Oya Protocol

We built a decentralized product listing tool and affiliate program for Oya, a decentralized e-commerce protocol. By decentralizing product listings, we remove a key lever of control from big marketplaces and give power back to the community.

Sellers can list their products once and sell them everywhere, avoiding platform lock-in. Payments and orders are handled on Ethereum with smart contracts. Affiliates can pull products from a deep pool of decentralized product listings, dealing with sellers directly and building their own independent stores.

These components are the foundation for a fully decentralized end-to-end e-commerce community. Future integrations include community governance, verifiable reviews, and counterfeit protection.

We use IPFS, Textile buckets, and Fleek for our product listing service, Piñata for CID pinning, and Filecoin for archived product listings. Smart contracts on Ethereum handle payments and order management.

By the way, we have two GitHub repos:

https://github.com/oya-protocol/hackfs

https://github.com/oya-protocol/oya-market

Our product listing front-end is on hackfs, and our smart contracts are on oya-market.

MetaMask tells us the Ethereum addresses of our users, which can be used as parameters for creating order smart contracts. We're also using these addresses in our product listing front-end to show different features to different users: buy button for buyers, edit button for sellers.

Our initial plan was to focus on the seller pain point of being locked into one or two platforms because that's where they have all of their product listings. As we developed the decentralized product listing tool, we realized that we could also enable the creation of new marketplaces through affiliate programs, since payments and orders are handled by the same smart contracts no matter where or how the product is sold.

Our smart contracts now accept CIDs for product listings so that arbitrators can use historical product listings as evidence in case they need to settle a dispute between a buyer and seller. More importantly, the existence of a pool of decentralized product listings allows for the creation of "mom and pop" online stores created and run by affiliates. Affiliate fees automatically paid through smart contracts give them an incentive to create the stores and market products for Oya sellers.