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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.