Mass Market Documentation

Mass Market is building a decentralized market protocol:

  • Infrastructure for a crypto-native global commerce network centered around physical items.

  • A network that is permissionless, participatory, and rewarding to use.

By introducing a protocol and platform for building an ecosystem around products, producers, and consumers, we envision a world that moves towards a more sustainable market model and values products built with integrity.

What is Mass Market?

Mass Market is a crypto-native, non-custodial commerce protocol for physical items, grounding crypto in the real world and connecting the potential of DeFi to the market for physical goods.

We bring the benefits of blockchain to the retail ecosystem. Our protocol is designed for businesses that want to participate in the new economy but have been lacking the specialist knowledge required for participation.

Our team has a long history in the Ethereum community and in the wider open-source p2p space. Our founder previously created ethereum.js and Primea, and between us we have worked on Dfinity, IPFS, Secure Scuttlebutt and Interfacer.

How does it work?

Mass Market’s protocol enables sellers to create a crypto-powered online shop.

The protocol is open source and locked-open in a move designed to eliminate platform risk. By design, shops own all of their data and participants in the network can freely choose who they want to collaborate with. This mutually beneficial and data-sovereign relationship decouples the hyper-integrated landscape of off-chain commerce and redistributes ownership back into participants’ hands.

Shop data is hosted on a decentralised network of synchronized relays with payments processed through smart contracts accepting any ERC20 token from buyers, converting it into the currency the seller wants to receive.

Why do we need a blockchain?

Blockchain technologies and the decentralised infrastructures they facilitate offer participants in an ecommerce ecosystem new features not possible without them:

  • Digital sovereignty: Off-chain ecommerce marketplaces own user data and relationships and can lock out users and merchants at will. With a blockchain-based ecosystem, buyers and sellers retain control of their listings, sales and purchase history, and funds.

  • Provenance: Verification of supply chain integrity and brand authenticity become possible when selective data is placed on-chain.

  • Fractional ownership: Stores and products can become collectively owned or purchased, with proceeds being distributed algorithmically.

  • Token-gating: Access to exclusive content, events, rewards, and more for creator and seller communities.

  • Affordability and innovation: The data-sovereignty afforded by a blockchain eliminates lock-in and its associated sky-high take-rates. Meaning more proceeds for creators, sellers and developers using and building new features for the protocol.

  • Composability: Corporate ecommerce marketplaces suffer from platform risk: they can can lock out ecosystem developers at will. In a protocol-based and user-owned ecosystem this risk is eliminated. Creators can build any number of applications on top of the protocol, such as aggregators, affiliate links, verifiable reviews and more, creating a rich ecosystem upon foundations that they collectively own.

All of these features combine to redistribute power, agency and ownership away from centralised corporate hands and back into the hands of users.

However, online commerce is a storage and transaction heavy industry so we have to be selective with what to store on-chain. What goes on-chain is only what is strictly necessary to benefit from the features outlined above that blockchains uniquely enable.

Warning

This project is under active development. This is an untagged, work-in-progress version of our documentation and may contain inaccuracies.