Proposal: Nation3 Marketplace

An expedient way to spread our presence, in a way that is complementary to the Court, and potentially provide funding for current and future public infrastructure.

Hello everyone, I would like to introduce a proposal to create a new project, “the Marketplace”, for the purposes of funding public works (including N3BI) and funneling users and potential new citizens into our ecosystem among other benefits.

It is clear that the development of the Court is a necessary building block for instituting the concept of a network state. Nation3 has an advantage here in that we are one of the earliest such courts on the scene, particularly considering the flexibility gained by having human judges. It is my belief that we are in a position to leverage this to even further advantage. Given that two of the major goals of Nation3 right now are increasing the number of active citizens and developing a means to fund Nation3 operations, it seems offering additional services to the wider public could potentially facilitate both these goals as well as others.

The Case For A Marketplace

So why a marketplace? Why now? Why us? What might this marketplace look like?

To answer why we would want to build a marketplace, I will first point to the goal of onboarding more active Citizens. By making an organized and trustworthy (more on that later) place to buy and sell services, we create a funnel towards Nation3, bringing more ideologically aligned individuals into the fold and customers to the table. Secondly there is an opportunity to utilize this new marketplace to generate revenue, which would go a long way towards funding public works. Thirdly this marketplace would offer an early testbed for both the sybil resistance strategies we wish to employ, as well as the Court, serving to the benefit of both our clientele and our own systems. Fourthly, we can encourage vendors within the market to provide a number of useful services that will ease the transition of those less tech inclined into Web3 services, widening our potential customer base and furthering the long term goals of decentralization. I would imagine that these services would be mostly online at first, but could easily spread into the physical world as demand for Web3 integration into legacy business models increases. And finally perhaps one of the most important benefits that we would stand to gain is to tie in this market to the Court as the default forum for arbitration. This would increase the need for the Court and help demonstrate its effectiveness to the wider public, building our reputation.

Ok, so all of that said why now and not later? For one, the sooner we expand our services the sooner the cause will spread and build momentum. Next, with the Court coming to fruition soon, having another service to support it may help with adoption rates in these early days. Furthermore, there are a number of other projects that we could address, one of my personal favorites was raised by @okla on discourse, building a better education system. However that project will probably require both groundwork that isn’t entirely in place, as well as extensive development that will take time. Considering that most of the components for this proposed marketplace are fairly well established, or are currently being developed by Nation3, I believe that this would be an expedient way to spread our presence, in a way that is complementary to the Court, and potentially provide funding for current and future public infrastructure.

So why a Nation3 marketplace? Among the current array of markets for Web3 services, there are many choices of people to hire, however few if any of those marketplaces offer significant assurances that the people for hire are trustworthy and reliable. This is where Nation3 would be a perfect fit. By integrating the Court via smart contracts, NationCred and a public ‘trust’ score, while removing individuals that misbehave, we could create an ecosystem wherein users would feel more secure about their dealings. Currently the average person has some limited understanding of Web3, the Blockchain or at least Cryptocurrencies, but does not believe that there is a practical use case in their lives. This strongly resembles the internet in the late '80s and early '90s, and one could infer that Web3 adoption will likely follow a similar arc. By providing access to better, more trustworthy sources of Web3 products we will accelerate this process. And naturally if we provide services that people want in a way that reduces uncertainty, it creates a feedback loop that will drive the further adoption of the marketplace, the Court and Nation3 as a whole.

Now what might this marketplace look like? So this is where options open up, and some decisions would need to be made. The original proposal developed around the idea that basically any Web3 related good or service (within certain boundaries TBD) would be available. However @aahna raised the point that narrowly focused objectives are drastically easier to accomplish than broad ones, and to that end this proposal will contain two models, the broad model and the narrow model, with the narrow model likely expanding towards the broad model as time moves on.

All of the following is up for modification, any details can be changed to better fit the needs of Nation3.

The Groundwork

The market proposed here would largely use established frameworks developed by Nation3, the Court and NationCred, as well as the preestablished aesthetics of Nation3. Access would likely be through a dedicated dApp.

User pseudonymous identities would likely be tied to their wallet address or ENS domain, a ledger of conduct could be tied to this identity via NationCred and a ‘trust’ score could be generated based on relevant factors including; NationCred score, quality and quantity of previous interactions, if user is a passport holder and any other factors deemed useful.

Include as terms of service (or equivalent) that goods or services offered on this marketplace would be under the jurisdiction of Nation3, implemented through Nation3 smart contracts.

If necessary, build in an automated process by which disputes are escalated properly and handed over to the Court appropriately. This feature might offer a way to resolve the dispute without escalating to the Court, encouraging more civil conduct.

The Narrow Model

One marketplace service we could, and frankly should (if we do indeed choose to embark on this project) support and encourage, is smart contract development. By hosting the ability of any person to gain access to a smart contract developer we allow new users to enter Web3 without as much fear of mistakes and overhead of education. This service also meshes well with the Court, increasing external demand for the Court.

A slightly wider approach, while remaining fairly focused might involve further Web3 services such as: access to developers (front end, full stack, etc.), consulting specialist regarding legal or tax implications of Web3 integration, cybersecurity services (contracting to develop, auditing, pen testing or bug hunting) and/or DAO related services (providing the various services that other DAOs might need but do not wish to preform themselves).

In an effort to reduce the overhead and cost of building the marketplace, one possible path forward would be to build our dApp to scrape other sites, such as Dework, for work listings and personal resumes.

One possible way of determining which goods or services to focus on early would be to determine what goods or services inactive members of the community are capable of providing, if we have an abundance of one or two skill sets that could be a place to start.

The Broad Model

In this broader model the goal would be to facilitate a wide range of goods and services to as wide a range of customers as possible. These goods and services would largely be Web3 related, either natively or by integrating Web2 services or functions into Web3. To be included would likely be all of the suggestions made in the narrow model, as well as a greater latitude to create new categories of goods or services in v1 or early v2.

From a long term point of view, the scope of this model could be viewed as narrow compared to what it might be able to scale too.

The Marketplace

Now depending on which model is selected, and the details determined, this will look slightly different. However, many points should be reasonably similar.

From a UI/UX point of view things should be fairly simple. All users would be provided a dashboard to view relevant personal profile information, connect additional wallets and interact with the various features of the marketplace. Users would be able to compare offerings, view metrics relating to the vendors trustworthiness and potentially query vendors. From the customer’s perspective there would be an ability to browse through a list of goods and/or services, as well as an ability to search, filter and sort. From the vendor side, the dashboard could be used to keep track of jobs and manage payment options. Along with standardized job listings there could be a place where both customers could post work to be bid on and workers could post their resumes for interested parties to offer work.

The “Trust Mechanism” that is suggested here is multi-faceted, and while nothing should be trusted completely, we could greatly reduce the presence of bad actors. To ensure a higher quality of interaction both customers and vendors would have a public record of their transaction history, perhaps not a detailed list of what was bought or sold, but a record of if they completed their end of prior transactions to standard, also any complaints could be registered for minor infractions of either customers or vendors. Vendors and customers who act in a fashion that violates the guidelines of our market would be marked as delinquent actors and prohibited from further conduct. While bad actors could create new identities to regain access to the market, the cost of reestablishing ‘trust’ within the system would serve as a barrier, requiring more effort than (hopefully) most bad actors would be likely to exert (based on sybil resistance model by @aahna. Disputes within the marketplace would fall within the jurisdiction of the Nation3 Court, wherein we guarantee a fair and unbiased arbitration.

To derive the trust score we could use something like the following equation…

“T = [(C+1)+(N*.1+1)+(S*.01+1)-(D*.5)]/3”

Where ‘T’ is the final trust value, ‘C’ is to denote whether or not the person is a Citizen where ‘C’ is .25 if they are a Citizen and 0 otherwise, ‘N’ is the persons NationCred score, ‘S’ is the number of successful transactions that person has conducted on our market and ‘D’ is the number of demerits the person has received for bad behavior.

And so we come to the surcharge issue, perhaps the most contentious part of this proposal. There are at least two ways that we might go about implementing a surcharge. The first would be a sweeping approach, all transactions that occur in the market being subject to a small service charge in return for the value add of our market. The second approach would be make the charge optional in some fashion, the seller (for example) could choose to have the charge apply. In either case citizenship could be used as a variable to modify this charge, for example passport holders might pay a reduced surcharge if there is a market wide fee (1% vs 3% or something to that effect).

Funding Public Works

As mentioned above, the marketplace could serve as a mechanism to fund public works. While not the only means to fund such works, this could serve as a scalable way to do so, while creating a value for those who choose to use our services.

Clickable prototype is still a WIP

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Thank you for your proposal, @Alferd.Packer. I think it’s an exciting idea :smiley:

My understanding is that you are proposing a Web3 marketplace, to use the broadest term. A Web3 marketplace for trading Web3 goods/services.

Conceptually, I view the word marketplace as somewhere for trading goods/products, not services. So if Web3 services (like smart contract development) will be a big part of this, should we consider another name for the whole thing?

You raise a fair point, I have used marketplace in an extremely broad way here, and it is more of a place holder until something better could be developed. The best I could come up with was Market3, but I bet someone here has a much better suggestion than anything I’ve got.

@Alferd.Packer Until we have the prototype visualizing the idea, could you perhaps write (in text form) a concrete use-case example of how a trade would work? A brief step-by-step “story” of someone’s initial interaction with the marketplace website, the other party (seller/buyer), the item being traded, item cost, currency/token, collateral involved (if any), trade fees, and how it integrates with the Nation3 Jurisdiction/Court, and how the trade gets finalized.

Something like

  1. Alice, a Nation3 citizen, connects her wallet
  2. Lists an offer of paying ‘X’ for service/product ‘X’
  3. Then Bob, not a Nation3 citizen, sees her offer and …

Just so that we have an example of what an actual trade would look like, to make the solution a bit easier to understand :smiley:

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