Public Market

@daviswbaer it’s an entirely different business model based around a token. The protocol itself lives within a nonprofit foundation, and gets supported by the token itself. These new business models are pretty revolutionary, actually!

@kjer Sounds interesting :)

@codyfitzpatrick No, there are no monthly fees for sellers. No commissions. No listing fees. As KJ said in an above answer, it’s an entirely different business model based around a token. The protocol itself lives within a nonprofit foundation, and gets supported by the token itself. Stay tuned for updates and the release of our product and white paper by signing up at publicmarket.io or joining our Telegram community https://t.me/publicmrkt

@codyfitzpatrick Good insights. To answer your question, no -- our tokens function as rewards points, and we don't have plans to use them to charge a monthly fee. We're building the business model around the token itself. Exactly how it works is somewhat in depth for this response, so I encourage you to sign up for our white paper when it's released (publicmarket.io). In the meantime, Chris Dixon has a nice post investigating how these new network models can work: https://medium.com/@cdixon/crypt...

Thank you both (@wubledoo & @kjer) for the informative responses. I look forward to reading the whitepaper when it's released. I'll brush up on Chris Dixon's post in the meantime. Wishing you all the best with this venture!

@codyfitzpatrick Looks like KJ and I are both answering at the same time! Giving you a lot to read! :)

@kjer @codyfitzpatrick Thank you! We look forward to knocking your socks off!

@raul_gasteazoro glad you think so! thanks so much for your support.

@vishal_nema it’s actually somewhat like both. We’ll have our own marketplace like Amazon (will launch shortly at public.market), but we’re also building a protocol with public inventory, reputation, and product metadata that anyone can build their own marketplace or “storefront” on top of without having to build up two sided network effects. You can think of it like an open architecture for ecommerce, or a “Commercial Commons” if you will.

@vishal_nema this article helps to explain it better: https://medium.com/public-market...

@kjer How about applying that same idea, but to Simbi itself to create a bunch of sub-unions of workers that function like small businesses?The tokenization is definitely a key economic factor to motivate people working together and contributing their best to make the small business successful (so that everyone in that small business could benefit)

@kjer This sounds really interesting!!

@giannidalerta Good question -- it's a fundamentally different approach. Open Bazaar optimizes for privacy and full decentralization. Public Market is optimizing for mass market adoption -- it's designed to both fit seamlessly into professional marketplace merchants' workflows (hence the large number of SKUs we will have at launch, approximately how many Jet had) and to feel like a normal eCommerce product to a consumer. Buyers don't need to download a software client, and they can check out with their credit card, they get their goods quickly and conveniently, etc. In other words, we are not requiring consumers to change their behavior in order to participate. In addition, because the protocol is commission free, buyers can make up the difference of what would have been paid in commissions in the form of Patron tokens. Another key difference is that our protocol can be built on top of by any marketplace application, not just our own storefront. We're aggregating the key datasets that private marketplaces keep proprietary (inventory, reputation, catalog metadata), and making those Public and shared resources.

@wubledoo so based on this, why do you need a blockchain? what are you guys tokenizing and why?

@giannidalerta There are multiple ways in which we do/will use the blockchain. The buyer rewards system itself is tokenized. We also will leverage the blockchain for the Public Reputation element of our protocol. Stay tuned to our Medium channel, as our CTO will be publishing more detail on our current progress and roadmap in the next 2 weeks' time. https://medium.com/public-market

@vlucas Fair -- i appreciate your skepticism and think it's really important, in the blockchain space particularly. I'm actually surprised to be on Product Hunt myself! We got hunted because we announced what we've been working on on Medium yesterday, it's worth a read. But we haven't launched our marketplace product yet, and that's when we really should be on here. As to your question, we are both building a platform for developers to use to create eCommerce marketplaces (without having to get their own inventory, reputation data, or product metadata) AND we are building our own flagship eCommerce marketplace on top of that platform. Our flagship marketplace will be at public.market and host millions of products from hundreds of professional sellers. Sellers want to use it because it gives that additional sales at potentially better margins, as well as reduces their long-term reliance on private marketplaces that charge higher and higher fees and ultimately compete with them. Buyers will want to use us because eliminating commissions and replacing them with rewards tokens makes their products significantly cheaper. But don't just believe what I'm saying -- wait for our product to be released! Hopefully we'll be hunted again at that time and you can prove it for yourself.

@vlucas We can certainly understand the skepticism-- there's a lot of hype around blockchain these days and only a few companies to date have really delivered on the promise. We are indeed building a protocol/platform that includes public inventory, reputation, and product metadata so that anyone can build their own marketplace or “storefront” on top without needing to build up two sided network effects. You can think of it like an open architecture for ecommerce, or a “Commercial Commons” if you will. We are *also* very soon be launching our own marketplace, similar to Amazon or Walmart.com (at https://public.market). You can think of our storefront as "Customer Zero" for the protocol, allowing us to "run water through the pipes" and ensure that we are perfecting it for those that adopt it to power their own storefronts.

@vlucas Looks like KJ and I are both answering at the same time! Giving you a lot to read! :)

@kristofertm 1) in the short run, our marketplace (which will be launching soon at https://public.market) will broker all fraud resolution. In the longer run, we will be standing up a public insurance marketplace to make this a competitive market as well. You can see a teaser about that in this post: https://medium.com/public-market... 2) Like other marketplaces, "free" shipping is often either built into the price of the item or subsidized by the seller. We expect that competition between vendors will lead toward more subsidy, less built-in over time. And we've got some strategic partnerships in the works to help give our sellers inexpensive shipping options. Follow us on Telegram (https://t.me/publicmrkt) or Twitter @PublicMrkt to stay up to date on our progress!

@kristofertm Great questions! Our white paper will cover this more in-depth, but I'll give the high-level here: 1) The actual dispute resolution process works the same as it does on private marketplaces -- support claims are initially routed to the seller, where they are almost always resolved. In the cases where they are not, they get escalated to the dispute resolution provider. This is where the difference comes in: instead of there only being one dispute resolution provider, we've created competition at this layer of the marketplace stack. Dispute providers can compete on cost and service to ensure that there is economic efficiency in the dispute services. Importantly in our system, sellers bear the cost of their own bad behaviors. Each seller receives a reputation score, and the better their score is, the less they have to pay for dispute resolution (think of it like fraud insurance). A good seller can get those costs down to near negligible, whereas a 'bad' seller may ultimately become 'uninsurable'. 2) See below for my answer to Alireza about how "free shipping works.

@kristofertm Looks like KJ and I are both answering at the same time! Giving you a lot to read! :)