Abstract
The global retail market is $22T a year, and eCommerce represents $1.9T [1], just over 8.5% of all
yearly global retail. Blockchain commerce, on the other hand, represents under $50M in total volume,
the sum of all products purchased using cryptocurrencies [2]. This volume is incredibly small;
for every $440,000 of commerce conducted, just $1 is paid for using cryptocurrencies.
In this paper, we offer a vision for a solution that addresses the key challenges standing in the way
of mainstream blockchain commerce.
This comprises a technology stack that solves 3 basic problems:
1. Lack of consumer protection for buyers that purchase items using cryptocurrencies;
2. Lack of a transparent reputation platform that verifies the reliability and trustworthiness of sellers;
3. eCommerce sellers across the world suffer from a high incidence rate of fraud; chargeback
losses are projected to hit $31B by 2020 [3], over 1.5% of all transaction volume [4].
We propose Verify, a distributed reputation protocol deployed on the Ethereum blockchain that
monitors and continually updates the reputation of the various parties involved in a transaction.
This results in a public, provably valid reputation record for buyers and sellers as rated by their
counterparties. Finally, this reputation data is used in various ways to incentivize reputed sellers
and buyers to continue using the Verify protocol.
A reputation protocol without data is futile; we, therefore, propose a novel solution built on the
Verify reputation platform that simultaneously addresses the key consumer protection issues that
blockchain buyers face today and collects the requisite data necessary to bootstrap the reputation
protocol (i.e. to solve the “coldstart” problem).
By building this infrastructure layer for blockchain commerce, we foresee exponential growth in
blockchain commerce in the years to come, as more buyers and sellers opt to use Verify for the
protection, speed and convenience that it offers relative to traditional alternatives. Verify is built by
veterans of the financial industry, having previously onboarded thousands of sellers on traditional
credit card gateways, before acquisition of their company by Amazon in 2017 [5].
Verify Website
Verify Whitepaper
Social