Image courtesy @mbandf Instagram

Imagine a premium watchmaker who had been using social media channels as a primary distribution and sales venue. Their watches’ pricepoint would provide a strong incentive for forgers, some of them skilled enough to deceive even knowledgeable collectors.

The IIC: a digital representation of the item

SOMA client services could introduce the watchmaker to our Heimdall Protocol which underpins the SOMA marketplace and tracks provenance. SOMA could show the company how to onboard its timepieces into the enterprise-side SOMA portal and create an Interactive Item Card (IIC) for each (using the Heimdall Protocol, the IIC is a digital representation containing all historical records and associated documentation filed on the blockchain and organized in a logical system for easy recall). The watchmaker would soon realize that the power of the IIC surpassed their expectations: its flexibility, capacity, and ease of use could allow them to customize a validation process that cut the chance of a successful forgery to nearly zero. An additional benefit: the watch owner could have a more complete set of records than the company could previously provide — and those records would be available via a distributed network and could be passed on to successive owners of the watch.

Each watch was a work of art, unique in its creation; similarly, each IIC would contain a different set of information and media, such as:

· The exact alloy of various parts, respectively

· The precise weight and profile of the tourbillon

· How many components compose the gyroscopic carriage

· Oscillation speed to fractions of a hertz

· Detailed photographs of individual components and of each timepiece in various stages of assembly

· Video record of the respective artisan discussing the watch’s qualities while demonstrating various aspects

A bit about SOMA’s Heimdall Protocol

The Heimdall Protocol is the blockchain-based architecture on which the IIC is built. Heimdall, therefore, underpins the SOMA marketplace; it also has enterprise applications far beyond SOMA. At its most basic, the Heimdall Protocol is a patent-pending set of processes and systems by which a physical (or nonphysical) item can be represented with certainty and that representation can be transferred, appended to, timestamped with key events, and unalterably stored.

Being built on blockchain technology, the records associated with the Heimdall Protocol are nearly impossible to destroy. The blockchain is a ledger system with the records distributed globally with a node-based architecture. Like crab grass, it can repopulate from almost nothing; even if some catastrophe were to take down the entire global internet, two isolated nodes could restore the entire ledger once they were able to reconnect with one another.

Protecting key information from view

The question might arise for the watchmaker: if would-be forgers could access all these attributes on a publicly-available ledger, would this info not aid in the forging process, acting as a set of instructions on how to do their nefarious task? The answer: reproducing every single attribute successfully would be beyond the ability of all but the most elite watchmakers.

Nevertheless, for an additional layer of protection against forgery, the company could opt to shield a portion of the descriptive media behind a password-protected cloud storage address referenced by a hash on the blockchain. Even if forgers were to successfully reproduce the specifications to which they had access, the hidden descriptions would uncover the forgery.

The company could store the password in their records, but also, for ease-of-reference for the watch’s owner (or succession of owners), could engrave it strategically on the watch back in lettering so small that even the most hi-resolution macro photos would not render it legible (any jeweler, however, could easily view and transcribe it on behalf of the owner). This precaution would ensure that the protected information would never be lost to posterity.

Pre-SOMA sales and marketing

The company would have previously relied on traditional marketing and sales channels such as the following:

· Website store (usually a WordPress website with ecommerce shopping cart plugin)

· SEO efforts to drive traffic to website

· High levels of activity on social media, with links to website store

· Paid/sponsored social media posts and advertisements, linking to website store

Additionally, the company may have contracted key influencers — high-profile watch collectors with a significant following — to promote their timepieces.

All transactions would probably have funneled through their website shopping cart, and all marketing efforts would likely have driven traffic to purchase on the website. Authenticating documentation probably existed in physical form and included certificates from the watchmaking company, product specifications, and other materials. The company would mail these to the new owner upon purchase.

Distribution via retailers

A few authorized retailers may have also sold these watches from physical locations. These retailers would have required a significant percentage of each transaction to cover the overhead occasioned by a glitzy storefront in a premium retail location in the world’s most expensive cities. Each retail sale would also have brought extra administrative burden to the watchmaker.

The SOMA solution to distribution

Newly onboarded to the SOMA platform and each with its own IIC, the timepieces would enjoy immediate exposure to SOMA’s thriving community of watch aficionados who could share each watch’s respective profile with one another and could purchase right on the SOMA platform.

(An aside: the IIC and SOMA’s social marketplace)

SOMA’s marketplace innovates on the preexisting ecommerce model by integrating social media functionality backed by the immutability of blockchain. Users can provide value-added services and be automatically rewarded via ‘smart contracts’ programmed into the platform’s native currency. Such peer-to-peer services include connecting a buyer to a seller, reselling, or doing affiliate marketing on behalf of a seller.

(back to the story)

The company could also harness SOMA’s reselling feature to ‘hire’ a salesforce army of dedicated watch enthusiasts, with no PR burden and no hassle. Each resale would automatically pay the reseller according to a prior smart contract between reseller and manufacturer and pay the balance to the manufacturer. The IIC would subsequently transfer to the new owner, along with its wealth of documentation. All of which could occur with little to no intervention from humans.

Because the IIC can be featured outside of the SOMA marketplace, the watchmaker could still feature their merchandise on their own site. Now, however, sales would occur within the SOMA blockchain ecosystem — not via a Wordpress ecommerce plugin.

By adopting SOMA, the hypothetical watchmaker would have found itself with a global salesforce, multiple distribution channels, a failsafe ownership transfer process, and a secure authentication protocol. At the same time, staff would have enjoyed a massive reduction in the hours they spent on contracts, payments, human resources, legal, and other administrative overhead. Less time on paperwork, more time to make watches!

About us

On legacy ecommerce platforms, anonymous usernames and depersonalized storefronts strip trade interactions of an important social element. Additionally, buyers lack a definitive way to ensure the authenticity of items. Enter SOMA. Our Heimdall Protocol stops forgeries and counterfeiting by validating ownership and provenance history on the blockchain. Social media elements bring personalization and interaction to trade, and allow users to monetize social influence, while a rewards system incentivizes beneficial collaboration and ensures that value-adding services are compensated. Soma is a free-market ecosystem — free of market manipulation, price-fixing, gouging, and bloat.

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