Arcadier is using blockchain to bring transparency to marketplaces

I recently attended Blockchain Sydney Enterprise Focus #1 where I heard from both the CEO and CTO of Arcadier. I was impressed by the expertise and the vision of the Arcadier team, and left feeling confident they will find success with their venture despite the current crypto bear market.

Everyone knows someone who has been scammed by a seller or someone who has been sceptical of the legitimacy of a buyer on one of the many marketplaces in existence – it’s clear that blockchain has a role to play in bringing more trust to the current marketplace business model.

ArcadierX is a project by Arcadier, a fast-growing marketplace SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) provider headquartered in Singapore. ArcadierX is their blockchain-enhanced marketplace platform which brings its users greater decentralisation and the ability to migrate trust scores, and even inventory across different marketplaces. There are six technology solution applications proposed in ArcadierX, and five of them are blockchain-based, with the last being intelligent analytics.

These new capabilities will develop Arcadier into an intelligent eCommerce ecosystem that will be able to bring the Arcadier ecosystem of marketplaces to other marketplaces beyond Arcadier.

Interested to learn more, I reached out to Co-Founder and CTO, Paul Cascun, to gain some extra insights because I believe Arcadier is a program with huge potential.

Q1. Can you explain how the ArcadierX token (ARCX) will be used as a utility to power the ArcadierX marketplace, and how ARCX will be both earned and burned by participants?

The ArcadierX token will be utilised for all actions in Arcadier Hub and Trust that lead to a positive outcome.

Arcadier will introduce ARCX tokens to primarily support the service requests made within the Arcadier ecosystem. It will be used as a reward for sharing information, token redemption in purchases, content contribution to Arcadier Hub and Arcadier Trust, requesting publisher assets for affiliate marketing, and governance in system bug and feature prioritisation.

The ARCX token may also be offered by participating marketplace operators, wholesalers, retailers, etc. either as bonus incentives with certain types and sizes of sales or purchases, or via exchange redemption for coupons and discounts, with a certain number of tokens needing to be sent to the publisher of the offer in order to activate the offer that is being made.

ArcadierX will implement various types of token staking for specific purposes, such as posting a bond as a guarantee of order delivery or staking tokens against fulfilment where no reputation history has been established.

Tokens could potentially be earned through Arcadier Trust, by end users from network participants like marketplaces and retailers, based on completing certain registration and review actions.

Q2. What advantages does a cryptotoken provide over standard loyalty points?

Crypto tokens have extended flexibility and utility, when compared with the five caveats of standard loyalty points:

They’re limited in scope only by the imagination of the user community and the market’s willingness to adopt new and exciting use cases that enhance their business offerings, flexibility, market engagement and profitability They don’t expire. They exist for as long as participants in the network are willing to hold, trade, stake, earn and spend them. They can only be “destroyed” by their own holders losing their private keys or sending them to an unspendable address (aka “burning”). Any burned tokens subtract from the available supply, making the remaining tokens that much scarcer and potentially more valuable. They have transparent market value, as they are openly and publicly tradable not only across an international collection of crypto currency exchanges, but also directly between peers (something that’s not possible with traditional loyalty points) and via decentralised exchanges where no trust is required to create buy and sell orders on open markets. Per point 3. Once distributed to network participants, buyers and investors, and unlocked, cryptographic tokens are freely tradeable on open markets internationally, subject of course to the laws of the jurisdiction in which the token holders reside. With an initial defined finite issuance and thus a limited supply of tokens, with the total number of existing tokens known and visible on the blockchain, a peer to peer points trading and redemptions market can conceivably operate in an open and transparent global market that provides market-based price discovery.

Thus, ARCX for example, can be used for a range of utilitarian purposes, including inventory listings, platform fees, platform access benefits, member incentives and potentially for loyalty redemptions across participating marketplace sites offer much greater flexibility by comparison to loyalty points

Q3. It’s been one month since the launch of your private token presale. How are you finding the process of raising capital in this environment where the reputation of utility tokens has been damaged by other companies who could not deliver on their promise?

There have been a huge number of failed projects in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space, from failures of governance, inability to execute, funds mismanagement, through to outright scams that raised funds in 2016, 2017 and early 2018 via the ICO mechanism.

We are quite upbeat and quietly confident about our ability to raise funds for ArcadierX through the course of 2019. We are running a three quarters long token sale, along with a private equity round, we believe that the value of our project will become clear to the market as time progresses and we will succeed in raising in this difficult market. Although that is contrarian in comparison to the current broad market sentiment, we believe we have a strong basis for this confidence.

ArcadierX is a genuine platform designed by an established and experienced enterprise leadership and technical team. As ArcadierX is addressing a well-defined existing market need of product and service discoverability, plus reputation portability, we are achieving strong ratings on many reputable ICO rating sites.

Given the platform is being designed with openness and inter-connectivity in mind, we know that we can build a strong ecosystem of partners and collaborators with a common purpose of freeing up global eCommerce from its existing constraints and limitations, towards using a common rail for distributed inventory and trust.

As we are running this ICO at the bottom of the market, we rely on the strength of our value proposition, the capabilities of our leadership team and our ability to communicate the many successes already achieved by Arcadier, that will serve to provide a solid foundation for the ArcadierX platform to build upon.

Q4. You said at the Blockchain Sydney Enterprise Focus #1 event that you will not mess with your core business and that blockchain is simply a mechanism for building trust and efficiency within your current model. Will you be moving your existing Arcadier platform onto the blockchain, or will you be running two separate platforms Arcadier and ArcadierX?

The core engine of Arcadier’s marketplaces technology will continue to be developed according to our strategic objectives, our stakeholders needs, their feedback and our agile feature development lifecycle that sees Arcadier releasing significant new functionality at least every quarter.

That is effectively business as usual, in extending the functionality, scalability and capability of Arcadier’s core platform and responding to the needs of our active customer base, from the largest to the smallest of our marketplace members.

ArcadierX is being architected and built as a distributed inventory and blockchain powered trust platform, that augments the core Arcadier offering, rather than replacing it.

So these will be two distinct platforms, that will interact and interoperate via APIs, not only with each other, but with many other SaaS offerings in the eCommerce, payments, loyalty and supply chain space.

We are taking a future phased approach of deploying and integrating blockchain and advanced technological enhancements onto Arcadier’s existing marketplace platform.

These new capabilities that will be built and rolled out under the ArcadierX brand will help develop Arcadier into a fully-connected intelligent eCommerce ecosystem, with a sustainable competitive advantage over our competition.

I’m also quietly confident for the success of ArcadierX. This blockchain loyalty play seems like an extension to everything they’re doing right already, with the added bonus they’ve been at the forefront of the success of Paypal and succeeded in many marketplace based businesses before.

Stacey Lyons is the Marketing Director at Loyalty & Reward Co, a leading loyalty management consulting agency based in Sydney. Stacey has years of experience within loyalty, marketing and eCommerce across multiple channels and business models. Most recently, Stacey has been managing the investor, member and retailer communications for blockchain loyalty company EZToken Rewards.

Stacey is a proud pioneer of women in blockchain and regularly contributes to www.blockchainloyalty.io global resource centre for everything blockchain loyalty. Let’s connect! LinkedIn, Twitter