If lately, you've used an online listing website to find a handyman or a contractor to fix a broken item of your house, chances are that your experience wasn't as pleasant as you might have initially expected it to be. There are so many listings offering similar services that one gets paralysed by the myriad of options available. To then filter out the fraudsters and imposters is a challenge on its own. There might be hidden costs involved or the prices charged might be more than the ones quoted.
Unsurprisingly, a certain organisation believes that they can use blockchain to solve problems of the service sector as well. Blockchain technology is expected to disrupt a lot of domains, and now Bob's Repair is hoping to use it to disrupt this sector as well.
What is their story?
Bob's Repair was started by the Prandecki brothers three years ago. They provided automated STWP service, through which they were able to connect the consumers to contractors directly. Even though they were successful in automating the process and eliminate middle men, they realised that the current system of hiring skilled service men online was in dire need of an upgrade and they were convinced that blockchain could be the answer to this.
What were these problems and how were they solved by blockchain?
Bob's repair highlighted three major problems, in their white paper, which they thought were the major barriers for the home service industry to grow digitally.
The Review Fraud -It's not uncommon these days to hear news about companies leaving bad reviews on competitor's pages or buying reviews to inflate their own overall ratings. To curb the trust issues that consumers have due to such practices, the Bob Platform will be using Blockchain technology to tie down reviews of both sides - consumer and contractor - with the actual financial transaction. So, the platform will only present real and unadulterated reviews. This will help foster transparency and trust in the platform.
High advertising fees - The platforms currently available in the market function more like listing spaces where the contractor who pays the most fees gets the top slot. So, the contractors are forced to pay advertising fees to get more eyeballs. This advertising fee comes out of the consumers pocket in the form of raised fees. To stop this practice, the Bob platform is simply going to eliminate any sort of advertisements on their platform. They believe that merit should be the sole criteria to rank the service providers. And this merit will be determined by reviews and level of service provided by the contractor.
Transparency in prices -Hidden costs may scare potential customers away from online platforms. Contractors are not encouraged to break down the price quoted to list down costs of the various activities and materials used. But, through the decentralised ledger, customers will be able to see how much contractors had previously charged for similar jobs. Smart contracts will be employed by the platform to hold payments in escrow and would be released after certains pre-set milestones are reached.
The Bob platform choose to build its platform on the STEEM blockchain, this will enable them to reduce the transaction time to 3 seconds and eliminate the transaction costs. The STEEM platform will also lend the ability to upvote, flag posts and build a user reputation to the Bob platform.
All the transactions on the platform will occur on the platform via the BOB token, which is an ERC-20 base token.
About the ICO
The presale for the token started on 4th January 2018 and is scheduled to run until 4th February. A total of 360 million tokens will be issued during the ICO. Out of these, 50% tokens would be available to the public during the crowd sale. 20% Tokens are allotted to the team and 10% for legal. The remaining tokens are held in reserve for future.
The BOB token during the ICO is valued at - 6000 Bob tokens = 1 ETH, and investors can also use BTC, LTC, DASH or Fiat currency to buy the tokens.
The soft cap for the entire token sale is set at 6000 tokens. While the hard cap for the pre-sale is set at 6000 tokens as well. The hard cap for the entire token sale is set at 30000 tokens.
Opinion
To serve the interests of the investors, Bob's repair will keep 50% of the profits every quarter to purchase BOB tokens from the open market and burn them. This, as they mentioned in their white paper, is equivalent to providing reinvestment dividends to the investors.
Along with this, Bob's repair and their entire team have years of experience and a proven track record in the past 3 years of operating in the home service industry which gives their claims to build an effective platform good credibility.
Even John McAfee, a renowned businessman and blockchain enthusiast, has shown support for Bob's repair platform and on their ability to deliver on its promises.
Well, everything is pointing to the direction that if properly implemented the project can prove very valuable in near future.
Visit :
Website : https://bobsrepair.com/
Whitepaper : https://bobsrepair.com/docs/White-Paper.pdf
My Btalk profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1027561