Building a Marketplace Is Hard. Here Is How the Origin Protocol Can Help You Get Your First Million Users Faster. Jeffrey Lin Follow Feb 7, 2018 · 5 min read

In one of our earlier Medium posts, co-founder Matthew Liu stated the goal of the Origin project was to empower developers and businesses to build de-centralized marketplaces on the blockchain. If you haven’t read his piece introducing the Origin Protocol it is worth a quick scroll through to get the gist.

Having built marketplaces in the past we know that getting the right balance between suppliers and providers is imperative to creating a thriving market. Having said that, we know it is increasingly difficult to do due to many monopolistic forces. In some of the biggest marketplaces(eg. Uber, AirBNB, Bike shares) the goal is to get to an equilibrium in which there are enough demand to meet the supply(and vice versa). Once achieved, this equilibrium creates a network effect that(in theory) can work in perpetuity and results in a windfall of massive profits. However, trying to get to that equilibrium is an exercise in planning, budgeting and marketing. My point is: you have a lot to think about.

Why don’t you let us take some of that work off your plate? If you are actively building a blockchain based marketplace (or are thinking of one) consider Origin Protocol as the perfect asset to get your project off the ground. With Origin’s help we believe we can help you get to your first one million users, quicker.

Get to Market Faster

Think of all the technical details that go into building a marketplace. Your developers need to architect a platform to allow secure transactions to occur between the sellers and the buyers. Without the proper security protocols in place, accounts and funds can be easily compromised thus leading to potential legal ramifications. The platform must easily scale to handle all of the product listings, media/content and activities generated by your users. Not to mention we still haven’t gotten to integrating with the blockchain and decentralized file system just yet. The amount of time and effort just to get your project off the ground is absolutely daunting!

These considerations are why a pre-built marketplace platform like Origin Protocol makes so much sense. Not only are you able to focus on the revenue generation aspect of your business but you significantly lower the barriers to entry. More importantly, think of us as your dedicated team of developers who will help grow your platform and develop new features on your behalf.

Our first iteration of our Demo DApp already allows sellers to post products and buyers to “purchase” products through the Rinkeyby test network. In fact, the demo is live and you can actually play around with it. Many of the foundational elements of a marketplace are already prebuilt and ready for your team to begin utilizing.

If you haven’t done so, we invite you to play around with our Demo DApp. Check out Stan James’ Medium post — Origin Demo DApp is now live on testnet to get started.

Enjoy shared network effect

Partners who build their marketplace on Origin enjoy a shared network effect that helps alleviate the reputation problem that plague public markets. User reputation is especially important for a site such as StockX, which matches buyers and sellers dealing in sneakers, luxury goods and collectibles. With the luxury goods industry often fraught with counterfeits, the need for tracking user reputation is of the utmost importance.

However, established markets such as StockX, AirBnb and Lyft have little incentive to share collected user data with each other. Each marketplace operator controls a valuable, but closed store of user and transaction data. As such, how is one able to ensure that your new marketplace adheres to the highest standards when the users are a bunch of unknowns?

The current state of centralized marketplaces

As a partner building on the Origin platform, you will be able to access a shared data layer. All User and transaction data will be stored on the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS to allow any interested party to query it. Past listings, previous transactions and user ratings are all curated from various ecosystems and made available to you from day one. As a result, you will be able to vet new sellers or ban delinquent users before they ever interact on your platform.

Our vision for creating de-centralized marketplaces

Our vision is to promote the open and free exchange of services on the decentralized web. To do this, we built a platform that replicates much, if not all, of the functionality of third-party intermediaries on the blockchain and other distributed systems. As a developer on the Origin platform, you will be able to take advantage of the robust ecosystem that our partners have built. Thereby allowing you to easily lower one barrier to entry.

Highly Active Developer Community

As a partner of Origin, you are a instantly part of a growing community of developers. Between our active GitbHub account, Slack and Telegram, developers from all over the world are taking part to make Origin a robust platform.

In Slack, there are several channels devoted to different topics. Discussions on developing your own DApp can be handled in the #eng-app channel whereas platform performance improvements take place in #eng-protocol. General engineering questions and discussion topics can be posted in #eng-general where over 1100 people from our community will be available to help.

Lastly, if you are prefer the more traditional route, we also invite you to send any direct questions to info@originprotocol.com.

In closing, the team at the Origin Protocol wants you to be successful in your new venture. If we are able to help you move the needle a smidge then we feel like we’ve made a positive contribution to the community. While there is still much work to do on the Origin platform, our goal is to build a platform that invites other interested parties including developers and entrepreneurs to build this technology and community with us, altogether working to create the sharing economy of tomorrow. We hope you’ll join us on this exciting journey.

Be sure to join the conversation on Telegram. Get updates on our Slack. Follow us on Twitter. Dive into our Github. Hang out with us on Facebook.

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