Our Company
We make technology matter by transforming retail stores into digital shops to create blocky marketplaces for the next generation of shoppers in the Omni Retail Age.
Who We Are
We are a company dedicated to creating a new backbone for the commercial Internet based on our proprietary block commerce (blockchain, blockshare, and blocktrade) technology, a retail blockchain (decentralized demand-side and distributed supply-side) network that helps merchants increase customer trust through product transparency in the shopping experience.
What We Do
We are a team focused on bringing omni-retail strategies to life by transforming physical stores into virtual warehouses in blocky ways so merchants can sell products together by sharing inventories across sales channels with wider assortments, better pricing, and more purchasing options on less stock. By empowering merchants to manage products and tokenize inventories on a commercial (privately-managed or publicly-shared) blockchain marketplace, the technology eliminates the single greatest problem facing their businesses: excess inventory, creating benefits for the entire retail ecosystem.
What We Make
We are a hybrid blockchain: a semi-decentralized, commercial peer-to-peer platform, where every user is “permissioned” to maintain the integrity of retail data in a fully transparent manner through a trustless-consensus protocol (e.g. proof of use), rather than a single regulatory authority or consortium of entities on manage the network.
Why We Care
We are committed to making retail matter. In a world where the power of new commerce models or retail technologies often pose great uncertainties, we place a great deal of emphasis on understanding their social impacts because they have the potential to alter the way people live, work, and play. In many cases, new retail models or emerging technologies create efficiencies, shifting profit pools from one industry to another to increase productivity. Yet despite these economic benefits, the ability to measure their social harms has remained limited. For example, thousands of Web retailers have grown at the expense of their Brick-and-Mortar counterparts in recent years, leaving millions of businesses on the verge of bankruptcy. Amazon, as the world’s largest retailer, represented nearly 50% of the total growth in the U.S. online retail market from 2012-2017, even as total retail sales remained flat. During this period, roughly 45% of the products sold on Amazon.com were considered 1st party (purchased inventory) from their retail partners, many of whom invested in marketing their products offline, only to watch their sales cannibalized on Amazon.com because of its cannibalizing effect. Ironically, if this continues, Amazon won’t have any merchants left to exploit, and they likely meet the same fate as their peers in the near future, which may bring about yet another retail cataclysm. We believe in making retail matter not only in terms of financial impact but also its capacity to benefit the entire retail community.
Working Together
We are empowered by our partners. There is no greater lesson in life than to learn that our success is closely tied to our relationships with our peers in the industry, and through public-private sector collaborations that share our vision of technologies that better our future.
Imperfectly Perfect
We are motivated by our colleagues. We try to be imperfectly perfect in every line of retail code, every pixel of commercial design, every product idea captured in written form, knowing that these errors create the conditions to look beyond the obvious. After all, to err is only human but to really mess things up people need computers.
