Earlier this month we announced the small step of supporting editable and multi-unit listings in our Marketplace DApp. Now we are even prouder to announce support for homesharing. You can now create listings on our Marketplace DApp similar to Airbnb with a calendar showing pricing and availability.

On the technology front, the more exciting news is that the underlying protocol can be used to express all kinds of fractional usage verticals. We will be rolling out full DApp support for more of these in the coming months.

You may never have heard the term “fractional usage marketplace,” but you’ve certainly used one. Think of an Airbnb rental: you aren’t buying a house, you’re renting the right to use it for some fraction of time. Similar sharing economy marketplaces allow people to rent out storage space in their garage, rent out parking spaces, or rent out venues for corporate events. Additionally, services like TaskRabbit allow people to “rent out” hours of work from their day.

This class of marketplaces have been incredibly successful, some with billion dollar valuations. But all come with hidden costs. Recently my colleague Jon Hearty wrote about the excessive fees charged by middlemen for vacation rentals. Today’s announcement from Origin is the first step in cutting out these fees, allowing vacation rental transactions with no middlemen.

For myself, as a long time developer and entrepreneur, it feels like magic to capture the essence of multiple marketplaces with an open standard. Imagine if TaskRabbit could have been created from Airbnb with just a JSON specification! The Ethereum blockchain and IPFS provide the decentralized database to store the marketplace data, and Origin provides the protocol “languages” to allow buyers and sellers to communicate and transact.

We will continue to innovate on the underlying protocols and expand to support still more verticals. Please contact us if you have an idea of which fractional usage verticals we should support next. Or if you would like to develop the standard yourself, please get in touch with our development team on Discord and submit a PR to our Github repo.

For now, if you have a house or apartment that you would like to rent out, please head to dapp.originprotocol.com, select “Create a Listing”, and then select “Housing” under “For Rent.”

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