Boson Protocol - Trustless commerce infrastructure for Web3

Transcript

morning everyone um thanks for coming i'm justin bannon one of the co-founders of boson and i'm gregor the other co-founder so today we're really excited to reveal boson protocol v2 so v2 is a massive upgrade on on v1 and really represents kind of trustless commerce infrastructure so really really pleased to be able to present this to you today so the problem that we solve um rests on the fact that smart contracts are disconnected from the real world so

what do we what do we mean by this well you know as everyone here should know smart contracts can't see the real world on their own um so you know they need uh in order to be able to kind of trust external data sources they need data oracles um but a closely related problem to this is that smart contracts can't affect the real world on their own so if we have a an instruction or a transaction originating in a in a smart contract they can't they can't trust that they've executed in in the real world and this is a kind of general problem

and so they need a different type of oracle to reliably be able to act on the real world and so in its most general sense this is what boson protocol is and we describe this as a general purpose decentralized actuator oracle so we're talking about this very very generic property of being able to reliably execute real-world actions and and bozon protocol at its core is unopinionated as to what those actions should be but is a general purpose mechanism for enabling smart contracts to affect the real world in a in a reliable way

however although the core of boson protocol is is is generic for v2 we are focusing on on commerce and specifically enabling web3 to connect with real world commerce and our vision is to enable a single digital market for physical things so imagine if instead of like products services etc all of these things being listed and transacted on different um websites or you know amazon and alibaba and different proprietary websites imagine if in the same way that you can

search for pretty much any piece of information or data on the internet imagine if all of these products and service were listed in a common format into this sort of single digital market for physical things and then could execute in an automated fashion without the need for trusted counterparties or intermediaries and so that that is the the vision of boson and really what we're we're looking at is is creating like a uni swap for e-commerce um yeah so we learned a lot from our version one and v2 we say it's a fair exchange protocol

that is efficient because it minimizes the number and cost of transactions involved it is also optimistic because it assumes that the optimistic path will follow it is highly automated because the majority of dispute disputes will be resolved by a mutual resolution game which is game theoretically incentivized and will have escalation only exceptionally our big focus was on simplicity it helped with the design for the user experience as well as developer experience it is trust minimized

because the escalation to a to a dispute resolver who is a commoditized service provider is only by exception and the dispute resolver has only minimal market power we say it's cost mutualized because we mutualize the cost of escalation across multiple seller transactions to reduce the impact on transactions especially low value ones so these are the problems um that boson v2 solves so how to create an infrastructure where we don't need to trust sellers or introduce intermediaries these three problems are

core to that especially if you consider that in commerce the majority of traits are involving physical assets so physical asset oracle problem the fair exchange problem and creating a single digital market for physical things the physical esoterical problem is about ensuring that the bearer of a digital token can redeem it for the physical thing that's a hard problem to solve but our solution is based on game theoretically incentivized forward contracts which you can imagine as an agreement to execute a trade or an exchange at a specified price sometime

in the future and the trade here is generally paying with digital assets to get a physical thing so in this case the seller makes an offer and we did an optional commitment deposit or security deposit and promises to deliver the thing to anybody that holds a redeemable token that corresponds to that offer a buyer can purchase this redeemable token on chain and promises to redeem it so while with committing to this exchange the buyer accepts the the responsibility to follow through his promise otherwise they could face a cancellation

penalty note here that we are not tokenizing assets um justin explained why that is unavoidably hard instead we are tokenizing promises or the right to claim a thing and with this abstraction boson can cover for practically any kind of exchange including exchanging physical assets so the fair exchange problem is about ensuring that the exchange goes through as generally intended [Music] in in essence the seller offers a thing [Music] and

the buyer commits to it if the buyer is happy the the process goes through very smoothly the protocol assumes optimistic path so the the process goes just through the middle vertical line here from offer to uh to buyer commit and then redeem for the physical thing with that the there is really no other transaction needed for the trade to complete um and uh that's it in case there is a dispute the buyer is not happy with the quality or the item wasn't delivered this this is now the the challenging part

and buyer has an option here to raise a dispute um here we have a two-step resolution process boson facilitates a path where buyer and seller can negotiate and resolve disputes locally so this is our mutual resolution game which is kind of a black box and can be customized more details are available in the new white paper but we will provide a few templates for depending on the use case the buyer and seller can can play the the recording game that best suits their needs

so this will cover the majority of use cases and we know the mutual resolution will be successful often just because there exists another path a more dreadful escalated disputed solution so the the dispute the escalation involves a dispute resolver that is could be an independent or a decentralized entity they they are knowing in advance at the offer created time and they buyer and seller also agree in the terms that um this this will be the the resolver with knowing also the evidence that will be required um to present in case the the

resolver is called so dispute resolver is costly and slow um but as such um buyers know that on in advance and uh they expect that the resolver will resolve fairly this means that actually they are better off if they resolve this their disputes um on their own and are honest in advance just to to reduce the cost and time um so in essence the the process goes through offered offer an exchange and in case of a dispute there's a two-step uh dispute resolution

so the two we've solved the two important parts of the creating a commerce infrastructure the remaining part is how to make it alive and cater for a single digital market for physical things so our solution is to tokenize commitments to trade as standard nfts so the holder of that nft a buyer can hold it and ignore it if they so choose but they can also trade it and transfer it and bring the whole power of defy to it it is something that's obvious to us in web3 ecosystem but it's a quite powerful new capability compared to the legacy e-commerce infra great thanks gregor um

so yeah we're we're on now on this sort of countdown to v2 launch which is which is due around about the end of september early october and we are signing up launch partners uh whether those are kind of sellers marketplaces or builders you can find out more on our website and if you'd like to read the full white paper which we've just put up on the website this morning you can just scan that qr code and uh yeah great great to answer any questions [Applause]

um how do you like what do you think the sort of stakes would be when someone's wanting to um buy something or if they're selling something do they also stake some token as well and what yeah do you expect those values to be um so there there are seller and buyer optional deposits and so i mean they're they're optional and they're set as a kind of value value dependent on the kind of they control the reversibility of the transaction so those two deposits if the buyer or the seller don't go through with the transaction they you know it's it's kind of i guess on the buyer's side it's similar to if you book an expensive restaurant and

don't turn up you might lose like 50 euros or something but there's also one on the seller's side um but obviously if you were like buying from like you had a trusted seller like a nike or someone you might not you might like require the seller because you're expecting you know it's a high trust environment but if you were buying you know something in the metaverse pseudonymously from a seller and and you you know because the buyers got to lock up capital then you might want to have some the seller to have some skin in the game just so you know it's not not not a time waste so those two deposits can they control both the reversibility and they also are a substitute for trust um so there's no

kind of fixed amount but um our two kind of game theorists um are actually doing live live economic studies in this i mean one of the really interesting things about blockchains and and is it's sort of turning economics into like an experimental science so we've got um two uh top game theory kind of researchers and they're going to be doing live academic research in in in this using boson yeah great thank you uh yeah i was just wondering um are you doing anything for a civil resistance or do you have any plans uh civil resistance in in terms of

well we're not really um at this stage we're not kind of there aren't any significant attack vectors for sort of civil resistance and in what what way would well i was imagining there are reviews for sellers and buyers for example yeah i mean this is an area of of development and so what the basis of of of how we're going to kind of build up the reputation is that a sort of pseudonymous address would need to build reputation over time but yeah you could also imagine that for trusted sellers you don't need anything beyond their name

but for untrusted sellers they have they can put optional deposit right and that's their stake in that this can be a costly thing so sible resistance is sort of implied by that and maybe also kyc for some sellers yes but that doesn't come at a smart contract level uh layer that can be done above yeah thank you [Applause]

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