This session got more into the competitive landscape, understanding Amazon business model more, and overview of our positioning.
Live chat history
Alex — Today at 5:59 PM
Didn’t purse use amazon? Did people fulfill their own purchases?
Was the unit economics of buying and selling handled by the people using it?
jlaurentum — Today at 6:01 PM
Purse had a merchant system, but that was scrapped. It ended up being Amazon fulfillment only
The reason why the merchants program was scrapped, i believe, was because of all the scams, which is what we’re trying to avoid by having a staking token
Alex — Today at 6:02 PM
That’s a pretty important detail. @Michelini a MVM might not need a logistics system, but unless we want to handle the fulfilment escrow ourselves (helping buyers and sellers handle last mile delivery with fiat), we need logistics providers that operate with crypto.
Alex — Today at 6:03 PM
Yeah, that makes sense. But we’d still need to match quality and logistics of amazon (assuming we want to hit the same level of convenience). This might be a good opportunity, because I don’t know any web3 logstics provider.
I think this is a large risk to assume the marketplace can handle themselves.
jlaurentum — Today at 6:10 PM
Let’s just say we want to be open and democratic, instead of being “the opposite of Amazon”. I guess being open and delocratic would imply some trust in the ability of the marketplace being able to regulate itself. The old connundrum of capitslism versus communism (centrally planned economies)
Alex — Today at 6:21 PM
We have to match Amazon, but better. Remember its not our job to create all the axuilliary services needed to run a markeplace successfully. BUT it is our job to make a token (and community) that empowers people to solve their problem themselves.
jlaurentum — Today at 6:23 PM
I agree with that Alex- giving people the tools to solve the problems themselves
Full transcript
(00:03) means that like you know we had been thinking about the the system from the from the point of view of the marketplace because we’re building a Marketplace and so when we’re thinking about like prioritizing a Marketplace it’s like saying okay the marketplace is the primary you know the system has to exist with marketplaces and so the marketplace is the primary actor and all token flows flow through the marketplace to vendors right as opposed to like if we have a vendor first you know a vendor Centric mindset then maybe the tokens
(00:40) are going directly to the vendors irrespective of the marketplaces they choose to to use right and so it’s like prioritizing the actions and and the needs of the vendors over the the actions and needs of the marketplace or at least putting them on the same playing field right otherwise we’re just creating you know like a bunch of hierarchies of of marketplaces that then dictate their terms to vendors and the vendors can go you know like like think about it like free roaming peoples versus or like Network State versus
(01:11) nation states right if again and this is just my understanding on other people’s may be different I would love to hear people’s people’s ideas on this but like if we prioritize marketplaces We’re reinstantiate a nation state model where like the you know the authority flows through the marketplace and the marketplaces have you know operate their own like of control whereas like you know vendors being able to come together and like maybe make their own Marketplace or or or things like that is
(01:38) something that that should be allowed you should it shouldn’t have to flow through a Marketplace I think I I see well I agree with you I mean prioritizing vendors sounds like a great decentralization force but wouldn’t it be more complex for vendors I mean acquiring the token and and all that I mean you can’t you kind of want to have le some Simplicity for vendors to use but of course that comes along with a cost in in centralization right well think that’s go ahead John might not have to choose one or the other we could
(02:12) design it so that marketplaces could like stand between vendors and the protocol or if vendors choose they can go directly to the protocol so that’s also a possibility doesn’t have to be all or one yeah okay agreed and ALS the last expain that I’m talking yeah I canar James I can hear you you’re very quiet though okay I can talk louder again no I I was so happy that we left the last economics call like discussing the vender versus Marketplace you know sort of discussion because you know Bo and I
(02:50) had the lectur of meeting in person several times and it seemed like at least to me that the end goal right was like marketplaces for the People by the people you know by the people who are actually interacting with the marketplace and owning the marketplace in a truly Democratic and so you know philosophically it seems like we want to avoid becoming something like Amazon we want to avoid becoming something like a centralized Marketplace it’s not to say that there isn’t a role for like that initial player and I think
(03:25) it’s determining that relationship that the marketplace instantiator has you know in order to make funds you know while balancing that against you know the sort of prolific problems that we see with the centralization of like ownership marketplaces right and so I we we have two very different roles and I think like part of this is actually balanced with the tokenomics like the sort of team sport where vendors in marketplaces are almost forced to work together because they need to have a good tour both in reputation
(04:04) as well as like actual Revenue right but at the same time they’re playing entirely and I don’t think the marketplace itself should be responsible for the governance I think that should be vendors but the marketplace sh should have like potentially different roles you know in terms of what they can and yeah not not trying to throw us in a tangent here but I think it’s a a critical conversation I think we should be valua the vendors the most right because that’s ultimately our roll out stage com up right especially for our
(04:42) first iteration it’s not going to be Market creator of focus you guys ever read the sovereign individual it talks about that in the end when the when the individual is prioritized over the nation states Nations States will will be in a mad scramble so to speak to to cater to each individual and attract through good tax policies and so forth powerful and Wealthy individuals so I think that that being said I think that if if you allow for several marketplaces to exist and and you know and and tokens to to flow
(05:22) through the marketplace you can somehow give some sort of I don’t know what voting power to individuals then maybe they could you know bring their business to any Marketplace and you’d be prioritizing individuals over Market places so to speak yeah so I think you know I’m going through the white paper and I’ve been trying to or the light paper right now I posted a chat about this like I’m going to wrap this up tonight at least the first version of it but you know we we have an opportunity
(05:58) through decentralization to really lean into that sort of trust ltic component because you don’t actually need a a centralized body in order to make effectual Democratic decisions like you can guarantee it on the pratic level right and so we can actually create a system which I’m sure there are some ways that it could be messed up but it’s it’s truly potentially Democratic and we have to try to break it but like we we can truly have a trustless system where vendors can truly have a democratic representation
(06:38) and shared ownership on the platform that they operate with and I suppose my concern right because we we we’ve been talking about marketplaces or market makers or Market creators right and we still haven’t really defined what their role is here I I think originally when it popped up the whole idea of like having someone being a market Creator was purely because we wanted someone to stake in order to create Marketplace is it is that correct like was it just a a staking reason uh why we would have a marketpl why we would have someone who
(07:23) is responsible for creating creating what for someone who’s responsible for what was that creating a Marketplace someone responsible for creating a Marketplace I mean yeah we we essentially when when I first joined it was two roles we had the vendors and then we had the people who were instantiating these marketplaces the Assumption for both was that they were staking some tokens in order to exist in either Ro well I think honestly the vendor was always the vendor was the stake or it kind of is evolved to maybe the
(08:02) marketplace happen to stake or or pay fees to become a Marketplace but the original concept was a vendor’s stake to have skin in the game if they disappear from the ecosystem that’s their collateral has that changed there was always there was there was a couple calls where there was some confusion of what staking meant because there’s the escrow escrow yeah escrow is the shorter term but but we still feel like it’s necessary always because it’s even a month after there could be after sales
(08:35) issues even though they receive the package there could be quality problems or other issues so there has to be longer term relationship guys could could something be created where where that would be a flexible question like in some marketplaces it would be the marketplace staking the the amounts and in other marketplaces it would be the vendors doing the staking I don’t know why the marketplace would take that risk I mean if if the vendors are are Bad actors they would then be liable well that would depend on the
(09:08) reputation of the vendors too I mean it could be done with certain vendors I mean to me it never was different never changed in my mind it was always a vendor had to lock up funds to be a I mean we could try the idea of we have no lock up but the buyer would see they have no lockups they would take that risk you know maybe we can make it we we never thought about how much to lock up John yeah we we never really never discussed how much the the the the marketing conversation chat and Discord that I brought up is like price estimates are
(09:45) actually qu essentially important for a lot of these discussions as well like how much the vendors should have to lock up even on a transaction the transaction basis especially there first right before we get bigger is predicated on our cost estim right should be well I don’t think we ever just said there would be just a fixed amount flat was always going to be some kind of a variable based based on volume based on reputation not not not not not fix or flat it’s it’s it’s going to become more nuanced just like when we
(10:24) talked about the Big R right we’re going to nuance and like Naro in and part of this is actually going to be like Hano right we’re going to have a lot of answers to the question when we actually launch Marketplace and actually receive the cost in a different way but you know that’s that’s a very important question to be able to answer one for the marketing point of view that that I was saying before but two you know for General tokenomics three for like that sort of like esro like we can have a we assume right now as a team
(11:01) sort of one toone parody between or maybe maybe different maybe it’s more than one to one parody between the vendor and the buyer for a specific items that vendor messes up you know it’s not just a refund it’s a refund but if we have no way of estimating the the cost you know for like a specific item then we have no way of coming up with that isn’t isn’t that like really important you know like there there are so many components to like an e-commerce platform like I mean the volume’s a
(11:40) little bit low on your side and I’m trying to write it down so I make sure I hear it all but do you mind just paraphrasing wait this point is again he he he said yeah yeah oh sorry go no no he was just saying that in order to like for the amount that’s going to be locked we should know what the vendor selling and how much the buyer is also risking well the idea is they could St there should be some of there should be some sort of functionality to like automate knowing how much the value is for the product
(12:15) being sold so that the vendor is responsible for that well a vendor would post the price so like yeah the price way that we had this that we’ve been thinking about this before is that like a vendor takes a certain amount of token and that has like a proportional some proportional relationship with the amount that they’re able to lock in escrow at any given time and so like and that can be augmented by reputation that’s like sort of the the rough sketch of the idea right and so if you’re saying then we need a way to
(12:53) oriz and find a live price like in order for that functionality to exist Oracle to tell us what the value of the token is yes but I don’t I don’t understand your question beyond that yeah yeah yeah so it’s it’s quite a bit more literal than that it’s our ability to estimate costs like again I shared this chat and the the marketing team you can see it right there like why Amazon justifies its referral fee right which is that 6 to 45% some of that is storage especially for like price your items part of that
(13:32) is category I mean you know obviously they’re like a cash per money business they want to make a profit that’s not our initial roll out strategy but at the end of the day do we have any way of estimating cost for the actual shipping storage you know vendor component for like any of this business because so I mean there’s that is that is very important there’s a lot to it and I don’t know maybe I feel like this shouldn’t be dis in this call but we can go through it now where we’re not going
(14:03) to be doing Logistics internally we’re not handling Logistics there’s lots of marketplaces that don’t I mean most marketplaces don’t do Logistics maybe Amazon is more of an exception that does Logistics and actually you don’t need to use their Logistics you can use your own Logistics there’s FBA and there’s fbm so even on Amazon you can opt to not use their Logistics that’s just an additional service that they charge for and they prioritize but you do not need to use their own logistic solution so we
(14:35) are not going to have our own network of warehouses around the world or around the us to start with and we’re going to be more like a eBay model or other models that the customer the seller says they have a product and it can ship from here to there in x amount of time for X costs and people buy that and then that vendor ships it to them that that’s that’s does that I mean most Mar eBay does that most marketplaces do that why not leave the estimate the cost estimating to the vender I mean for a given product if a
(15:10) vendor has a more competitive cost estimation then Shoppers would go to that vendor and that’s it you know the idea is to have several competing I mean I think most of these things are sorted out by by competition in the marketplace yeah it adds extra work for the buyer it adds extra work for the buyer like I don’t know nobody here’s bought off eBay or Etsy or something you have to look at the shipping of that seller and you read the shipping on top of the product and then people get yeah it’s not as nice of an experience as
(15:43) Amazon but many marketplaces have the vendor just saying their shipping and fulfillment fees and that’s added to the price so let’s say a vendor has $10,000 worth of current transactions and their token amounts only worth 10,000 what what would happen then so they have to purchase more tokens to the concept is to make it as transparent it’s transparent so hopefully would even show on the listing of the seller profile but it would show to everybody in the ecosystem this person has $10,000 in sales and they have $10,000 in
(16:25) outstanding orders in the last 30 days this person’s a high risk if you buy from them you know we could make it totally just Market driven we don’t even have to have like a requirement we the buyer could just decide this this seller has got $50,000 outstanding orders and only got $5,000 in collateral that means if he goes bankrupt or disappears I’m only going to get five 10% of my money back if it’s divided out to the 10 $50,000 outstanding orders it’s basically like a variable so when we discussed this we
(16:57) even thought that some sellers might want to lock up more money to to show that they’re a more reliable actor in the ecosystem they locked up $100,000 then the buyer might feel more comfortable because this person has a lot more to lose if they cheat me versus somebody locked up $50 or zero that person might not look as trustworthy because they have no lockup it doesn’t make we can we could do it that way yeah go ahead we could do it that way or we could just prevent them from from making a new order like at at a certain
(17:28) collateralization ratio we can do it either way yep sorry part of this is my fault I’m trying to write the quite different so maybe that this isn’t strictly tokenomics I I I did actually want to focus this tokenomics well on the value from the self-governance point of view I think we’ve neglected governance you know from like a vendor focused vendor centc specific Point View and I I think if we have a limited hour we should focus on that but we can work through you know the rest of this later yeah I
(18:09) mean but really I suppose I mean the concept I I think that’s more important what we’re trying at least I believe what we’re trying to do is we’re actually completely inverse of Amazon the Amazon model is to take over the whole supply chain and centralize it all inside their one company and their company servers and their their customer support which is already not sustainable PE you know I don’t know about buyers definitely sellers we’re trying to make it totally transparent where you know I
(18:38) don’t know if we can do it in this current model but we can make like turn your garage into a 3pl turn your maybe a hose in in Venezuela could use some excess capacity to start holding some boxes for people that want to sell in Venezuela you know it’s it’s it’s to to kind of open up the whole supply chain and and I believe Martin and his their protocol ideas is similar we want to allow entrepreneurs and small businesses to BU keep their services whereas Amazon’s killing logistics companies is killing
(19:07) it’s trying to course save money for everybody but it’s it’s just trying to do everything themsel internally we’re trying to let everything be external Plug and Play like plug in logistics plug in different services and and and transparently allow people to see the the quality of that person’s service like a Uber or a a ctoc model vendors as well as service providers whether they’re Logistics QC shipping so Mike I I threw the Proto of the light paper ins when when people are flooding around
(19:46) they can look at this and I I put it here like we can change this after the call and it’s certainly not finished it will be finished tonight that said yes I think vendor Centric is is kind of the point that we should drill into because we are trying to be like you said Mike the opposite of Amazon right anything within to economics anything within governance anything within supply chain anything that falls within that category should be the opposite of Amazon right and I think Mike again to your point that you
(20:28) said you told me you would like a negative well I think we’re using a token to offset it or or or yeah I think we’re trying to offset we’re trying to bootstrap this Market with our token right like that’s kind of one of the benefits of web 3 in a way is you can bootstrap liquidity or bootstrap Commerce or transactions by by by that you know by by the token incentives to to start the network effect yeah so that said people are looking at the dock now but I think what would be most healthy for this call as
(21:04) well as for me for like the white paper that I’m writing is focusing on the utility composition for low token assuming One Singular token you know not any specific for governance he jimes sorry this is Alex can I jump in with something quickly yep yep so so first of all awesome the light paper version is of working bre even I’ll dive into this but there’s just one thing I want to clarify Mike and and that is are we doing the opposite of Amison I think that’s a pretty bad pitch when it comes to to what it is that
(21:43) we’re trying to do because we don’t want to sacrifice convenience we don’t want to sacrifice the aspect of price competitiveness we don’t want to sacrifice the aspect of quality of search and product what what we do want to fix is obviously some of the centralized setup here but but I don’t see it at all that’s doing the opposite of Amazon we we don’t we have the thesis that we can match what Amazon is doing and better by using a decentralized model isn’t that what we trying I guess
(22:16) maybe I’m using a word by opposite but we’re trying to do a A decentralized or a trans open open Amazon versus a closed Amazon the data by definition the core difference one of the core differences is the data the data is all on chain and public to buy sell I mean that’s a very core critical difference that I can’t see Amazon entering this ecosystem willingly to do right the data is transparent the maybe opposite is the wrong word because of course Amazon does do things very well but the point is
(22:48) open and transparent and and welcome yeah and and I think we should I mean given that we that we have a governance token the governance token is the assumption that the open Community can serve its own Market better by using this token right so they can fix the problems that’s currently present in Amazon but not dramatically change what’s working I mean it’s like the old saying goes right if it’s not broken then you know I fix it and and yeah we we we you know I just think it’s pretty important that when we
(23:21) speak about the specificity of what we’re doing we have identified a very specific problem in Amazon that is you know the justice system which we now actively are trying to bridge using this open governance token right and so we we invite Community to participate but not at the sacrifice of what Amon is already doing well and that that I think is going to be a challenge right may I point something out coming coming from Pur about how how broken it Amazon is exactly I mean because it is broken it and it’s not and by not being open and
(23:55) decentralized it has become unsustainable in Pur you had earners who were essentially Amazon Shoppers get their accounts blocked and cancelled and you know and and their purchases canceled and all that stuff and that was very dictatorial I mean sometimes they Shoppers in Amazon would have their funds Frozen so I don’t so I wouldn’t speak too much about I mean certainly the the convenience aspect of it is attractive but that’s how Amazon starts once they centralize the the vendors and the and the and the and you know the
(24:29) marketplace itself and everybody’s at their Mercy not just the vendors I mean the Shoppers too so I would say that yeah we kind of do want to be something opposite to what Amazon is you know my take on it I I mean oppos it is true maybe I Ed the wrong word after this sorry sorry let me interject quite a bit just for a moment take a moment after this call to to read through the light paper and please throw in comments based off if you’re individual perspective but it is that it is opposite in the same way that b and
(25:03) might have been saying that it might not be entirely correct but the point being is we’re opposite in the right ways and we truly have a competitive advantage in that regard especially if we’re pursuing a zero Revenue policy initially on launch and we can always change that I mean the back to the cost of the point being isend government I get decide yeah I mean a big cost of Amazon is their Logistics I mean I I I don’t know if they published their numbers I think both shared a great article a couple
(25:37) months ago they don’t really break up all their costs and their public filings quarterly filings so we don’t know but I could imagine the warehouse is a huge cost do we have a roll out strategy like I mean I I I have an back I think I mentioned to you 5,000 first users assuming we get them all yeah we’re we’re not going to get them all do we have like either a specific geographic location that we plan on launching in or do we have a specific kind of product that we’re trying to sell you know focus it on I think that
(26:11) we have to spend more time on this but but it seems like the quote unquote easy way is China we have to this it’s an important question but we’re we have to discuss this as a community or group still more so it’s not been finalized but I think the general assumption is we’re going to start with China Electronics export we need to talk with Andres about regulatory in the US but for Hamza but again load pipe people can build marketplaces to sell anywhere but Hamza might just be you know from China to
(26:43) where even thinking South America but from China and a lot of marketplaces do that AliExpress many China Light in the Box there’s many many platforms that sell China globally and there’s Partners I believe I’ve spoken to some of you about that are more than happy to partner with us to pull their products in and and support us and and work with crypto so that I met multiple times and I should get back to meet them probably soon again I spoke to Alex about earlier it’s still got to be confirmed though
(27:12) but I think the EAS quote unquote easier is China export Electronics I think so if we’re targeting like crypto users is there any sort of demographic information in terms of products that they’re more interested in yeah B has a report he made a couple months ago of from the purse data some of the top products I don’t know where we could find that but we can get you that but it was basically consumer electronics the one issue was they were very much interested in name brand consumer electronics such as apple and
(27:45) Amazon’s product you know Kindles and such versus no branded but the consumer electronics and gift cards took up like 80% I feel like so part of that is probably the inability to to transfer like crypto into actual Goods I think that’s part of the reason that we see like gift cards right yeah for sure crypto people right if we’re actually truly effectively targeting crypto people that’s what they buy and that’s because of the precise problem that we’re trying to solve which is that sort
(28:16) of inefficiency they end up buying gift cards for Amazon right they end up buying gift cards for eBay they end up buying gift cards for various different products and part of that is well frankly the scammy component you know you have a lot of going through crypto but at the same time it’s also that sort of utility proposition like being able to offer quite a bit like I almost feel like the product needs some sort of distribution partner and I think I might know some people for this personally y who can accept crypto
(28:51) payments for something else just as like a roll out strategy obviously the goal is to to normalize both crypto and web2 payments and be a totally like web2 app and vendors and buyers don’t know the difference but they can use both right that said the infrastructure like that’s part of what we’re doing here too no I agree I mean the the logistic not Logistics this this drop ship company in China accepts crypto and is willing to partner with us and they’re their early T and employees I believe I spoke to you
(29:32) a bit about them so they are let’s you and I connect for the the white paper in this regard and put a book book note in this conversation right now for the token mix but like sure I mean Logistics is true we haven’t spoken much about but I I I have many solutions I mean I did e-commerce I’ve done the E 20 years and I lived in China 15 years so I I know Logistics a comp companies that can provide these Services plug and play we haven’t gotten that far unless we want to but I just but yeah we can speak
(30:06) about it yeah yeah again apologies to everyone on this call I think we should focus on governance right now like obviously we have a lot of things like pretending to product we have a lot of like unanswered questions but fundamentally I did want this call to be about you know governance self governance from the vendor point of view and like how that can be beneficial for them I I think we should focus on that I would agree so I guess then go I think you said your question is what’s the mean utility of the token right which I thought we’ve
(30:42) spoken about but I think there’s two or three to utilities specifically the utility value proposition of the token we can always figure out other components of the token but you know something that’s been brought up a few times right now was like why is the token valuable we know the token is valuable from the governance point of view and we know that the reason the governance matters is two reasons one is you want the Big R you want the good score for your Marketplace you’re playing as a team and
(31:18) the second reason is that you can directly receive funds you know from your specific governance actions and so it’s it’s like increasing the marketplace as a team as well as the individual actions I think those are the two different distinctions right like According to some previous conversations with Bo you want to be able to directly reward people who are taking certain governance actions and at the same time you also want that sort of meta Marketplace sort of Team structure where you incentivize that because everyone’s
(31:55) so even if O is a vendor and he doesn’t want to vote and he doesn’t want to do governance he still wants to make sure someone is making the correct governance decision you know for something like order fulfillment for example because he still receives benefit without actually having to take a Judicial action is that is that correct in your guys guys’s size oh did you follow the I don’t know that governance actions yeah I don’t know the governance actions are what we were talking about in terms of reward so in
(32:28) those like earlier discussions when we were talking about rewarding actions like we were talking about actions like actions that players in the ecosystem take that Merit a reward I don’t know that like voting necessarily is is a rewardable action but in as long as yeah if we’re talking about governance like we got into this discussion a little bit earlier before everybody jumped on the call and I want to like revisit it but at the protocol level there are two there are two kinds of governance or like genres of governance discussion or
(33:00) decisions that I think are relevant so most of what we’ve talked about has been like parameter governance and that’s parameter governance over like the distribution of tokens on a you know based on reputation or based on actions sorry hold on I’m getting the call but based on governance or like actions of people in in the ecosystem but there’s also like this what I call workflow governance so like the Dow has to also operate as a company that’s directing money to people like to you know Engineers to administrators to people
(33:39) who are organizing things like coordinate and and then like the distribution can flow through things like coordinate and that’s like a simple transaction that be can can be okay by a doubt and so like getting into this question of governance like how should we award governance power and what is the mechanism by which we like award governance power is something that we like haven’t settled on but it is something I’ve been giving like quite a bit of thought to recently especially like when we’re talking about staking
(34:12) and moving toward because like because there are two different I think I I think in my mind we’ve simplified this a little bit such that there are two different kinds of staking so there’s vendor staking which should be rewarded and there is governance staking which I don’t think should be rewarded in the same way service providers so like service providers being rewarded I think falls under this like workflow governance idea so I think I touch upon this in the white paper and I don’t think I put all
(34:47) the words down but I think we have this sort of two prong system one we have everyone’s part of the same team and we have some sort of met a Marketplace you know sort of big ball of money big ball of blow token that we give a Marketplace based off what theirs whether it’s you know the Big R or the actual money that’s going that’s one component and then I think we should provide tools for them to sequester some of that money in order to pay for those sort of temporary tuitional positions so that they can
(35:26) essentially put like self bounties on on problems that they themselves are facing for example a Marketplace has a problem with order fulfillment well we give them a th low token and they say order fulfillment is a big problem it’s causing us problems as a Marketplace as far as the reputation goes we’re going to put you know 100 low token out of the Thousand as a sort of bounty as a reward for people who are effectively like doing the job does that make sense so like we’re we’re still doing that
(36:00) sort of centralized to economic governance Federal Reserve but at the same time we’re providing the mechanisms such that they can decide where that money goes whether it’s to just everyone within the ecosystem or whether it’s directed towards indiv gos or problem that faing which will always change so I one more I I don’t quite understand yeah okay so load pipe Foundation we’re giving emissions to a theoretical Marketplace let’s say Toma we’re giving a, tokens to Hamza based off of its
(36:39) reputation score and the amount of money going through right but Hamza knows right because we provide the metrics that they’re suffering within one specific category which is customer complaints right customers are complaining about a lot of and load pipe takes no action here we still give them the Thousand but what their Dow can do is say we’re going to take 100 of the Thousand tokens and we’re going to give it to people who are being moderators for this specific content is that sort of like similar to
(37:18) the the staking for judicial roles that you mentioned before but rather than confining it to like a specific role ourselves we’re saying hey the marketplace can decide who they’re paying for what jobs you can pay the police officer you know 50 of the low tokens you pay the vendors 300 of the low tokens you can pay like various RS whatever amount that you want in order to address the the the issues that your Marketplace is facing hurting your reputation SCH does that make sense yeah so that’s like workflow governance right so that’s
(37:58) creating creating a workflow to to do something to do some like administrative task right to do something that helps the business and yeah so so that’s like a form of governance and so like the the the question is like who gets to vote on those like how do we determine the voting power of someone who is you know voting on on a proposal like that and one of the things I’ve been thinking about is sort of like the Curve Model but a little bit more circular and so I I do need to I need to draw this up at
(38:34) some point but here let me let me see I can do this do this quickly here I’m gonna share my screen real quick all right so this is the the figma that we’ve been working out of for like a while let’s say this is the marketplace Dow and it has like a cast Vault and a token Vault and I’ve been thinking about the different like escrow contracts right so a voting escrow contract where a user will come along and uh let’s call this you know a prospective Governor right and they take their token and they deposit it into the
(39:23) voting escro contract and then the voting escro contract returns to them like a a voting escro token right which is like a representative token that is their voting power at that time and the token that the governor puts into the voting escro contract then goes into the token bul and that’s where like they’re paying tokens to this is where like the distributions are being distributed from so like in order to have this governance power you have to deposit into a token vault which is then being drained by governance actions now
(40:05) I think that that’s distinct from like the cast Vault and so like parameter so this person would still have governance power in determining like the rates of payout and you know to to other Market participants but I think the workflow governance is the one that like deals with the cash FL and saying like Okay this goes to the engineering team right or that goes to or like the marketing team and these are two different again two different genres of decisions right one is one is workflow and one is parameters and so it does beg this
(40:50) question of like where because like like whether or not vendors decide to vote like I I don’t know how much venders give a about this or you know so like the opportunity to vote for them should be afforded but like we also have to hold that in custody at a certain point right so like it’s possible that there is this other contract here which we can call like the vendor staking contract and a vendor would come along and deposit into the vendor staking contract and then they would be able to delegate I think
(41:40) or vote directly delegate to a governor or vote directly but the money has to stay in here it can’t it can’t go to the Token Vault because we need this as collateral in the case of a dispute yeah I was I was going to say that directly I think we should have some sort of Delegation process because well just like voting in pretty much every country besides Australia where it’s mandatory and you have to pay a fine a lot of people don’t really care they don’t want to deal with that a lot of vendors are just going to want to
(42:11) sell their things and not worry about these for the governance and you know having some sort of prerequisite delegation of votes they can always change their mind and delegate it to something else like a self representative officials right I think would be a very effectual thing you know in this manner so yeah we could have a council essentially of like 20 people per D you know depending on the size of the D and people would have to select something or only be able to select something you know after an arbitrary time and I think that would
(42:48) kind of balance out so you know from the load pipe protocol point of view if we ever actually have to interact with those individuals because of like some gross negligence in some sort of regard we’re only talking to 20 people and so it’s it’s centralized but it’s also decentralized because you know load pipe doesn’t care and it’s programmatically like guaranteed through like trustless fing you know s of systems and people can always change your vote I think that would make a lot of sense otherwise like
(43:21) 500 vendors like trying to figure this out things don’t happen quickly you know you know when you have absolute democracy and and maybe that’s what it is is like we present so this is a this is a vendor right we present them with a screen yeah well this is a vendor and like we present them with a screen that says hey you can either delegate to one of you know like you can choose a delegate for this representative voting token or you can vote yourself but there’s like sort of a ramping penalty for no vote right so and then I also
(44:01) think that like the token Vault you know is is going to going to here right token vault is going to judges so what what we should do right if we have these sort of two perceived actions we have the airdrop essentially to all of the market participants essentially everyone that belongs to a country call it Universal basic income even though it’s not quite and then we have rules specific rewards for a select few individuals within specific sort of category and we’re going to Define this later when we narrow down on whatever the the r
(44:40) formula is right because have several different moles not just one kind of Judge then the marketplace itself and this should probably be a secondary thing should determine how the rewards are rewarded to the various different judges of various for example you’re going to have the true like penal sort of governance individuals who are focused on like penalties and then you’re probably going to have like some sort of strategic role you’re probably going to have some sort of diplomatic role I really don’t know
(45:19) how this looks because B like you understand a dow better than I do but there are various different roles and you could even have like hyper leadership roles and vendors can vote them out they can always change their vote but they can shift how the additional funds are being rewarded to these governance roles and I think we you know just because of how people are we should probably put some sort of hard cap on this it should be something like 20% of marketplace rewards are awarded towards like governance positions
(45:56) otherwise well we we’ve already seen how they go and again I don’t I don’t think I don’t think like governance I think governance power should degrade over time I think like you should and it should be like you’re putting tokens into the Vault and giving the tokens away functionally so and we we discussed this before though like you were getting like really really Greek with the optional sort of governance like you would have the citizen who would become a governor for like a period of time and
(46:30) that’s a a sort of political system that we could actually enforce like programmatically it does come with its own problems right but that said like we can actually guarantee that via blockchain like we can guarantee so many things via trustless Smart contracts in a way that yeah we’re we’re actually effectively able to replicate like previous systems of government without the corrupting fact because it’s not possible it’s it’s onchain you know it’s neutral well it’s not it’s not it’s
(47:04) onchain NE right that makes it like because again this is this this is like a question of like you know like think about curve curve like voting rewards degrade over time or not voting rewards voting voting power degrades over time like it’s a it’s an intentional decision we don’t have we don’t have to make that decision we could we could make it so that like the voting contract is actually like you know getting token emission right but but but again we have to decide that Mike you know and I’m
(47:35) sorry that it so often ends up being on these economics calls but are you keeping a list of like the sort of decisions that the team needs to make it large CU there have been quite a few I think we’ve gone for like seven there are like a lot of undecided not specifically but I’ve been keeping them my mind I think we should probably start doing that yeah well I mean and and that’s sort of the point of these calls right is to like settle on a design pattern and so John also had mentioned of you know this idea of going
(48:12) through some of the different models that we had proposed and looking at the the positives and negatives of these these different models and also like you know again I this was just sort of like a you know brain explosion or whatever and and this isn’t like refined in any in any way but like but also like what level of governance is this and then like how much power do we want to give to vendor staking and like this idea of coming up with a model and having a model so that we can like start testing the model I mean that’s like what we’re
(48:46) trying to get to right like we want to make informed decisions and for that we need to have a this is like a Hamza obviously like we’re going to change quite a bit but Hamza is going to be the the proof of execution right and so even if we don’t walk out of this with like a perfect solution and I don’t mean this go I mean when pza eventually launches you know that that’s the means of expiration because at least we have the core team involved and we’re actually trying to figure that out that
(49:15) said I I sincerely think we we we should have a list like of some of these let’s call them existential questions like we got through the the vendor versus versus a Marketplace provider you know in the last couple call and I think that is an qu essential like important difference with with the product and yeah I think we we should focus on governance that said I think the next thing that we should do is the polar opposite and it’s not to economics it’s a cost and price estimate I think this is something that David is going to
(49:54) be like very involved in we should try to start estim some of the logistical costs for all of this as well even if it’s wrong you know it’s a it’s a baseline logistical cost of what so when you look at like a e e-commerce site there there are so many reasons that things cost the way that they do I post some of this in the marketing chat but like you know warehousing and this is something that I had recently reached out to Mike in regards to you have licensing you have essentially the the business costs
(50:32) of doing a traditional web 2 you know sort of business like what does that look like I mean and then also that we need is like competitive I mean the marketplace we we if you don’t have Logistics warehousing cost it’s it’s not it’s mostly just advertising and admin and the Justice the side you know you can ask purse I mean ask Jose they had they were a Marketplace person was a Marketplace what was their cost it was cost as people and marketing if you don’t have the logistics or are you saying James the
(51:08) cost of logistics specifically like the cost of fillment you’re assuming this is like a pure web Tu business without any sort of the crypto components you know that actually informs things for us both on the toonomic side as as well as like the the white paper side which is is where I’m at right now in my head Web Two web three doesn’t matter I mean if you don’t have Logistics I’m not sure why yeah oh we can go through it but the logistics is not requirement of any Marketplace web 1 Web Two web 3 web four
(51:39) you don’t have to have Logistics in the marketplace just to be very clear for everybody on this call you don’t need to have Logistics that’s not required to be a Marketplace I just want to be very clear if I’m not clear enough I I I I think I’m I’m using the the wrong word here might I mean so so if our end goal is coming up with projections and understanding the the relationship between numbers who here has that sort of understanding of I think you David David is probably the best and I thought you would connect
(52:16) with him but yeah David would be the yeah I I think I think James you are talking about operating operating expenses right what is the cost of the of running the business yes yes yes AB exactly so so far what we have is just salaries right of all of us and some it softwares right and the IT softwares if I’m not wrong most part of it are being assumed and then invoiced to Hamza by shadone right but so far we don’t have any other needs not now and also not forecasted aside of the ones that we have right now maybe we will once the
(53:03) activity starts maybe we will we will get some Bank fees and stuff like that but if we are talking about using just crypto there won’t be any any expenses aside of processing the the Bitcoins and operations that’s that’s all we have right now and it’s not expected to increase in the future unless we we set up an office or something like that when we have employees also I would say I don’t know that understanding well hold on I don’t think understanding like Logistics costs is is necessary to like
(53:41) understanding how like what are the onchain like things that we can see right like the the system the onchain token system doesn’t give a about like uh Logistics cost it cares about like sales volume over a time period right that’s like a variable that like if we put in okay it is making you know because then that flows into like the parameters that we set in governance right so then there’s parameter variables of like what percentage are we taking of that sales volume per time period and then the the parameter
(54:16) variables of like what what percentage of that goes to vendor staking what is the degradation period of a vendor Esco contract I guess the other another input variable would be percentage of sales of like SB for TP yeah that is contested yeah you know this is on me this is not strictly a tokenomics discussion this is more the white paper discussion Bo John Mike David I would like to have a call with you to sort of discuss the logistics of that you know as far as like the cost assment because that actually feeds into the marketing and
(54:59) that also feeds into the messaging and in a way it does feed into the tokenomics if we’re concerned about the value of the token itself and that I I feel like that’s a separate conversation that needs to happen and I I’m sorry for bringing it into this yeah I feel like we went in more operations today but it’s definitely needed so you have to we have to all be on the same page I agree but I think we’re also mixing up hamza’s Marketplace has to price spend a majority of their money on marketing and
(55:28) advertising to acquire customers right I mean even Amazon I if you ever do Google Google search you’ll see the top usually the top ads are eBay Amazon these marketplaces are spending tons of money on PL on Advertising to acquire customers even to this day I think Amazon probably spends tons of money on ads in general acing a new sorry sorry in general acquiring a new customer in any in any Market let’s say or any any field of operations takes 10 times more expensive to acquire then retain but yeah I mean as far as like governance is
(56:09) concerned yeah I guess like that all is again when you’re saying like estimating the cost that is workflow governance right that is like a cash Vault and like how much of that cash vault is then being like sent to the marketing team and the engineering team right and so but that I don’t I think is distinct from like what is the token governance or like what what does the token flow look like right and maybe the cash Vault has some relationship to the Token Vault and so being able to estimate like profitability of the company or like how
(56:50) much is coming in and like what break but but I think that’s like the job of a team that is working like that is a work FL governance team so this would be like the the risk tee or not the risk team but like the the analytics team or the like you know that’s them making recommendations to governance to determine like what percentage fee do we need to take in order to be a tax positive business and then what relationship does that have with it like what relationship does profitability in general have with like the token is an
(57:22) unsettled question that I think we need to settle before we think about like the mechanis of profitability yeah actually my my my concern is in profitability it’s taking some of the abstract numbers that we talked about on the economics calls and actually being able to boil them down again for the the white paper point of view you know we have the the Big R right and we have Big C let’s call that cost and we don’t effectively have a means of measuring what that is yet which which you know as a a larger team
(57:58) is like I wouldn’t say an issue you’re right like we we should decide the larger patterns but part of deciding the larger patterns is actually informed by the data and understanding especially like competitive analysis which you know Mike is very experienced in but at the same time it hasn’t really been translated so well I think we also were trying to keep areen we trying to keep it aren we trying to keep this thing simple and and kind kind of clean and and kind of push a lot of the work to the marketplaces and incentivize the
(58:31) marketplaces to to do a lot of the work themsel I mean are we trying to do a lot on I yes absolutely but how how can we say like honestly in one breath that we’re being the opposite of Amazon without understanding how Amazon is actually operating like ter as a team you know how how can I write about that how can I put together the economics or something drop the let’s first of all drop the opposite let’s drop the opposite I think but that’s my mistake it may be open or transparent yeah but yeah I don’t know David do you
(59:10) think you have some kind of data that you can help provide that would break down the cost structure of Amazon is it is that possible or is that something I mean I think you might be the I don’t want to put on the spot here but do you think you could find something that could give us a breakdown of their cost structure don’t have that in their financials probably they have some public financials that we can look at right but if if there are strategic numbers on that more likely they will be gathered in a
(59:46) general epigraph let’s say right more likely they will not disclose what is strategic or what can be replicated somehow but yes I guess that there might be some something something public I will look for that do you guys feel that as something valuable worth pursuing you know outside of the governance or even the toomics discussion rather the product I think well we should find that article you shared a couple weeks a couple months ago I guess I could dig it up in Discord it it kind of got into that a little bit and the financials of
(1:00:23) Amazon the cost of Amazon I could try to find I think you Shar Discord somewhere trying to think I can find that but it’s fair it’s a fair point yeah I can I can find it it’s a fair point I I can try my best to write it down it’s kind of internalized in my in my brain I don’t know if it’s correct even it’s not like I’ve looked the data but I I kind of kind of generally understand their cost structure and what they need to do but we’re we’re also trying to kind of yeah I’ll work on
(1:00:55) that in some degree going to inomics as well I think because again we’re we’re competing with a monolithic entity right in the Giants hands I think was the rap video yeah that was shared with from the team but you know that that’s pretty important it’s it’s really important understand okay yeah thanks Bo you found it but is it yeah is it important to tokenomics like in understanding how the token is minted and what like how the token flows and how voting power works yeah on the bid level let’s call it that
(1:01:41) obviously high level is not relevant whatsoever but deciding how we adjust some of these numbers and how we weit some of these numbers I think like even if we’re diving into the Big R right having some sort of perspective and to to how Amazon for example weights their own various categories to be informative for us for creating the same micro variables that influence So when you say Big R you’re talking about Marketplace reputation correct right okay and and that’s like determine okay go ahead I I was just going to say Amazon
(1:02:19) certainly has some number like that yeah but they have it for vendors right so so like we have would argue sure yeah yeah no you’re not wrong I I would say that we have and you know marketplaces maintain their own like sort of reputation for like sorting for for the purpose of using like a sorting algorithm right and but like there is like a top level reputation that we need to write to vendors and then there’s like a top level reputation that we need to write to marketplaces and then there’s also a reputation for judges so
(1:02:55) like there’s three three separate like reputation metrics that do different things and the different thing for us is that we’re going to have judges and that’s going to be our own like sort of separate you know sort of collection of information right at the same time you know platforms like Amazon collect a very large amount of information and if we’re taking ourselves seriously as like a challenger a competitor to existing Le to Market places we should understand as much as we can about how
(1:03:29) they are doing it because that will actually influence not not the tokenomics not the The Meta governance it’s not going to change there but like the specific data points and we discuss this as a pinpoint is for the last two tokenomics calls like how do these variables work like what sort of data are they collecting and how does that add up to their like where can we find that how can we find who can be hire for example that already works for Amazon you know on the data level that already what they’re doing have to do I think that
(1:04:07) would be incredibly valuable you know for a project like this yeah I think we should just build it I I think that we should just start like coming up with formulas right and start under like because we understand what like data is on chain and what data like we are also limited by that right if we’re talking about like distribution of like of smart like if if smart contracts are the one doing distribution we have to understand like the Oracle problem we have to understand that like marketplaces are maintaining data that they’re not
(1:04:39) writing on chain right and so there’s only so many onchain actions which are trackable which result in the reputation scores for you know the various actors that we’re looking at right and so like I I don’t think understanding how Amazon does rank is particularly you like valuable because they do have so much more data that they’re working with because it’s all their like internal data you know like they but but like you know we we can also understand like there’s pretty simple ways of like
(1:05:12) assigning a reputation to a vendor for instance right like how fast are they fulfilling their orders and how how many what percentage of their orders result in a negative judgment for them right like those are onch actions that result in a reputation for a vendor and if there’s more you know then then yeah now is the time to to like theorize and talk about those and write those down somewhere but like but aside from that I mean like I I I don’t know what other like very so so like yeah I think we should just start
(1:05:46) proposing you know formulas for for assigning those value yeah that’s kind of what I mean though yeah we we we can internally come up with it as a game and obviously it’s going to be beneficial again through the tokenomics through that sort of chain well but I thought I thought you just said that we needed to hire like a former Amazon data scientist to to like give us Insight I’m I’m leing into that that that would actually be incredibly beneficial from a product point of view because you know think about how long
(1:06:20) you spent on these toomics calls and if if we understand how the competition actually works would that not be a beneficial thing like understanding how they already decided to do things even if we choose to do things different I mean you can check in the general unless I mean David sharing it I mean I don’t really know what what’s I mean there’s not many secrets to their cost structure I I I mean if you insist we can go through it right now the cost structure is warehousing marketing advertising administrative
(1:06:53) costs you know such as customer support in India that we complain about and hate you know I I I I mean we’re trying to yeah I mean so so I I’ll step back here for a moment if we’re trying to be the opposite of Amazon right and this this was even a point of contention on this call right now we’re not actually trying to be the opposite of Amazon we’re trying to be the opposite of what Amazon is bad at right we’re trying to be better than Amon in opposite direct Place what’s sources of information do
(1:07:27) we have in terms of how they operate from a competitive analysis point of view do we besides like you Mike who you’re very like familiar with the business like I mean Jose Jose’s work has spoken about purse I mean he didn’t work in Amazon but he worked close to with purse which was a tool that help people buy on Amazon and you know he’s given some calls with us about his experiences mostly to to John and I I think but I think we’re trying to take the Justice part or the dispute resolution and take
(1:08:00) it as a separate part that’s transparent and just I think is a core part of what we’re trying to do and create tokenomics to reward those people that help in that part of it because it’s all internally done at Amazon right now with their full-time staff or their outsourced operations that they’re employing I’m sorry you know I’m focused on the white paper and so on the delivery message I suppose that ecomics which I think is large to solv I think maybe next call we have an outline if I could be prepared for these I think
(1:08:41) if I could be prepared for these in advance I could I could help more maybe next next one maybe have a like outline so then I if that if I could be ready to help more with this these questions all right guys I think that’s very important though understand the condition in what how they’re doing what they’re doing because the vendors will wouldn’t essentially care about those those sort of things in the same way I dropped in the marketing chat like and I think someone that already posted a comment yeah I mean I haven’t
(1:09:18) had I’ve been on calls back to back so I’m going to try to get to that tomorrow morning but I saw it I did see that that’s that’s a very good comment out oh there’s a chat here I never saw this town hall chat okay I’m reading these so if if we’re going to make ourselves different from Amazon like we we have very very many different ways of presenting ourselves obviously like we have the trust that’s like blockchain can you you and I discussed is less relevant it’s more in the
(1:09:54) background for the as far as like what they’re concerned as far as like the sentence go they don’t want to know that they’re using blockchain that said we have a robust theoretical like justice sty that we can have where vendors can actually own the marketplace that they participate in you know for governance and we like B was saying before we have this sort of to work mechanism one is Marketplace level and two is the specific actions between different vendors and then I I think it’s pretty important to to understand what and how
(1:10:36) you know as competitive to them like this is like a business 101 like what’s the competitive analysis you know I can send you a few compet I don’t know James this a little bit I don’t know this just disappointing you’re bringing us up on a call saying that we haven’t done competitive anal there’s there’s a few documents of competitive analysis I can send you if you need there’s are many other marketplaces besides Amazon we’re competing with we’re not only competing with Amazon there’s plenty of other
(1:11:06) marketplaces that don’t have I mean the major cost of US of Amazon is advertising admin like customer support and this vendor on boarding and their bigger cost that’s different than most is that they do the logistics in inhouse where you know I think Amazon I mean Walmart’s I think finally started Mak their own Logistics but they used to make you have to use your own Logistics eBay have to use your own Logistics I mean most others I I even in China you have to do your own Logistics so that’s
(1:11:37) a different cost structure that I’m not as familiar with but it’s got to be huge cost but we’re we’re not putting that into our our our models at this moment so I can send you some more competitive analysis if if you need there’s been a a couple made over the last 8 months course so we’ve been working on this easy face so I’ll get you yeah I mean so we’re we’re I think 20 minutes over the like our lot of time right now but yeah I mean like I guess for the next I mean again yeah like I I would sort of echo
(1:12:13) what Mike is saying like I maybe it’s like more maybe this idea of like cost analysis and and you know like competitive analysis is is relevant to the light paper and things like that I I don’t know that it’s strictly relevant to tokenomics and yeah I mean I don’t know I I I do think that we should have like a for our next call if that’s on Friday which maybe it should stay there yeah we get back on schedule but like we should go through the different like toonomic models that have been like
(1:12:46) maybe maybe we can do some work and James it would be lovely if you could organize this of getting together the like different models that we’ve proposed and different styles of like the way like governance and tokenomics like let’s just get it all together and take a look at them next to each other and like make some decisions some design system decisions about how tokens ought to flow yeah definitely can regardless I’ll have the light paper for you end of today and you guys can sh through the document I shared it with all of you I
(1:13:20) think in the next three days I can have a functioning white paper probably about 10 pages in length that’s realistic and we can toss it to the development team I think we’re going to change it quite a bit you know like everything is going to be in flux but I do think these are like very important conversations that’s that’s why I bring them up talking about cost analysis of like operations know okay all right James thanks well if there’s if nobody has any other comment yeah then let’s yeah thanks James and
(1:13:59) we’ll talk again on [Music] Friday