Oya Market

Oya is a decentralized ecommerce protocol owned by its users and run by smart contracts.

Online sellers suffer from high transaction fees from traditional ecommerce marketplaces and payment processors and are forced to pass those costs along to their customers. They also have little control over their own business when orders are going through a centralized service.

We've built the foundation of a protocol that manages orders and payments through smart contracts and surveyed actual online sellers to develop a persona with detailed and realistic pain points. This persona is also informed by our years of experience as Amazon sellers.

We've also developed a high-fidelity design of a decentralized marketplace and a user flow for integrating the protocol into existing online stores running on platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce.

Our naive implementation already has lower estimated fees than traditional ecommerce marketplaces for items over $30, and we think we can bring gas costs lower to be price competitive for cheaper goods. However, the savings for high-end online sellers are significant and a good catchment to draw in real users.

In addition to the basic order functionality, we have coded a basic token rewards system that could be integrated into a DAO for managing and upgrading the protocol. Oya tokens are earned by using the protocol as a buyer or seller, not from a token sale, putting real users in control of how the protocol evolves. Fleshing out the voting and upgrade mechanism would be the next key step.

• buidlerevm and Mocha for testing

• OpenZeppelin 3.0 library for smart contract boilerplate

• Solidity 0.6.x for smart contracts

• Chainlink + EasyPost for order delivery confirmation

• High-fidelity UI designs and architecture in Figma