Boson Protocol Live AMA with Decentraland

Boson had the pleasure of hosting a live AMA via our Telegram channel with Decentraland. They were joined by Dave Carr from the Decentraland Foundation and Boson’s Head of Metaverse Tech Holly Atkinson, Head of Product Luke Gniwecki and Head of Strategy Jonas Seiferth

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Alastair Band: Alright, the channel has been muted! It is AMA time 🚀

Joining us today we have @JonasSFT , @hollyatkinson , @LukeGn and @davecarr23

Jonas: Hello 👋

Alastair Band: Please introduce yourselves to our community 🙂

Holly: Hi everyone! I’m Holly, Head of Metaverse Tech at Boson. I’m a blockchain dev, and my background is in project finance & commercial transactions 👋

Jonas: Hey I’m Jonas, head of Strategy at Boson. My focus is on aligning the different teams, especially supporting the protocol team.

Dave Carr: Hey everyone, I’m Dave Carr. I work in Marketing and Comms with the Decentraland Foundation

Luke G: Hi all 👋, I’m excited to be here and answer your questions. I’m Luke, Head of Product at Boson Protocol. I have 9+ years of experience in product development, product management and marketing.

Alastair Band: Awesome, it’s so good to have you all here 🙂

Jonas: Thanks for having us 🙏

Holly: Pleasure to be here!

Alastair Band: So there’s been a lot of coverage recently about our LAND purchase in Decentraland, what does this signify for each of you?

Luke G: Having our own LAND in Decentraland enables us to develop the first product built on top of Boson protocol and demonstrate what we mean by dCommerce. We’re building a new paradigm of commerce but we don’t just want to copy what commerce was in Web2 into the Web3 world. The virtual mall we’re working on will not only allow for digital to physical redemptions of items purchased in-world, but it will introduce a new set of experiences to accompany dCommerce. It will make the shopping experience more immersive and engaging. Our goal is to create a bridge between the digital and physical worlds and we’re excited to be working with Decentraland as the first virtual world to achieve this.

Dave Carr: I think this presents huge opportunities for the community. That bridge between the virtual and physical not only opens up a big range of possibilities for creators but on a ‘platform’ level it’s blurring the boundaries. Was asked the other day about how DCL might impact or reach into life in the physical world. This is one of the instances.

Jonas: It’s the first step towards real-world shopping in the virtual worlds. I don’t like shopping in the real-world and clicking through pictures on e-commerce sites is also not great. I would rather buy something in Decentraland. Chatting with the virtual store clerk, wearing the virtual version of the physical item, etc.

Holly: Innovative BUIDLing ahead! Our team is hugely excited to bring Boson to Decentraland. We have a large estate to develop and that represents many new opportunities for web3 (and web2!) commerce

Alastair Band: Great answers!

So, what does this mean for decentralized commerce / dCommerce?

Holly: Boson Protocol cuts out extractionary centralized parties, bringing more value to users as well as to retailers who want to use our new space

Our move into virtual worlds opens up new revenue opportunities for retailers of real-world items and services, which will be represented by our commitment tokens in Decentraland

Alastair Band: For everyone, what excites you most about metaverses?

Dave Carr: For starters, the way DCL is structured — decentralized, owned, governed and built by the community — means that you’re effectively witnessing the creation of an entirely new world or worlds. And the diversity of creativity and the open collaboration between such disparate groups is fascinating to watch.

Luke G: What excites me is that in the near future we will live in a world where there’s little or no separation between physical and virtual worlds and experiences. We will be able to go to work in-game / in-world and move across various metaverses to do shopping, socialise, play and have fun. If you think about commercial exchange as one of the core things that accompanies us in our day-to-day lives, Boson Protocol is going to be a foundational building block of new business models and web3 products in the upcoming Metaverse economy e.g. player-owned games, virtual experiences, virtual work and social events. Metaverse as a concept existed before in the gaming space but blockchain technology takes it to a whole new level.

Holly: Anyone can join in! We’re seeing new social opportunities as well as retail opportunities, and this could be pretty disruptive to the status quo 😄

Jonas: At the core, especially looking at what DCL are doing, it’s better than the real world! Our virtual lives will be community owned and governed and no need for borders, visas, passports, censorship, physical limits — But true ownership of real estate, true ownership of identity, freedom of speech, etc.

Luke G:

Btw, this is how we do all hands meetings at Boson 😀

Alastair Band: That was good fun cruising about in Decentraland! 🤩

Jonas: Wondering: When first wework in decentraland? 🤔

Dave Carr: Good question…

Alastair Band: Mysterious…. 👀

Alright, it’s time for the questions from our competition winners! Each person here has won 100 $BOSON each! 🔥

This is a question for @davecarr23 from @Shabbir30260554

How is Decentraland focusing on mass adoption and what would be the upcoming greatest challenge for Decentraland?

Dave Carr: The community, users, landowners etc are really just devoted to improving the experience — technically, socially, culturally. Making the experience as seamless as possible is key. Around that it’s about having lots of cool stuff to do once you’re in-world. Both of these areas are developing at pace.

Alastair Band: Exciting times ahead it seems 🚀

Next question is for the Boson crew and comes from @DBCrypt0

I saw the shopping demo video showing how you can buy something in the virtual world to claim a real world item so I’m wondering if there will be a feature for scanning someone’s body to get accurate measurements so someone can try on an item of clothing virtually and buy it? Basically creating digital avatars that are a life-like representation. This would be amazing for clothes shopping.

Luke G: There are projects that allow creating a digital representation of yourself in the avatar form so it’s definitely on our radar. For now, we’re focused on what we can do within Decentraland. Good idea though.

Alastair Band: That would be pretty cool!

Here’s one for everyone, or as you say in poker “a family pot” when everyone is in, and it comes from @Sathicrypto

Community is the keystone for the success of any project. My question is how important is Community and its trust to you? And what are your steps and agendas to grow your community and reach out to users at a global level?

Dave Carr: For Decentraland, community is everything, because Decentraland is owned and governed by its community. The DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) was recently launched and that allows the community (MANA and LANDholders) to submit and vote on proposals that affect day-to-day goings-on in Decentraland. So the DAO is crucial to maintaining trust and governance. Globally, DCL already has a pretty impressive reach. The Chinese community for example is very active and recently celebrated the Dragon Boat Festival with a massive in-world party. But various countries and cultures are well represented. The Foundation actively engages with people across the world to bring their experiences into the metaverse. The more the merrier.

Alastair Band: I’ll take this one from the Boson side, community is huge for us. We are moving to an innovation in the open style and we want to have our community as involved in as possible. Head over to bosonprotocol.io and register your interest for our ambassador program and we will very soon be launching our Discord server, where we will be able to have structured conversations and share ideas. Furthermore, we will be at EthCC in Paris next month (from July 20th) come and say hi!

Jonas: Community is at the core of any truly decentralized project. For us it’s really important to foster a community of stakeholders, committed to Boson’s mission. We’re hosting a “Engineering dCommerce” introductory course with the Token Engineering community. There we dive deep on dCommerce, Boson, Token engineering, etc. this is the first step to open up building of dCommerce and Boson to anyone who’s interested 🌈

You can register here: https://tokenengineeringcommunity.github.io/website/docs/academy-welcome

Alastair Band: On a more global level, we have partners all over the world. We recently announced our partnership with World Mobile that will give us great reach in Africa, and we have partners in Europe, North America, Asia and many other places too. The list is always growing 🙂

Holly: Take a look also at how the ‘Contributing’ section on our docs site, https://docs.bosonprotocol.io/contributing/

Alastair Band: Boson Bot deleted this from @davecarr23

While we’re posting links, for a decent snapshot of the diversity of communities and cultures in Decentraland, the Events page is worth a look: events.decentraland.org

Alastair Band: Team Boson, ASSEMBLE! This one is for you, and comes from @TinMaMa17;

We all know that there are many problems with the Ethereum network: scalability issues, high gas costs, slow speeds, etc. So, why did you choose to build a token on the ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not build it on some scalable blockchain?

Holly: That’s a great question! Well, we needed to start somewhere! Our first version of Boson Protocol, v0.1, has been implemented on Ethereum to showcase the protocol’s functionality

Luke G: Our vision for Boson Protocol is to be blockchain agostic and interoperable with other blockchains/networks.

Alastair Band: Great answers to a great question!

Final winner of a share of the $BOSON pot is @Diak88758796, who has asked;

Is virtual land an important part of a decentralized future?

Luke G: Great question, a decentralized future should be open, permissionless, distributed and accessible to everyone. Decentraland is the first fully decentralised world and that’s one of the reasons why we picked them as the first Metaverse for LAND purchase and development of the virtual mall.

Plus the DCL team are great to work with big vision and great ideas! 🚀

Dave Carr: LAND is obviously a key component of Decentraland but you don’t need to be a LANDowner to participate in Decentraland or help shape the decentralized world. It’s important that no one element is necessary to determine the evolution of decentralization.

Holly: Exactly @davecarr23, having the LAND is amazing for decentralization, and the great part about our plans for metaverse commerce is that you won’t need to be an actual LAND owner to take part 😊

Dave Carr: Some of the purists in the DCL community would argue that decentralization in the virtual world will ultimately have an effect on governance in the physical, so a decentralized future could end up being much bigger than first envisioned…

Alastair Band: Mind = blown

I’ll need a minute to process this… 🤩

Right, community, do you have your questions ready? 🚀

I will be unmuting the channel now, please post away with your questions!

Get it: While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?

Holly: We’ll soon be launching our Discord server, where the community can get more involved with the protocol. In the meantime, we welcome community contributions — check out our docs site https://docs.bosonprotocol.io/contributing/

THO LUCKY: IF THE BEAR MARKET COMES will your token PROBABLY DUMP? Do you have any plan to prepared for this bear market? How will you handle the panic sell ?

Alastair Band: We raised over $36m between private and public sales, so we are pretty set but we have contingency plans in place. We can’t control the markets, but we can promise that we will remain focused on delivering decentralised commerce.

Jonas: We secured enough funding to build thru the next bear market 🐻

RIAZ HASAN: What is your top priorities in 2021? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year?Which part of the project are you most focused on right now?

Dave Carr: Top priorities in 2021: improving the user experience (ongoing), supporting decentralization and creation (recently released the Wearables Editor, allowing creators to publish and mint wearables on the Polygon sidechain), helping third parties (artists, brands, other entities) make sense of and use Decentraland. Decentraland Art Week in July and preparing for a major event in the second half of the year 🙊

Luke G: As per the announcement last week, in addition to developing the protocol, we’re focusing on building a virtual mall in Decentraland and getting first brands & partners to set up shop so you can all experience in person what dCommerce is. In paralllel, we will be launching a number of events and experiences on our land so the community has a place to hang out, network and have fun. Stay tuned for more updates 🙂

Risi Parwati: What inspires you to make a blockchain protocol which allows users of Decentraland communities to exchange virtual and real-world products?

Jonas: In Metaverses such as DCL we see true virtual economies emerging, so it only seems natural that users will also want to exchange real-world goods. We also think that shopping online will shift from a 2d e-commerce experience to a fully immersive virtual experience. Essential in all of this is that Metaverse commerce should be open and decentralized like the underlying world it takes place in, which fits the vision of Boson

Libra: Does your project support staking program?if yes. how is your stake system work, what is the requirement for user if they want to stake in your platform?

Holly: We have our Boson Guardians program, you can read about it here → https://medium.com/bosonprotocol/boson-guardians-community-rewards-program-launch-5dd22c2ad47f

THO LUCKY: Do you have any Coin Burn or BuyBack system or do you have any plan to burn $ Token to increase token value and attract investors to invest in your project on Defi?

Jonas: Our Token model is based on the dCommerce sustainability loop, in which revenue gets collected into the dCommerce DAO and the community decides to ether reinvest that revenue or buy back / burn $BOSON. You can read more about it here https://medium.com/bosonprotocol/introducing-the-dcommerce-sustainability-loop-1d72026636d0

Robertson: What is the development planning and decision-making process?

Dave Carr: Decision-making is through the DAO. The community puts forward proposals and then votes on whether or not to approve. Some proposals put forward thus far: adding points of interest to the map; removing specific offensive content; determining fees for wearables…

Libra: NFT is not just a trend! It is going to rule this decade and innovation has just started. So, with NFT what is your future plan?

😊😊😊

Holly: I agree with you! Boson Protocol is using NFTs to represent real-world goods & services

Dipa: After this partnership with Decentraland, do you have any further plan? like global expansion, building and developing or getting more customer and users?

Jonas: First, expanding Boson to every virtual world, then expanding boson to dominate e-commerce, then boson dominating the universe, including mars 🤫

Kuluk and uhuk: How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in country where English is not spoken , do you have local communitiy for them to make them better understand about project?

Dave Carr: As mentioned earlier, Decentraland has different active communities currently involved and local languages are supported. More communities around the world are very welcome.

Holly: Got to dash, thanks @BeardOnTheBLock for having me today! And thanks everyone for all the awesome questions, I hope to come back soon 😎

Alastair Band: Alright, I think we are all late for meetings now — myself included — so it’s time to wrap things up here!

Thanks you Holly, Luke, Dave and Jonas and also to you, our community, for being AWESOME!

Dave Carr: Thanks everyone. Pleasure to chat with you today

Luke G: Thanks for joining everyone 🙂 We have some Metaverse work to do and need to shoot. Until next time! Enjoy the Metaverse 🌌

Dave Carr: Don’t hesitate to reach out on the various DCL socials

Alastair Band: Channel is back open, thanks again everyone!

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About Boson Protocol

Boson Protocol is a foundational primitive which solves the digital to physical redemption problem to enable decentralized autonomous commerce. Boson disrupts closed ecommerce platforms with an open, tokenized economy of things, powered by DeFi and Web3 data.

About Decentraland

Decentraland is a decentralized virtual social platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Within the Decentraland platform, users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications.