In AuctionWeb’s first year they had 750,000 auctions listed on their marketplace. This led to a network effect that grew to 2 million in the second year which eventually grew into the e-commerce giant we all know today as eBay. With the advent of the blockchain, we feel that Syscoin offers a paradigm shift in e-commerce – an advantage that will let us compete with current e-commerce platforms and eventually replace them by removing the centralized policy makers.

Vendors and consumers are currently susceptible to the centralized decisions of middlemen. Some of the policies made by these middlemen are draconian and predatory. Syscoin and the Syscoin Blockmarket platforms can minimize or completely remove the dependency on middlemen because of blockchain technology. This empowers merchants and buyers to freely trade without the limitations imposed by these middlemen and to settle disputes without depending on these policies.

Merchant Pilot Program Update

Our Merchant Pilot Program continues to attract the savvy retailers and wholesalers that see the need to save on fees and to reduce their Cost-Of-Doing-Business (CODB). We have been working behind-the-scenes with some of these merchants and will announce them once we finalize details. Today, we are excited to announce two merchants with whom we have been working together to figure out how to introduce their inventory into the Syscoin decentralized marketplace. Combined, they introduce enough SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) to put us above and beyond our target of 750,000 SKUs for our first year of business after releasing Blockmarket Web. Both of these merchants are also Syscoin investors and are fully incentivized to make the platform succeed.

Partsavatar.ca is an automotive parts giant that will onboard up to 1 million SKUs. They are currently targeting the Canadian consumer market, Syscoin will help them to expand globally. With 5 retail outlets across the country, they have quickly become a recognized Canadian brand in auto-parts. Being headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada, they are close to the west coast Blockchain Foundry team who are helping them get their inventory listed on the Syscoin blockchain.

Dangstons.se is an international marketplace based in the Eurozone that offers international shipping and delivery. They have an incredibly diverse product catalog, multiple store fronts in different languages, and they wish to list more than 500,000 unique SKUs to the Syscoin marketplace. In order to accomplish this, we had to completely re-think portions of the Syscoin core to allow merchants to add more than a few offers at a time. Through our Merchant Pilot Program work and requirements driven from Dangstons.se, we have added new features into Syscoin 2.2:

Shipping information can be tied to individual sales of offers and shipping costs are now built into the purchase flow.

Support for vendor-customized product options.

Up to 10,000 offers per block (per minute) can be added/edited across the network.

Dangston.se currently use a mix of Prestashop, Odoo, Amazon reseller channels, and Shopify. We will be developing e-commerce plugins to help them connect their current e-commerce software suites to leverage the Syscoin decentralized marketplace engine while keeping inventory, prices and more unified. These additional features will be developed over 2018, but as a first step we will on-board Dangston.se listings into our marketplace with the launch of Blockmarket Web.

Development Update

With so many merchants signed up for our Merchant Pilot Program, we need to prioritize development in areas that will benefit the most, first. This means focusing development on the 2.2 core product.

We are leveraging the knowledge we gained from developing the off-chain anchoring technology for alias data, which was released as part of our Blockmarket 1.1 Identities, to also store offers and certificates off-chain prior to the Web release. We will apply this technology when importing offers for the merchants in the Merchant Pilot Program. The required information needed for filtering offers and looking them up quickly and efficiently remains on-chain to achieve the best of both worlds; a scalable offer which can hold markup and long descriptions as well as the ability to quickly find the offer you are looking for in millions of listings. Now that our decentralized MongoDB indexer is integrated into Syscoin core we can figure out what data is truly needed on the blockchain and what data can be stored off-chain to achieve a flexible data store linked to an on-chain service. To meet demands of our users of up to 30,000 transactions per minute, we scaled up the blocksize to 10MB. This will allow for VISA/Mastercard level scalability for on-chain settlement of transactions while at the same time allowing for the smart contract functionality of identities, certificates, and the decentralized marketplace.

We are strapping ourselves in for a busy few months leading up to the Web release. We would like to thank the patient investors who see the need for what we are doing and believe that we will achieve our milestones. We aim to be the hardest working team in the industry and will not stop until we have completed our goals. When Blockmarket Web gets released and we acquire funding for Blockchain Foundry, both our work and our development speed greatly increase as we ramp up to manage the influx of users and community. The focus then becomes growing the marketplace both on the consumer and merchant side as well as migrating to the next-generation of the Syscoin platform.

As leaders in this industry, we will continue to push the boundaries between what exists today and what is possible tomorrow.