What is simplyBrand?
simplyBrand is a new aspiring decentralized project that caught my attention or multiple reasons – its whitepaper and the market segment that is being tackled. I admire projects that are able to pull off a detailed, structured and in-depth whitepaper. Whitepaper is basically a business case for a Blockchain project. I’ve read around 100 whitepapers in total by now and they have one big flaw in common. The author usually expects the reader to be totally technologically illiterate and chooses not to implement any algorithms and only use the technologies as buzzword (or the projects simply do not have any real technical background for all we know).
simplyBrand is different. It explains its vision clearly, it explains which market segment it tries to tackle and how exactly it’s going to utilize the technologies with the algorithms themselves in a very plausible way. I love it! I’m not sure whether the high quality of the whitepaper was accomplished due to author’s skills, or if Cobinhood (which helped simplyBrand to launch the ICO itself - reviewed here), helped to a great extent. In any case simplyBrand’s whitepaper is one of the best I’ve read!
It also choses very reasonable scope for its focus. It tackles the E-commerce business, namely counterfeits themselves. According to the whitepaper, counterfeits are causing losses amounting to millions of dollars yearly. They can also be harmful (insecure electrical devices, fake cosmetics). Those counterfeits are then being sold on B-2-C and C-2-C platforms – even via market giants like Amazon. Any sorts of regulations are very ineffective, because the main counterfeit producer is China, and to be brutally honest here, China doesn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Brands are no exception of course. Finding and removing counterfeit products is then a futile effort for the platforms themselves (mainly for the C-2-C ones). There is no leverage that can be used to punish the counterfeits producers – it basically is unenforceable by law. simplyBrand though comes with an elegant free market solution.
Protocol and technology description
Let me start off with this illustration to helps us visualize the whole platform.
As you can see, we are dealing with multiple technologies (Blockchain, AI) and multiple user roles (platform users, brands, enforcement agencies). Let’s take a deeper look into those aspects of the platform.
Architecture
The core of the whole platform is the Product Info Database. The database will be formed by both, the human users of the platform and AI. Both entities will be reporting URL of the counterfeits products. Products are then reviewed by the human users and AI again to ultimately decide, whether the product is counterfeit or not. If the answer to that question is positive, the product is moved to the blacklist. Blacklist itself will be stored on Blockchain.
simplyBrand will offer a SaaS for business, through which all the third parties, be it brands or enforcement agencies (or any other) can access the services for fee.
Report/Verification process
Verification process plays a crucial role for the platform. Users will be able to report counterfeit products in two possible ways. They can either report products that they bought (and unfortunately received a counterfeit), or simply report counterfeits from the internet without purchasing the product.
Any user can report up to 5 purchased counterfeit products per month. User has to provide a lot of additional information about the purchased products in order to be eligible for the rewards.
On the other hand any user can report up to 30 URLs of the counterfeit products uncovered across the internet domains. If the user falls below 60% reporting accuracy on an example set of ten products the work done will be receive a “failed” status. “Failed work” will be explain in the “Rewards and Rating” section.
Active users will be receiving example sets of reported products. It’s up to them to decide, whether the product is counterfeit or not. In order for any given product to be labelled as counterfeit, the community needs to find 75% consensus. If the user finds himself with less than 70% accuracy after a finished example set, he won’t receive any rewards and his work will be labelled as “failed”.
User roles
The platform will basically support 3 user roles on the platform. How can those roles contribute to the system and how does the system reward them in exchange for their work or money? Let me break that down for you.
Human Participants
Human participants are the individual users of the platform. They play a crucial role for the AI for they provide learning samples to it. They can invest their time and knowledge in order to receive rewards by performing the report or verification actions. They will also have access to the blacklist so they can make educated decisions when deciding which E-commerce platforms to choose when buying products online and what is the possibility that they will receive a counterfeit.
Brands
Brands will be able to access the SaaS for a fee. They could get access to the database of all the products and the blacklist. They can join forces to create a B-2-B whitelists. They could gain a positive image brand, promote their brand through the platform by rewarding the human participants, and so on.
Enforcement agencies
Enforcement agencies could save lot of money because they wouldn’t need to perform expensive E-commerce platform analytics. simplyBrand platform, the AI and the users, would do analysis for them. Arguably, the fee would be much less expensive then if they needed to perform analysis and gather evidence themselves for it would all be stored in the Blockchain.
Rating
Whenever a user performs any task, the rating changes accordingly. Every user starts at rating 80. Whenever a task is fulfilled successfully, the rating grows by 1. After the first “failed work” the user receives -2 points. For the second “failed work” the user receives -4 points (and so on).
One of the most interesting aspect of the project is going to be explained now. Whenever user reaches rating 75, he will get suspended for a whole week (meaning he cannot perform additional tasks). When a user gets a suspension 3 times, he gets a permanent ban and won’t be able to move his funds ever again. This is the first time in Blockchain history (or maybe just for me personally) where it’s so easy to get banned and lose your tokens! It’s supposed to be a defensive mechanism against those that would try to game the system.
Summary
simplyBrand looks very promising. There are not many Blockchain projects that would try to tackle E-commerce market segment and brands themselves with their money. The whitepaper is very well structured with minimal amount of redundant parts. Many of the algorithms were revealed. The author also made sure not to use technological buzzwords, but instead always provided more information – mainly how is any given technology going to be used and for what purpose. Very plausible goals are supposed to be achieved which, for me, is the most important positive part. simplyBrand chooses to roughly punish its bad actors that would want to game the system by locking out their funds if they do not perform which is a very interesting approach that is yet to be battle tested.
DISCLAIMER
The information contained within this post shall not be taken as a financial advice. I am not a financial advisor and none of your investment decisions should be carried out based on any information presented here. You can lose all of your money by investing. The information presented in this article is for educational and entertainment purposes only.