The Future of Transactions on Web3 with Justin Ban

All right, everybody. Today I am joined by Justin, the co-founder of Boson Protocol. How's it going, Justin? Great, Steve. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to get an update. I mean, we talked, probably feels like a year ago about version one and everything that you were working on. So I'm eager to hear how things are going. But before we get into that, let's

give a little bit of groundwork and some context for listeners out there. What is your background? Like, what was the origin story? How'd you get into Web 3? Sure. Well, I mean, like really briefly, I, you know, I sort of started out doing like a physics degree. I ended up working for a company called Priority Pass that sold like vouchers for things like airport lounges. I

didn't rely on an intermediary, it didn't rely, you know, on a trust any trusted third parties. And that was a fundamental, fundamentally unsolved problem in blockchain. So I did the insane thing and left kind of job leading, leading a global platform and started out on researching whether this problem could be solved or not. And here we are. Nice. And for the people who have not heard

of Bozon Protocol, could you give us just a high level 10,000 foot view as to what you guys are trying to do and then we'll kind of unpack it. Yeah. So Bozon enables the decentralized exchange of physical things without an intermediary. So you can think of us as like Uniswap for e-commerce. You put money in and you get a physical item. You can't just buy out

all your money back. And you don't need to kind of, you don't need to trust anyone to do that. Got it. Got it. Nicely, nicely simplified down. Now let's get into the fun, the fun metaverse conversation here. So let's talk a little bit about what you guys have done over the past. Let's say, you know, year or so wouldn't, when you've been executing on a lot

of different things. I've been following the project since we first talked. But let's talk about like what, what's leading you to? A version two. And where are you guys at? Sure. Well, I mean, the thing is leading us to version two. I mean, version one is pretty much designed by me and my co-founder. Yeah. We're, you know, we're pretty proud of it. We run a whole

lot of like commerce metaverse fashion week. And, you know, it's, you know, for us, certainly really important achievement. But version two is built by this kind of dream team that we assembled. Of about six or seven PhDs, some of, you know, protocol designer is from the Ethereum foundation. We've got like Dr. Primavera, the Philippi from Harvard, blockchain, legal scholar designing all the, all the legal innovation

and some of the world's top aim. There is so really assembled this incredible team to, to kind of correct this fundamental breakthrough that enables smart contracts to execute. Real world commerce, you know, without requiring kind of centralized or trusted intermediaries or, or sellers. And so V2 is what we call like an optimistic protocol. So it's far more efficient than V1 because if nothing goes wrong, it's

just a kind of clear path through the protocol. The whole protocol is built in such a way that it just, it gets involved when there's a problem. And so this means that it's, you know, well, it's quite similar to like e-commerce where Amazon or, or, you know, if you, if you shop online, if you do nothing, the seller gets paid, right? And I'll protocol operates, you

know, pretty similar to that. However, you know, it's when things go wrong that the protocol kind of kicks in, incentivizes both parties to behave fairly. And, and kind of handles those kind of, you know, things like disputes. Got it. So further, the beginner out there that's trying to figure out how to make ROI, let's say in a virtual world like Decentraland or Sandbox or Spatial or

any of these ones out there that are, you know, kind of taking market share now. Could you walk us through what the future of that looks like? I'm really kind of getting a visual or with like a visual of five years, 10 years out, what that looks like. Sure. I mean, well, as a compromise of sort of, looking at those on a read and under what

the, let me address the metaverse one as well, but I guess the most fundamental economic one, a way of viewing those on is. Okay. At the moment, all of the physical items in the world that could possibly be exchanged commercially, if either not online or if they are listed online, they're listed within siloed proprietary like e-commerce sites. It's not like I can Google what's the capital

of, Botswana and, you know, find that just, you know, on the internet. And so what happens if you list all of those items in a common interoperable format and put them on this new web three. And so that's what what both on can do it can tokenize all of these physical assets as sort of redeemable NFTs. And then what happens if it's as easy to exchange

those assets and actually do the physical redemption. Because it is for me to kind of go and download a file on the web. And so, you know, that is why, you know, we, that potential is why we kind of got, for example, world economic forum technology pioneer stages, because if you can make, if you can make all of those physical assets, that liquid and that, you

know, easy to exchange, that's a completely different type of economy. It's, it does the commerce what went one of the things that we can do. And so that's the kind of the big, the big view of, of those on. But, you know, you asked specifically for, for the metaverse. So, you know, if we're sort of wandering around the metaverse and you want to buy from a

suitonomous seller or, you know, one of the principles certainly of sort of web three metaverses is that we can't, we don't actually need to know who's behind the metaverse. And these avatars, and we don't need to know who, you know, the actual kind of real world identity is of everyone. Well, that is a difficult environment to trust transaction. And so, you know, you've got a couple

of options. One is you're going to trust the seller, okay, which is okay. As I mentioned, not always the case in sort of a metaverse. The other would then you would trust an intermediary, right, which is like, so we're going to have a web three decentralized metaverse. We need like Amazon or eBay to do any commerce. So, when we've already seen like Facebook charging 47% to

do commerce in their metaverse. And that's not really the kind of vision yet. If we're creating this new digital reality that we're all going to live in, are we, and it's kind of decentralized and trustless, except for commerce, right? It's decentralized trustless environment, but Amazon and Facebook take 50% of all commerce. I mean, that's just like, it kind of breaks the ideal, right? With Boson, you

don't need to trust an intermediary or the seller. You could be wandering around the metaverse and see this kind of large. Burple squirrel avatar, the office to sell you a birkin bag or a vase or a, you know, and with Boson, you could try to commit to that transaction. You know, you could put your money in and trust that either you would get that physical item

or you would get your money back. So, it's like a trustless. So, it's like a real-world player. And so, it can plug into any metaverse, it can plug into the real world. And just acts in the same way as like TCP, IP does in exchanging data. Just reliably enable you to exchange that data without the need to trust other parties. So, yeah, I mean, the metaverse

and gaming are massive growth markets for us. But actually, we've probably seen 10 times attraction just from not selling it. It generally comes in free from developers selling, shutting things twenty years. All these different ways of for us, everything is because it sucks that we are the same metaverse as the day of new ready-run lasts. So, both companies or artists are scaring our feedback. And while

we're in, therefore we all can buy against this redeemable NFT and then can trade, transfer or flip this NFT like any other NFT. Maybe it passes around to two or three different people and then finally some of them are deems. Interesting. So seeing a lot more traction on the tokenized tokenization side, that's quite interesting. And I think you guys did a huge event that I actually

talked to somebody, I interviewed somebody from it, Metaverse Fashion Week in Decentraland. Is this like a... Could you walk us through what an example there was where I go into Decentraland, I see something that I want? Bowson allowed me to actively purchase that item. Correct. Was that how you guys were positioning? Yeah, so you know, we have a lot of those space in Decentraland. We had

a sort of a street with lots of different brands. So some of them were three brands like Aurora, St. Dress X, and then some web 2 brands like Tommy Yilfiger and HoGurl and some NFT brands like Dead Fellows and Fang Gang and stuff. And so we had a lot of fun. Each one of them had a store. Some of these stores were like really kind of

like themed and had like quests and games and like highly highly stylized. But essentially each one of these stores would then be selling like physical items. So you'd see like a 3D rendering of physical item and you could go up to it and interact with this kind of purchase panel that meant you could put some crypto in and get back this redeemable NFT. And do all

of that with a fully 3D environment. And yeah, I mean, we kind of continue to develop that theme for V2 of the protocol. We will be launching and partnership with another company. The ability to buy stores or vending machines or kind of, you know, where that will, that you buy as an NFT. And then you can install these. Within many different metaverses, it will render into

lots of different metaverses where you've got this kind of pre-designed store. You can fill with items and then just kind of the commerce has already plugged in. And so, you know, you can imagine having these kind of meta stores in sandbox, to Roxos, the Central and Spatial or, you know, all selling physical items as NFTs in the metavers. Nice. That's really cool. And with regards to

the metaverse, it's set. I love to get your take on this because I think a lot of a lot of people listening may have heard the word used. They may have seen something like maybe even Metaverse Fashion Week. But I want to get, you know, your perspective on where we're at now with the virtual world. And where you can kind of see things going with the

Metaverse as a whole. Sure. I mean, where we are now is, if you want to see the metaverse, you know, it is pretty early. It kind of reminds me of, you know, Web 1 when Amazon started selling books, right, which was too early for it to be kind of, you know, properly viable. But exactly the right time to get in, if you want to be a

category leader. And, I mean, even we had a fireside, but Tommy Hill figure at a metaverse fashion week. And he was like, well, now is the time to get in. And, you know, because, you know, if you want to be a leader, you get in first. And so, you know, where we are is the technology, you know, that we're still at that very much shaping stage,

even for infrastructure is being laid down. But the category leaders are being established. And in the same ways we saw with Web with, you know, Amazon taking over the likes of Barnes and Noble. And then with Web 2 where we, you know, you and mobile, you saw this sort of thing. And then with the sort of changing of the guard in terms of who were the,

who were the sort of leaders in, in certain industries. The metaverse is doing exactly the same. So the people that are getting involved now are going to be the leaders and market leaders of the future. But, you know, there are, there are multiple visions of the metaverse of where it could lead. I mean, one vision is, you know, mark my view. It's like a bird's vision

of meta. And, you know, for me, that's a pretty dystopian one. If you accept the thesis that we're going to spend increasing amounts of time in a digital reality to have that reality owned by an organization like Facebook, it's charging 47% tax on commerce and with that background and history of sort of, you know, kind of data violations and stuff is a pretty scary one. But

the vision of having lots of, lots of players, you know, lots of Web 3 protocols and projects all collaborating to create this kind of ecosystem where everybody has got, you know, a kind of opportunity to create and share value. Is the vision of the metaverse that me and, you know, a lot of our kind of Web 3, kind of community. I'll try to make a reality.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of different visions for what this could be. And I like that you guys have really laser focused on commerce. How big just pie in the sky. Can we go into here? How big do you think commerce within the metaverse could actually be? Well, I think the metaverse is the next iteration. So, the metaverse is going to be a part of

the Web. It's like we went from Black and White TV to Colour TV because Colour is more real. We've gone, you know, we're going to go from flat screen, like Web experiences to fully immersive 3D experiences because it's more real. You know, it's like maybe when they went from Black and White TV to Colour people would go, well, why do you, there might have been a

few people, well, why have you, what's the point of a Colour TV? Right? And there's not many people now. And there might be people now. So, well, what's the point of the metaverse? Well, because reality is 3D and immersive. Why would you collapse reality? Right? And not have the most real rendering of reality. So, if you kind of accept that, the metaverse is going to be

our digital reality. And a flat screen is going to be like a Black and White TV. Then the answer is everything. All the entire economy will be run. The metaverse will just be the digital aspect of reality. And you will just see that, you know, that we see now with people, I mean, every human has a digital shadow and there's a big part of us now.

And what Bozon does is connects this digital reality. Where all this kind of commerce is going to be running. It's not going to be much. Dollar bills flying around in 10 years. Right? All going to be digital in the metaverse. What Bozon does is it connects the metaverse and the real world. You do all this kind of commerce in the real world in the metaverse and

redeem it in the real world. So, the vision for Bozon is to be like the TCP, IPF commerce, to be the layer, the base layer. Upon which all commerce is conducted. That's been our vision from day one. It's starting to sound a lot less ridiculous to people. Yeah. Yeah. It's getting, it's getting real, I guess you could say. So, the last question here is what you're

excited about. You've been in the space for a long time. You've seen a lot come and go. You're building actively. And I always like to take a second to ask you when you get up in the morning, what is it that you're checking your phone for? You're super, super excited about outside of Bozon Protocol. Well, outside of Bozon Protocol, I have a, you know, a four-year-old

Dorsa, who, yeah, I mean, that's my, that's my kind of core reality. Bozon Protocol is my obsessive hobby that I love, but my core reality, where my head and my heart is, is, yeah, I would, pretty, feed pretty firmly on the ground with the family and a daughter. So, yeah. That's kind of what, what matters to me. But, you know, in terms of, in terms of

Bozon, we've just gone through, I mean, we've just been in the space. And there's deep R&D mode with all of these kind of PhDs and super coders for months and months and months and months. And you sort of get so focused on that. They become your reality. And then suddenly it's finished. And you start talking to partners. And it's just like the lights have just gone

on in the room. And suddenly, you know, and the great thing is, you know, of course, there's been lots of sports. There's a lot of people working on this and lots of hard work. And that's super important. But, but you can't underestimate luck and timing. And we're launching this B2 of the Protocol into a market where, you know, you've got that kind of shop, shopify and

token gated commerce. It's just kind of created this zeitgeist. But we are like fully decentralized tokenized commerce protocol. And so the market is just absolutely hot for this. You know, kind of so many Web3 projects playing directly into the protocol. We've got kind of big brands and Web2 kind of marketplaces kind of connecting. And, you know, it's just, yeah, it's great. We've worked, we've got very,

very hard for this. And we'll take hard luck that we're launching into a market that's just, you know, this is the zeitgeist. Nice. Yeah. And I have a two year old at home. So I know the importance where you can categorize what's really important. And it's fun to have both of those worlds working together. And that's really cool. So those are all the questions that I

have for you, Justin, where can people go and learn more about those on? Well, a good place to start is the website, which, which will be that there's a new website launching about a week or two. But also you can catch us on a telegram. You can also follow us on the channel, Bozon Protocol and keep up with all the latest developments. And there are, you

know, as of next week, it's just going to be this kind of drum beat partnership announcements. And you can do that on Twitter, at Bozon Protocol. Very nice, very nice. Well, wherever you guys are listening on iTunes, there's Spotify, the links that Justin mentioned will be in these show notes. But thank you so much for coming on and giving us an update. Justin, this was really

great. Thanks, Steve, for the pleasure. Thank you.