Since the invention of e-commerce, a few big names have dominated the whole market. Although the innovation that was brought to the world 47 years ago, opened new horizons for the world that couldn’t be imagined before, but the overshadowing business by the big players have left the smaller corporations in darkness regarding how the system works. The domination causes the smaller businesses to lose profits and the overall innovation process slows down. CyberMiles dashed into the scene to eliminate this problem, providing the users with the Smart Contracts solutions that they seek.

CyberMiles is a decentralized blockchain protocol specifically designed and optimized for online marketplaces. The startup, which is based in Hong Kong, was initiated by 5miles, a leading peer-to-peer marketplace in the U.S.

CyberMiles is a joint effort of Dr. Lucas Lu and Dr. Michael Yuan, who met and worked previously through an investor and found the company later on. the former also happens to be the CEO of CyberMiles and was previously the co-founder and CTO of LightInTheBox (An online shopping and shipping center), not only that, but he also has the privilege of of being the first GM of Alibaba’s Taobao mobile, both of the experiences which explains his new startup. Dr. Yuan, is the chief scientist for CyberMiles who looks after all the technical matters of the firm. He’s author of multiple books related to software development and an active code committer in large Open Source projects such as Fedora, Firefox and JBoss. He is an expert on enterprise and mobile software and was a principle investigator on U.S. government-funded research projects.

CyberMiles envisions to eliminate the stereotypical approach of e-commerce, i.e. the winner takes all. They have the approach that the monopolies should collapse and the larger players of the market shouldn’t dominate the market, set prices and extract most of the profits. In short, they’re using the decentralized system to create an interactive ecosystem where everyone is invited to innovate and participate.

E-commerce Smart Contracts

The problem with blockchain is that it gets too slow due to clogging, and the options for smart contracts are limited. The real life problem faced by most people is the issue of the middle man, which might be an individual or an institution. These middle men usually are notorious because of their opaque behavior in terms of funds transfer. The market places provided by the world wide web are also too centralized for the individuals to use. The websites that provide client to client dealings are somewhat better to connect buyers and sellers, “However, these platforms are also centrally managed, running all the functions such as listings review, dispute resolution, payments, and allocation of user traffic. As a result of centralizing all these functions and limiting payment solutions to a handful of providers, the total costs of conducting business can be as high as 15% of the merchandise value,” the white paper states.

Other problems include the identity and privacy management on smart contracts applications. The problems stated, and the usual others on different blockchains required a new blockchain platform to be designed specifically inclined toward e-commerce and smart contracts.

CyberMiles aims to provide a decentralized platform for users, which is concerned with the field of e-commerce. The main idea is the provision of smart contracts which eliminates human intervention. Unlike the centralized solutions where the business conduction requires a fair value of money, this platform would be based on the distributed ledger.

Talking to the Coinpick.today team, CyberMiles said,

Given that the market size for e-commerce applications is more than $1 trillion, marketplace functions currently centralized (like dispute resolutions) can be done, via CyberMiles, in a more efficient, cost-effective, decentralized manner, powered by the communities’ own incentivized members.

The centralized platforms like Amazon and Walmart are based on central servers who monitor all the payments and cut a fraction of their payments for their business, CyberMiles eliminates the need for a central moderator and provides a transparent platform where the assets are secure and the identity of the users are kept private during smart contracts. They added,

The CyberMiles network will manage user identity and reputation, records credit history, and facilitates financial transactions (such as peer-to-peer payments). It does all without a central data store or clearing house, hence ensuring privacy and safety.

CyberMiles also envisions to provide a better platform which has minimal scaling issues and can conduct as many transactions as possible, without clogging probabilities. To improve blockchain, they provide a platform similar to Ethereum blockchain, only better. The problems faced by Ethereum scaling are brought out of the equation allowing users to transact without the network slowing down. They plan to incentivize the community members which would, “..strengthen the participation and creativity of marketplace participants while at the same time allowing the network to become more dynamic and scalable.”

The platform would allow developers to build dApps on the CyberMiles blockchain, which would be powered by CyberMiles’ tokens, very similar to the Ethereum blockchain system. The customized smart contracts templates buit by CyberMiles ensure ease for the new businesses being deployed on this blockchain. With the implementation of this technology, the issues related to e-commerce are solved, efficiency is improved, and the relationship between sellers and buyers are strengthened.

The TestNet was launched ahead of schedule in March 2018, and it was successful to conduct 2,000 transactions per second (TPS). Once the MainNet is deployed (Expected to launch later this year, consistent with the anticipated milestones as of the token offering.) it would be able to bear 10,000 TPS, beating the competitions in the market. Even VISA is able to conduct 6,000 TPS.

The main demand of businesses and their users in e-commerce is safety of funds transfer. Recognizing this, CyberMiles identifies safety of funds transfer as a fundamental feature. They have implemented a protective system with two services namely pre-recovery and post-recovery. Pre-recovery would detect suspicious activity on its blockchain and would block it automatically. Post-recovery is a system that supports the recovery of lost funds through a community consensus mechanism.

One of the best features that grabs the eye of most users is the minimal transaction fee, as in most cases of centralized e-commerce systems, the transaction and network fees are huge. The blockchain protocol, that CyberMiles is adopting, is indeed the future. As stated by the white paper, it would have the following attributes;

• To support a large library of commerce-related Smart Business Contracts that power decentralization of processes

• To manage user identity & transaction data privately & safely, while enabling new transactions & settlements among network participants. Starting with 5miles’ 14+ million user base, this access to user data will be a key driver for other e-commerce and consumer finance platforms to be built on CyberMiles.

• To utilize a delegated-PoS (“Proof-of-Stake”) consensus engine to support tens of thousands of transactions per second (“TPS”), hence resolving latency issues of existing chains.

Working and use cases of CyberMiles’ Smart Contracts

CyberMiles provides the users with a platform with efficient Smart Business Contracts. For a record history, CyberMiles blockchain securely records a user’s identity, credit history, reputation and transactions. Credit history, transactions e.t.c. are associated with public keys of users, while the private information of a person is kept secure.

Once the offers are made and accepted, the clients enter a smart business contract (A software on CyberMiles blockchain). To ensure safety, after the users enter the smart contracts, their private information is sent in which contain their digital signatures to prove their identity.

CyberMiles themselves showed a few use cases of their smart contracts through their YouTube channel.

Why blockchain?

CyberMiles envisions to improve the scaling issue faced by Ethereum blockchain providing a faster, safer and smarter version, which is also free as no network fee is required like in other marketplace ventures. The transaction fee is also very minimal.

CyberMiles further explained why they preferred blockchain for their project,

CyberMiles is looking to improve on the current generation of blockchain networks to better handle big-data applications. We also are working with third party e-commerce platforms, including 5miles, its long-term collaboration partner, to develop “DApps” that will be running on the CyberMiles protocol. 5miles is expected to migrate more than 14 million U.S.-based e-commerce users to the CyberMiles blockchain.

CyberMiles’ recent achievements and future insights

Recently, CyberMiles introduced their own programming language for Smart Contracts, named Lily. The roots of Lily lie in the Solidity language, the evolved form consists of a dynamically-extensible language, a compiler, and a virtual machine run time.

We are glad to officially release our programing language #Lity✍️, coupled with CyberMiles’ Virtual Machine (#CVM) ????️!

They will enrich CyberMiles’ blockchain by providing indispensable tools for creating Smarter Smart Contracts.https://t.co/n7O9ydezKa pic.twitter.com/MycGKYOZjR — CyberMiles (@cybermiles) July 27, 2018

The programming language offers more features relating to security, performance and schedulability.

The roadmap that shows the financial standing and company’s overall progress is shown on their website.

The MainNet is set to release in Q4 of this year consistent with the coin offerings.

Token Sales and ICO

CMT is the official token for CyberMiles. Much like ETH on Ethereum blockchain, it can be used for all the transactions for the Smart Contracts and for the applications built on top of CyberMiles’ blockchain. The difference between the ETH tokens and CMT is that CMT is based solely for e-commerce purposes. The validators on the network would be incentivized with tokens much like how it happens in any other mining.

Regarding the ICO, CyberMiles told Coinpick,

CyberMiles’ ICO, last fall raised $30 million from participants in 110 countries. Completion of the platform is being funded by the ICO proceeds.

The ICO of CyberMiles is rated to be great as it raised a huge amount in a small span of time, it also shows huge potential as the social activity on the platform is very positive.

The question that lies is that what will the future bring? Will the MainNet be able to offer the kind of fast, secure, smart and free network that they promise to provide, with a scalability factor that allows over 10,000 transaction a second? The claims seem exciting and it is expected that startups like CyberMiles would bring revolutionary changes to blockchain.