Open, fair, and competitive markets are essential to a thriving economy. Today’s marketplace platforms, however, are unhealthy, unfair, and anticompetitive. Buyers lose, sellers lose, and society loses — only the marketplace owner wins. Public Market is using blockchain to decentralize and transform the eCommerce marketplace business model and create the conditions for fair and affordable online commerce.

Ever since the early days of civilization, societies have understood the need for a “commercial commons” — spaces where the trade of goods can be freely conducted for the benefit of all.

The Agora of Athens was built to facilitate the free exchange of goods.

In ancient Greece, the grand Agora stood at the heart of Athens, providing buyers and sellers from across the empire with a place to meet and conduct their sales. Across the globe and throughout the eons, such “public markets” have been a hallmark of prosperous societies. Governments have historically provided the basic infrastructure as a public good, understanding that open trade is vital to the maintenance of a healthy local economy.

The internet represented a new moment in the history of commerce. With the advent of eCommerce, markets could be global for every consumer, promising to make the buying and selling of goods better and cheaper. While the internet has fulfilled its promise to increase the breadth of goods that consumers have access to, it has also given rise to a dangerous side effect: some of the largest and most powerful commercial middlemen the world has ever known.

Marketplace platforms like Amazon filled an important role in the early evolution of online commerce: connecting buyers and sellers and protecting them against fraud. Today, however, they have become extraordinarily lucrative monopolies, charging ever-increasing fees on the sale of goods they generally never touch while raking in tens of billions in profit.

Here are some stats:

The big three of Amazon, eBay, and Walmart constitute over 60% of online commerce.

Amazon alone will control over 50% of all online sales in the next 3 years.

Amazon alone accounted for 70% of growth in US online retail last year.

The large majority of these marketplaces’ sales come from independent (“third party”) merchants, who bear all inventory risk and fulfillment costs.

With Amazon becoming a de facto monopoly, online commerce is effectively controlled by a single corporation whose sole responsibility is to its shareholders. This means that they must maximize the profit from each transaction, amounting to a “Monopoly Tax” that puts many independent sellers out of business while increasing the price that consumers pay for a growing percentage of their purchases.

In the blockchain community, enormous intellectual energy is spent on devising ways to replace centralized monopolistic companies with decentralized alternatives built on top of transparent, open source protocols. Despite the promise of the technology and the size of the eCommerce market ($450 billion in the US alone), surprisingly few teams have yet to take on the most obvious of all centralized, monopolistic middlemen.

I’ve spent the past 15 years of my entrepreneurial career working on issues of systematic economic disempowerment — first in the broken economies of war zones and refugee camps, and later by creating new economic structures via alternative currencies. Yet each of these initiatives has ignored the real elephant in the room: the fact that in today’s economy, a select few unbelievably large monopolies have become more powerful than governments. They use that power to suppress wages, extract rents, and even control government policy. Amazon is the king of them all.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve built a team of some of the best entrepreneurs, operators, and technical minds in eCommerce to answer this essential question: How can we use blockchain to eliminate commissions from eCommerce markets in a way that is immediately adoptable by a mass consumer audience?