal and Swipe to integrate it in their platform is still a big question. Also, using this feature for commercial transaction by non-tech people might be a challenge.
Opportunity: Though there are multiple solutions to decentralized marketplace and connecting real world products with virtual data on blockchain, the idea of commercial transactions without middle-men arbitration has several use cases ranging from commerce, voucher distribution, gaming, network tokenization and many more. Usually, the burden of financial arbitration falls on marketplace in such cased commercial transactions without middle-men arbitration can have significant adoption in traditional ecommerce as well. Also, with IoT becoming next big thing in tech, implementation of machine-to-machine commerce could be a game changer. Not just IoT, but also the use case of Boson Protocol could be found in virtual reality where avatars can complete transactions without the involvement of arbitrations. The use case for machine -to- machine commerce, if implemented properly will certainly gather traction in IoT field and VR. The biggest opportunity for Boson could be connecting physical world with DeFi.
Threat: Bridging of on-chain and off-chain data is important for Boson Protocol, any complexity or glitch from either side could have cascading effect on the network. Since, Boson will support private data monetization, any potential vulnerabilities such as side-chain attack or twist-security attack, or attack on Key Management could be detrimental for the Project.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the concept of implementing commercial transaction without arbitration and connecting real world product and services to blockchain is amazing. The implementation of NFT Vouchers to facilitate the promise of commercial promise as a future contract really solves the trust issue between smart contract and real world. There is no doubt about the use cases of the project. Also, team has experience of catering the same field which is a bonus. Overall, the concept is exceptionally good and will serve a real use case.
