Crypto-Native Commerce

Mass Labs is on a mission to make crypto currency again! To achieve this, we are building Mass Market: crypto-native, non-custodial commerce protocol, grounding crypto in the real world, and connecting the potential of DeFi to the market for physical goods.

Mass Market brings the benefits of blockchain to the ecosystem for retail. Our protocol is designed for businesses that want to participate in the new economy, but don’t have specialist knowledge or the time to engage in complex technical routines.

Despite all the crypto hype and early drama, we fundamentally believe that digital payments are the future of commerce. Digital currencies, in particular stablecoins, offer an ease of transaction both within and across borders as well as much needed stability for users across the world. Meanwhile, blockchains offer creators a new array of innovative ways to engage and reward loyal customers, as well as making possible new technical architectures that disassemble the monopolistic and extractive landscape of web2 platforms.

As a team we have a long history in the Ethereum community and 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. We bring this deep knowledge of decentralised systems to Mass Market, focusing on what we do best so that you can too.

Mass Market is a protocol that enables sellers to create a crypto-powered online shop. The shop’s inventory is hosted on a decentralised network of synchronized relays, and payment is processed through a smart contract that accepts any ERC20 token from buyers and converts it into the currency that the seller wants to receive.

The entire protocol is open-source and locked-open, removing platform risk. We aim to support and cultivate a robust ecosystem of innovative applications that build on and benefit from the protocol. For example, web3 marketplaces can plug their smart contracts into the protocol to benefit from a fully decentralised back-end, while builders can develop new tools and features on the protocol for buyers, sellers and marketplaces to use.

By design, shops will always 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-intergrated landscape of off-chain commerce and redistributes ownership back into participants’ hands.

Blockchain technologies and the decentralised infrastructures they facilitate offer participants in an ecommerce ecosystem new features that are not possible without them. These features 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 and we are not mad enough to store everything onchain! What goes onchain is only what is necessary to benefit from the innovative features that a blockchain affords. These include:

• Digital sovereignty: offchain ecommerce marketplaces own user data and relationships and can lock out users at will. With a blockchain-based ecosystem, buyers and sellers own and control all of their data and cannot be shut out of their listings, sales and purchase history or funds.
• Provenance: verification of supply chain integrity and brand authenticity both become possible with the blockchain.
• Fractional ownership: of both stores and products, which can become collectively owned or collectively purchased, with proceeds distributed algorithmically.
• Token-gating: access to exclusive content, events, rewards, and more for creator and seller communities.
• Composability: corporate ecommerce marketplaces suffer from platform risk and can lock out ecosystem developers at will. In a protocol-based and user-owned ecosystem this risk is removed. 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 own.
• Affordability and innovation: the data-sovereignty afforded by a blockchain will eliminate lock-in and its associated sky-high take-rates. This means more of the proceeds can go directly to creators, sellers and developers using and building out new features for the protocol.

Participate in research

We need your input! We are building for you, and we would love to hear what you think, what you need, what is most important to you, and what you would like to see.

• Are you a seller? Do you (or someone you know) own a small business, and sell things - or would like to - online?
• Are you a buyer? Do you like to buy things online, and would like to buy them with crypto?

Then get in touch - send us an email. There are a tonne of ways that you can help us figure out what features to prioritize, how to optimize the token dynamics for a progressive and sustainable ecosystem and how to improve the UI. Whether you have 5 mins to spare or can share several hours of your time we would love to hear from you.

Become an early adopter

Curious to try it out? Connect with us at upcoming events and use our point of sale app to buy a crypto souvenir! Not got a ticket? Then sign up to our newsletter so we can hit you up when the Mass Market test-shop is launched online. Grab a whole array of Ethereum-themed stickers, plushies, magnets and brain-twister puzzle kits directly with crypto on our online test store.

Build something!

Are you a software developer or ecosystem builder? Then keep your eyes peeled. By end of summer we will open-source our codebase, and next year we will open the doors for developers to build all kinds of applications, integrations and plugins to flesh out the ecosystem, or run relays for hosting online stores.

Follow our work

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