This is the first ever AMA by the Ocean Protocol community with many more to follow as we head further into 2020. The Ocean Protocol community were fortunate enough to have some valuable time speaking with Justin Banon, CEO of Boson Protocol, a company building a planetary-level Web 3 product data marketplace on top of Ocean Protocol.

A brief summary on who Boson Protocol are and what they do.

No human intervention

Boson is an almost trustless protocol that enables smart contracts to exchange crypto assets for physical products and services, without the need for intermediaries or arbitrators.

Fully automated

Boson Protocol programmatically handles refunds, expiry and complaints via a closed process governed by a breakthrough cryptoeconomic mechanism. This novel Bayesian game is incentive compatible with the objective function to maximise quality redemption transactions.

Reliable transactions

Boson Protocol provides practical atomicity between payment and delivery of physical items, ensuring that both transactions happens together, or not at all.

BELOW IS A TRANSCRIPT OF THE AMA

Question- Who are you and what do you do ?.

Answer- I used to work for Priority Pass, which when I started was a $50m aggregator of lounge visits, using physical form factors such as plastic cards and paper vouchers.

I was studying for a masters in digital innovation at the time and had a big idea:

what if we digitised products and services to meet the demands of mobile and digital businesses.

As global MD, I used this idea to transform Priority Pass into Collinson Travel Experiences (https://www.collinsongroup.com/en-eur/enrich) (CTE), a group of digital voucher platforms, with global revenues of $1billion per annum.

Now I am working full-time on Boson Protocol. We finished the inaugural Outlier Venture’s Basecamp Accelerator in December which was incredible, we are now full steam ahead building.

Moderator Comment- Before Boson, you were COO of dexFreight, one of Oceans Partners building on Ocean Protocol.

We asked Hector Hernandez some questions previously for a post we did, he was incredibly helpful!.

Just for everyone reading, we covered dexFreight in one of our earlier posts, we are all patiently waiting for more information on the dexFreight partnership.

Answer- Yes. I was COO of dexFreight and am still their strategic advisor, so working on their overall strategy and token and business model design pattern with Hector, Zargham and Trent.

I designed the business model for dexFreight and Boson in alignment with my Web3 design pattern:

* dexFreight coordinates logistics and monetises the data via ocean in an equitable way.

* Boson coordinates physical asset exchanges and monetises the data via ocean in an equitable way.

Moderator Comment- It does sound very exciting, it was great to see you post about it yesterday on twitter.

For everyone reading, Boson Protocol was part of the Outlier Ventures startup accelerator, they’re also working closely with Ocean Protocol and have invested.

I noticed both the CEO of Outlier Jamie Burke, and Trent from Ocean Protocol are both advisors to Boson Protocol.

Answer- Yes, Jamie Burke -Outlier Ventures CEO is also our advisor. OV are incredible, and the OV Basecamp is the best place to be for a DLT, IOT, Data, AI project.

Question- What made you get into blockchain/crypto in the first place?.

Answer- Since I was a child I have been interested in the evolution of order within the universe. It started with physics, and then moved on to innovation and the evolution of technology and technological civilisations.

I ended-up studying innovation and as MD built a billion dollar platform business. When I discovered blockchain it ticked all these boxes:

* a technology which brings physical properties (irreversibility and immutability) to the digital world.

* a technology that enables new business models that resist economic and market capture (as per platforms).

* a technology that could bring a post-capitalist economic era, see my post here.

Moderator Comment- I must say, moving from heading-up a billion dollar business, to a blockchain startup, it’s going to be incredibly exciting to follow your work on Boson Protocol in the coming years.

Answer- Well the business was $50m when I joined.The fun bit is growing it.

Question- Now the big question on people’s minds, how did you come into contact with Ocean Protocol, was it when you were at dexFreight?.

Answer- Well I have been a follower and big fan of Trent’s work for some time now. I also have an academic background in digital business models. Data is at the core of the most successful Web2 business models but there are some serious flaws- privacy and security obviously, but more fundamentally having private entities with an imperative to extract / owning our sources of truth is very dysfunctional.

So my research into new business models, which enable data to be self-sovereign and value to be more equitably distributed led me to Ocean.

Boson’s business model can be thought of as a Web3 update to a very successful Web2 business model used by Google and Facebook.

Give utility for free: (so for google that’s search, facebook that’s social)

to drive ubiquity and then monetise the data.

However, whereas Web2 involves data hoarding, privacy breaching and value extraction to sergey, larry and zuckerberg, our Web3 model is self-sovereign and private by design and enables equitable value distribution.

Ocean not only shares these values, but has built an incredible substrate that we can leverage to achieve this business model. I think using Ocean will become a no-brainer like AWS has been for Web2.

Moderator Comment- Everyone certainly seems to be a fan of Trent, he’s definitely respected amongst industry leaders.

Answer- Yep and he was very generous with his time, when he had no extrinsic incentive to be. People don’t forget that, Karma.

Question- Can you explain what Boson Protocol is, and what it aims to achieve, in a way my wife can understand, who barely understands blockchain ?.

Answer- Sure, Boson Protocol can be thought of as blockchain vouchers representing products and services which require:

* No human intervention — no intermediaries or arbitrators.

* Full automation — of payment, expiry and complaints.

* Reliable transactions — that happen together or not at all.

* Customer feedback data — via a Web3 data marketplace.

Question- When you say voucher, you don’t mean coupons for “20% off your next meal”. Do you mean digital representations of physical assets or have I got it wrong?.

Answer- Our vision is to:

Boson Protocol is expanding the decentralized economy

by becoming the universal clearing rails for non-monetary value

and the planetary-level product data marketplace.

Question-

Answer- A ‘voucher’ represents a redeemable promise or “a digital representation of the right to claim services or goods”.

So not 20% off. But you can purchase our tokenised vouchers with digital value and then redeem them for real world products and services, hence this unlocks the cross over of cyrpto in to physcial goods and assets — not just crytpo to other crypto — which is why the crypto exchanges we have been talking too are incredibly excited.

Moderator Comment- The crossover between crypto and physical assets is a very exciting one for sure.

Answer- Here’s a user case:

Crypto exchanges have large user bases and huge stored value. However, crypto funds are siloed and exchange transaction fees are commoditised.

Boson Protocol enables exchanges to increase revenues and differentiate propositions by enabling customers to swap digital assets for NFT vouchers which can then be redeemed for real world products and services.

Question- Have you got more examples of potential use cases? What sort of assets will be made into NFT vouchers?.

Answer- That’s just one side of our business model, digital to physical transactions.

We also incentivise users to share data about their product preferences. This data will be stored in an Ocean Web3 data marketplace and then sold, with user permission and self-sovereignty, to companies.

Our go-to-market strategy is-

To first demonstrate feasibility by launching with dexFreight, a decentralized logistics platform with $100m in transactions listed per day.

Then Provability; by targeting exchanges who have large users bases, huge stored value, and are under-monetised.

We will then use exchanges as reference customers for corporates such as payment networks and big banks.

I previously built the billion dollar global market leader in this space,

so I have strong relationships and deep domain expertise.

so I have strong relationships and deep domain expertise. Finally, our vision is for Boson to achieve ubiquity as basic plumbing for the economy of things.

Some crypto cases:

Finally, our vision is for Boson to achieve ubiquity as basic plumbing for the economy of things.

Crypto Credit Cards / Monetize, differentiate and reward user bases.

Blockchain gaming / Issue and trade real world game stuff, swag and loot.

D-commerce / Exchange of on-chain value for off-chain products.

DeFi / DeFi loans for purchase of off-chain products.

Blockchain rewards / Redemption of tokens into off-chain rewards.

The first assets will be ‘experiences’ — access or added value moments that enhance a customer journey.

Of course lounges are an example — but there are many others that crypto holders will want to access directly and suppliers will want to offer to them across travel, dining, hospitality, entertainment, sport etc — tickets or entrance are a great use case, digital media, downloads, streaming the list could go on — depends what the first customer bases will find most desirable.

Moderator Comment- It sounds like the applications of this tech are limitless, a complete trustless solution for physical goods.

Data oracles: enable smart contracts to trust real world data.

Boson protocol: enables smart contracts to easily exchange products, services and their data.

Data oracles were hugely popular in 2019, but from reading your website, it seems like you plan to evolve them into something that not only enables smart contracts for data, but physical assets?.

What breakthrough did you make to achieve this?.

Answer- Well several months ago we made some significant changes to the core mechanism of Boson Protocol. We previously used a version of the Dharma protocol architecture with trusted keepers handling arbitration. However, in designing the integration with dexFreight it became apparent that this just wouldn’t work. How could you have completely automated and trustless systems, except when a user wanted to redeem tokens for a real world product and then we would have to incur the trust, cost and friction issues of human arbitrators ?.

So we looked to see if we could create a mechanism that enabled digital to physical transfer in a way that is trustless, atomic and incentive compatible. What we discovered is now being developed into an academic paper by our Advisor Dr Zeynep Gurguc, Cryptoeconomics and Game Theory researcher at Imperial College. We will be publishing and open sourcing that closer to our launch.

Let’s go through this:

So we take on-chain commitments (deposits) to make offchain transactions using stateful NFTs.

These NFTs then flow through a closed process, which is complex enough to handle the various redemption, refund and expiry paths, but simple enough that it can be governed by a novel Bayesian game in such a way that the outcome is incentive compatible / meets the objective function of: maximising non-complaint transactions.

Finally these NFTs act like a secure data channel, enabling the collection of valuable data mapping customer demographic to preferences. If you are a consumer facing company understanding consumer behaviour its incredibly valuable. This also prevents all this consumer data from being held within proprietary silos and instead creates a planetary-level data marketplace.

It is this unique enablement by the Boson Protocol of the cross-over between crytpo and physical for commerce that has got all the key people interested.

Moderator Comment- No wonder Outlier Ventures were interested, they definitely do their due dilligence, this tech sounds like a complete game-changer.

What blockchains are you planning to work with?.

Answer- At present our plan is Ethereum. However, my Tech Co-founder, Gregor Borosa, has a very open mind. Gregor was actually my teacher on my blockchain masters course — he taught blockchain programming and applications so is very knowledgeable on this.

I think everyone building is having to keep options open.

Question- Now you mentioned “ consumer data from being held within proprietary silos and instead creates a planetary-level data marketplace”.

Is this where Ocean comes into play? What’s Ocean’s involvement within the tech and why did you choose to build on Ocean Protocol ?.

Answer- Yes. Ocean is the substrate upon which a whole class of planetary-level data marketplaces will be built. We will look back and think- it was nuts to allow private companies to own our data, of course we need self-sovereign, planetary-level sources of truth.

With dexFreight and Boson Protocol, I plan to do my bit to bring mass adoption to crypto and Ocean enables us to do that.

For dexFreight, Ocean have partnered with dF to build a data marketplace. It is a perfect synergy between the domain experts of dF in logistics and blockchain and the tech and data marketplace expertise of Ocean Protocol.

My firm belief is that the teams that will send rockets to the moon will be those that combine the very best from multiple domains and collaborate and share value equitably. Those are the values that Hector, Trent, Gregor and I all share.

Moderator Comment- The Ocean team seem incredibly tight-lipped on who they are working with and what they’re working on. We are so fortunate to be able to speak to you about adoption of the tech.

Answer- Ocean is so much more than the best technology. They have the best minds and the best people. If we are going to take-on and beat the data monopolies we will need to work together. (This was the advice of Prof. Carlota Perez — one of dF advisors).

Of course whilst Boson will launch to crypto exchanges, that is to give us provability. We will then use these as reference customers for mainstream corporates.

Right now we are building our core protocol, developing product-market fit and raising finance.

So we would love to talk with potential customers, users, developers and investors.

Question- What companies do you expect to adopt the technology first and what sectors of the economy do you see the technology thrive in the most?.

Answer- No 1 priority is making it happen — the plans and designs are all there just need to do it with the first couple of partners and everyone else will follow — that and a small funding raise to fund the beta stack development.

Crypto exchanges have already shown a strong interest, after that corporates, banks and airlines are firmly on our radar.

Question- What is the structure of the company, is it a decentralised, open sourced protocol where everybody can contribute? If so, how does the governance plan on being handled?.

Answer- So currently we are a UK limited company.

However, we will split into a non-profit foundation / protocol run by a DAO- we have two amazing legal and governance advisors who will help with that (Anja Blaj and Marina Markevic).

Then we will have a profit-making company that will build profit-making business on top.

Our business has three stages:

Stage 1: Profit making voucher marketplaces, generate near-term profits and attract competitors onto the network.

Stage 2: This drives network effects within the public utility network where value is captured via the Boson token.

Stage 3: At scale Boson’s web3 data marketplace kicks-in, with the potential for exponential returns.

Question- Can you give us any indication on when a white paper will be released and a possible road map?.

Answer- Well we are speaking at ETHLDN, back at my old Uni — Imperial College on 28th Feb, so definitely before then. However, the details of the core mechanism may need to be delayed closer to launch. We will open source, but want to give ourselves a headstart over copycats.

Question- How can people that are interested in Boson Protocol get in touch with you guys?.

Answer- @justinbanon or @bosonprotocol on telegram is good.

Also:

Twitter @JBanon @Bosonprotocol

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbanon/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/bosonprotocol

Moderator Comment- Well Justin, we’ve definitely gone over the 20 mins I somehow convinced you to do with us!.

I just want to say on behalf of the Ocean Protocol Community, thank you so much for taking the time to do this with us. Boson Protocol sounds absolutely amazing, it’s definitely going to be a huge success.

Answer- Thanks Donnie and Ocean Protocol Community. Here is to an amazing 2020 together!.