HandyCon 2025 | Day 2 - Hamza Market - YouTube

Transcript:
(00:00) [Music] hello everyone uh my name is Bo I work on haza and decom which is a decentralized e-commerce protocol and today I'm just going to talk preaching to the choir a little bit about why decentralized systems will win why they haven't won up until this point and what are some of the challenges that we need to overcome in building a more robust decentralized ecosystem so first I'll start just asking the question why were all the tech billionaires at Trump's inauguration why do you have Jeff Bezos
(00:44) sitting at the same table as him why are they all standing behind them and there's probably a lot of reasons why this is the case but I'm going to highlight one quasi conspiratorial reason why I think this is the case and think what you will about the Trump Administration or the Biden Administration not really here to take a stance on either of them except to say that during the Biden Administration Lena Khan they had of the FTC and the FTC which is the Federal Trade Commission in the United States was
(01:13) suing most of the major Tech platforms for monopolistic practices and using using antitrust law going after them pretty aggressively and successfully sued a couple of them a lot of people thought this was going to result in Google having to sell off chrome BR the Chrome browser portion of itss business breaking up portions of its business but when Trump was elected uh there was a shakeup at the FTC as as there was in a lot of other places in the US government and specifically Andrew Ferguson is now the the chair of the FTC and he said
(01:47) specifically that he will be reversing Lena con's anti-business agenda and instead focusing on fighting wokeness and conservative censorship on like social media platforms so they're not going after big Tech anymore for monopolistic practices and that leads me to uh just the story of my father um so my dad is retired now and in his retirement he's just started like buying and selling collectible coins I don't really get it but it gets his goat and he loves it and so like more power to him but as he goes to eBay anytime he
(02:24) sells a coin he's getting a 133% sales fee he's also getting a listing fee um he's also having to pay for advertisement to push him higher and higher in the platform and he's sort of at the lives and dies by these platforms it's where the buyers are it's they they sort of control his access to the market in many ways and so he doesn't really have a choice in this matter and this is the case for a lot of sellers like out in Amazon world and on eBay or whever they just have no like choice or no no
(02:57) say in what their fees are and they don't really understand what the fees are going to and where are the fees going right like certainly there is a portion of the fees that are going to development costs and up up updating their front ends and doing market research and so on and so forth but a non insignificant portion of those funds are also going directly to Super Pacs that are lobbying for regulatory capture to make sure that these monopolies are never actually broken up and that they continue to exert more and more power
(03:28) over all of our lives and so what is the answer and again this is the part where I might be speaking a little bit to the choir but we think that the answer is public goods protocols and Federated application layers I think everybody here is probably familiar with what that looks like but to paint a really simple analogy this is like roads and brick-and-mortar businesses right like the road is the protocol by which you travel to a business the business always sort of looks the same it has some of the same features but they be different
(04:00) in their individual instantiations and so you travel in your car over the road protocol which is a public good which is maintained by a system of Taxation and costs you nothing than sort of like other than the implied costs of using it so why hasn't this model if you are familiar with things like mastedon mastedon is another example of something that Embraces this sort of like public goods infrastructure and Federated front-end model why doesn't it work for so social media why haven't we seen one
(04:32) of these social media companies really challenge like the dominance of of meta or or Twitter or anything like that and I think it comes down to to two things first of all it was like a fundamental misunderstanding of the business model um maybe not a fundamental misunderstanding but uh an inability to to replicate the business model so the business model of the social media platform is that there's a bunch of users that are creat data that all the time they're taking all that data and selling it aggregating and selling it to
(05:06) advertisers but um decentralized social media companies were never really able to do that they couldn't get that metal middle step done where they got every all the users of the social media platform together got them to pull their data and then agree to sell it to some advertising company and then everybody like gets paid as a result never really happen second is it's like a a op option problem right so you really social media platforms have dominance because they can get so much data together it to sell
(05:39) to advertisers and when you start like a lens profile and show up and there's like no one there and none of your friends are on it because it's just Niche like crypto influencers then you're never going to get the sort of critical mass of data that you actually need so that you could get people together and sell it to um an advertising firm and you know start start recycling the money back into the system so what about e-commerce e-commerce is a bit of a different problem because the business logic of it
(06:09) is very clear and it doesn't require anything other than individual peer-to-peer transactions where some fee is being taken as a result and so the business logic actually can be extracted from e-commerce protocol into an e-commerce protocol and then people can build front ends that make use of the Core Business LS that have been extracted from from that that like business right but it's not as if we're the first person to try this and so why has it gone wrong in the past and I think it's a combination of two I also
(06:43) think it's two things I think one is generally anybody who was trying to do decentralized e-commerce was either launching a token and not a product so they were just like launching a shitcoin and not trying to actually come up with a robust decentralized system or system of governance or anything like that which is really we think necessary uh to having these sort of decentralized Institutions or it was just a problem of user experience and this is a common problem across web 3 it's a common problem in crypto using wallets is
(07:18) difficult it's hard to onboard people anybody who's already there there isn't enough people who are already bought in to get that sort of like critical mass so you have to overcome a lot of ux hurdles so they were just over complicating a pro process tokenizing this and nfing that and we think it's like a little bit more simple than than all the crypto words that that people say so so this is our sort of um a diagram for how we've decided to tackle the problem like I said we have like a decentralized call or we've extracted
(07:53) the business logic into a protocol and we think that these are sort of the four core functions of any e-commerce Market Market Place you need an escro system you need a predictable and trusted dispute resolution over that escro system you need a way to maintain a product catalog and to moderate that product catalog and you also need to be able to settle disputes over that prod product catalog whether those disputes be in the more sort of philosophical larger sense of what what should and should not be sold and or on a brand
(08:27) level right so like where one brand says hey we should be the only ones who are allowed to sell this product and they shouldn't be able to sell it and then finally you need some sort of data hosting and indexing right because if you have this like sort of um Federated application layer where anybody could come along and bu build a Marketplace you don't want to lock them in and uh host their data here you want them to be able to cach the data that's hosted somewhere else but this needs to be done
(08:55) at the protocol level as well and so these are sort of the things that are the the apps should be responsible for and can compete over what is your wallet experience like what is the marketplace UI how do you curate the the database of products that are listed how do you allow sellers access to to the protocol so on and so forth right so you can create a place for people to compete on on those levels without allowing them they can also charge a fee on top of whatever the protocol feed is but um but you want this to be extracted so that no
(09:29) one Marketplace becomes dominant and can Lobby for control so on and so forth I will say to give a little bit more breath to this these are quite sticky issues and I don't really go into it here but one you know thesis for like another talk should be that the problem you can look at dispute resolution as like sort of a faximile of justice and product catalog moderation as sort of a deliberative or Congressional process and the problem is not having instit I don't think it's that like we don't
(10:02) typically consent to our institutions and we don't generally have any say in the decisions that are institutions make but you when you're designing like marketplaces you don't really want you know you want people to have the freedom to create Silk Roads if they want but you also want some way of imposing the reasonable limits on on Commerce in in ways that people can agree to and so the these processes here of like what is Justice look like and how do we decide on whether or not we can sell slaves or
(10:34) like sell drugs um which people will generally have like very different opinions on that has to also be like sort of transparent and responsive to to the community that's using it so that's that's at least the attempt that we're we're trying to make here I also think that like there's a couple of web three superpowers that we don't that we talk a lot about but are things that should be more intely embedded Within These like decentralized systems we make and first it's just like account abstraction right
(11:04) it should be easy to to access these websites it should be easy to make a oneclick transaction and we need to leverage like the technology that we've been building for the past like three or four years in order to make it easy for people to to use applications right and um and so any Marketplace that that accepts crypto but doesn't Implement a reasonable like sort of abstraction no gas when you're making a creating an order being able to buy with a credit card but then having a wallet created in
(11:37) the back end being able to claim your wallet right if you have to have a hardware wallet and trust yourself to to hold it and everything like that those are things that should be should be should exist the application layer but are something that like crypto should do going forward and building our applications we should be using things like dii Primitives um so so when an escro account is created we should be able to like swap for a usdc for instance and generate yield treasury should be generating natural yield in
(12:10) predictable and Safe Way like 5% is is not is nothing to like write home about in terms of like what defi yield can be but if if there's a treasury that's holding like just raw usdc um then people are like missing the the opportunity of like truing businesses like this and being able to exert some governance over the composition of Treasury assets is also something that like is huge and should be used a lot more in in these like public protocols especially where you're Distributing ownership to people
(12:45) and leads right into like protocol governance right like um we should be Distributing um tokens and power to people just for using our applications and then we should give them some say over you know core system uh components now that said it's like it shouldn't just be one token one vote I think we need to be a little bit more nuanced about our approach to these decentralized systems so we should use things like hats protocol we should Implement more elections and have terms for for people to carry out jobs so that
(13:16) the people who need the power to execute decisions actually have that power and so you don't run into the huge problems that we have with like General voter apathy but if people choose to to let their voice be heard then then they should have that power um and that's again just a power of of web free of the web free ecosystem and it's a permissionless AI playground and so when we're modeling out token interactions and and the way these like decentralized systems work we sort of don't care if
(13:47) something is an AI agent that's interacting with the system because we embrace the philosophy of like design it such that if an agent is acting in a way that is beneficial to the ecosystem then it sort of doesn't matter whether or not they're human there are places where we should wait decisions or wait actions by like a metric of humanness but it doesn't mean that we should discount Ai and limit its ability to to take actions within the ecosystem so in the context of e-commerce for instance being able to
(14:20) enable AI agents when you say you're talking to like chat GPT or whatever your like chosen AI system is and you say hey I need toilet paper can you order it from me or can you order it for me it should be able to just like neatly know click into a Marketplace propose the Buy in say like a multisig transaction and then it should come back to you and say hey do you think is is this good can can we buy this and you should be the second signer right and soing AI to do things without giving it too much power to to execute especially
(14:52) when it comes to like Financial transactions on your behalf uh is another thing that is enabled by this sort of like trustless and permissionless EMP structure and especially around platforms that we've already created Hey long and short of it is no one's coming to save us and that we we have to build decentralized systems and decentralized institutions to to fill in and provide alternatives to people um because otherwise it's just more of the status quo which is monopolistic practices no privacy as we
(15:23) just heard a lot about and more command and control from like wealthy Tech Elite so yeah that's why we're building dcom and Hamza yeah feel free to visit us at h.m Market take a look at what we're doing if you happen to be running a deepin project we would love to sell any sort of deepend node infrastructure and yeah feel free to reach out to me or Mike and we can talk to you more about it but yeah with that I'll open the floor to any questions people have hello Bill how are you hi I'm well I just
(15:56) wanted to comment that we're not the first d the a decentralized e-commerce platform there was a a platform which some of you may know it's it was called open Bazaar and the characteristics of it was that it was peer-to-peer transactions with privacy and anonymity and that disputes in transactions were settled by moderators who were part of the community we're progressively striving towards those ideals of of what it means to be a decentralized e-commerce platform but but we started out pretty much centralized for for strategic
(16:33) reasons to to to eventually get there and be able to nimbly move to that to that model yeah no I mean like we're we're trying to progressively decentralize I mean it's I think that's the nature of like decentralized businesses is that there's a period at which you have to just like sort of move fast and make decisions and these protocols them should aify over time right so there should be like for instance a Dev Guild that can update smart contracts and the conditions under which the dev Guild can Dev Guild can
(17:07) update smart contract should become increasingly owner as over time right I I really like the high and Ry models Ry specifically like what they called the ungovern model or GB governance and the idea was okay like you set up the system and then you take away your power to change it over time as as you test it it settles into a good stable State another question Bo is there any specific instance of hns hns integration to to ham to the hamson marketplace are we using on any one particular component I believe H&S
(17:46) domains um yeah H&S or like H&S doid shows up when you connect your wallet but and yeah you can send payments to to H&S IDs but but payments are automatically filled in uh so yeah other than other than sort of the display name I don't think anything do that I think we do have plans to allow people to maybe make some subdomains for their stores using their H&S domain you know obviously Mike is really really deeply involved in the project and so he's he's pushing us on H&S integration so yeah
(18:21) there's there's certainly plans to continue to integrate it you mean in in being able to to allow people to own their the data on their stores Port it to other domains and such well so again it's like their their data lives at the protocol level and so they can move it from from front end to front end if they so choose right it's not locked into Hamza it's like it lives at the dcom level and so yeah I mean like there's nothing that prevents us from creating a linkage between the hsid and and the
(18:53) like store data so that when they want to import it to a different front end they can just prove ownership of their H&S domain or something like that I see let me check the questions there's there's one how do you feel about decom having to interact with real world infrastructure that is inherently not private or decentralized for example mail service comes to mind yeah so it's it's like a really difficult problem when we're talking about like being physical products and the Privacy that
(19:25) or like the cimity that you can achieve with like web GRE and yeah I mean some of it is like simple hashing but like other parts of it are like you sort of just have to trust people we do and and like you have to like at a certain point you have to provide your like address right like if you want an item you know deliver you kind of have to provide your address now we don't care what address you provide and probably allows PO Boxes but mostly we're facilitating a like peer-to-peer transaction between a buyer and seller
(19:58) we're giving seller access to a larger market you know more more buyers and we're giving buyers the assurances that they have like an we have an escos system and that there is dispute resolution over that so it's not a pure peer-to-peer transaction or at least with a little bit of oversight but yeah you do want to do things and and this is one thing that we're trying to integrate a lot is the like source of funds masking um so possibly passing uh transactions through like something like Oxo if you guys are familiar which is a
(20:25) privacy pool technology it's a derivative of like tornado cach um because you don't if so like if I initiate an order with a seller I need to share my address with that seller but I don't what like if I have $10 million worth of ethereum or Bitcoin or whatever that you don't want the seller to then see your wallet balance because like you just gave them your address right and so you know some of that's some of that's simple some of that's a little bit harder and so yeah how we do like sorts
(20:57) of funds masking when we're pass passing it into the escra contract also something that we're working on but yeah it's like it it's tough because we can't just build a p pure like private system at a certain at a certain point some some information needs to be shared if I may add to that there are some Freight forwarding services that allow you some to have some privacy in the sense that you can like or you you can place your address into a sort of a mailbox that's not your real address and the freight
(21:27) forwarder handles it routes it back to your real address for you that's also an option yeah I mean like at that point you trust like the the question is always like who do you trust who do you trust exactly yeah especially when when we're talking about Real World Systems right and in that instance you trust the freight forwarder right not to you know and and you're you're creating a a break in the information Trail right so the seller doesn't know where you live they just know where the freight forwarder is
(21:57) but they do know maybe like some information about like how much you're holding in your account abstracted wallet right so not all of that information is going to be able to be eliminated but as much of it as possible will be but then yeah if you trust a freight forward then then there you go but yeah there's another question B by Helga can you buy the token do you have tokens we do not have a live token but we're moving towards a token launch and so I think to token launch likely by the end of the year but yeah yeah that'll be
(22:29) the the dcom token and yeah more information will be coming about that soon um and yeah it seems like the way you would make this work a lot of iniz reputation brand kind of like the original I mean reviews are still around but you can tell that they're so distorted on most Market places so it's it's going to be yeah I mean kind of like those eBay sellers that have sold like 50,000 products right they they don't want to ruin their brand that's where an ID like a H&S ID might come into play yeah I
(22:59) mean yeah certainly I mean like what do you attach your reputation to I mean it could be anything but yeah absolutely could also be an H&S ID right and yeah I mean I don't know if H&S ID comes with any sort of inbuilt reputation metrics is is there something like a GitHub passport or any sort of humanness score that is with an H&S ID no I don't think in the same way that that you're asking but there is the fact that it's auditable you can see the entire history of where it's been or where it uh and
(23:33) then you can also do a lot with txt records which can be like things you can tie on to tie on to a domain which yeah but it's a little bit out of my scope if I'm honest on a technical level oh no wor I mean yeah it's like it's it's certainly possible to use an H&S domain and yeah and to see the history of everything there I think what we in terms of reputation yeah I mean what we care about most is is like reviews obvious viously but how many how many transactions have you done what is the
(24:02) dispute percentage of those transactions how fast are you delivering products that th those are like you know typical things that go into reputation score and then yeah that can all be tied to someone's H&S domain if they choose to Connected allow me to clarify that we we also support as well as physical products we also support digital ones so people can buy and sell physical products as well as digital products that's just a a clarification sure if we let's see where we at on time here I think we we have a
(24:38) little bit I see I see gift cards are an option here um gift cards are an option yes is there any gift card arbitraging gift card for Bitcoin or gift card for ethereum strategy here or is it one one for one is that I believe right now it's one to one I I would have to it looks pretty one to one but it always gets interesting with the gift cards but yeah I mean it's it's it's possible to um yeah it's it's not an Arbitrage opportunity I don't think unfortunately but it is a way to spend
(25:17) crypto with real world or spend crypto in the real world although I think we are um I don't want to I don't want to say too much about it but U we are looking at like Solutions like nois pay and and their like physical card and seeing what we can do with that in terms of like if we're creating a wallet for someone already it's already like a smart wallet how can we link that to to like an actual card being able to transact in the real world yeah no it makes it makes a lot of sense it's very
(25:49) cool and I do think yeah I do believe that irwins irwins pins shout out to the legend are on already on the site that's true rugs drugs will be coming soon I all right any other questions from the from the audience oh there we go SEC oh yeah like secondhand items for example is that yeah any reason not to yeah no I mean I think um our philosophy on it is to be permissive and then to have a dispute resolution process right in fact it sorry well in fact one of our transactions was a used car that is true that Mike purchased on on hamson
(26:29) yeah so yeah it is possible no yeah much anything yeah I think I think we're not trying to be Amazon we're not quite trying to be eBay we're trying to enable like peer-to-peer transactions but also um brand have the infrastructure for Brands as well but that's that's sort of the beauty of it right is like if we're building a protocol that can handle any sort of arbitrary kind of transaction marketplaces can build specific uh front ends can build specific ific marketplaces that cater to like
(27:00) secondhand items or cater to deepend products or cater to this that or the other thing can also integrate with things like braster and replicate things like Facebook Marketplace in other social media sites so very cool all right we have anything else here think anything else you wanna you want to add Jose yeah one of the beauties of Hamsa one of the beautiful things about hamsa is allowing people all over the world to transact in cryptocurrency where they don't where in some countries as you may know it's not so easy to for people to
(27:39) be banked in USD services so that's it'll open up the the world of Commerce to to niches that would otherwise not be available on Amazon so that's a pretty interesting use case without a doubt without a doubt yeah I see the there's a few a few stable stable options here and and you have kind of the main the main wallet choices so there's no reason for somebody not to not to be able to convert their pesos or rails or or whatever to what they what they need to buy buy what they want it makes it makes
(28:12) a lot of sense the the dispute resolution system and I'm sorry if I missed it earlier but is there anything anything on that like I guess it would just be like a chat right like what you would actually interact with yeah I mean so the plan longterm is to do sort of like a community note style dispute resolution um so allow people to sort of stake in if they want to stake a small amount of the decom token just to to to be verified as a judge and then they get to sort of all of a sudden see cases it'll be anonymized versions of the
(28:47) cases so like there won't be any information given about like uh the specific parties like wallet addresses or anything like that but but any information that's been given by either of the parties and then the idea is that you just let a lot of people rule on it you wait their rulings by a combination of humanity score and then also like sort of correctness percentage and in this case it's not like objective correctness it's just however many times they've been on the top of a decision and so you start to get this like judge
(29:15) reputation over time and then after a period you allow settlements to or judgments to to settle like that so it's a it's a more Community form of Justice rather than having just like one single Arbiter that's been appointed by in any individual credit yeah the anonymizing sounds really cool plus you're gonna have different languages different stuff yeah yeah all right I think see if anybody has like a final question here but I think that I think we got about five minutes until until the next chat we really we really
(29:46) appreciate the time this was awesome we'll have to take a look take a look do a little bit of shopping and um five minutes we'll start talking about mask privacy browser and and we'll go we'll go for from there sweet thanks for having me everyone Tom thank you thanks everyone it's a pleasure your identity online should be yours unshakable Untamed censorship resistant with dox you are Limitless no middlemen no restrictions just you dox your identity your rules [Music] this event wouldn't be possible without
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