Carry Protocol: Using Blockchain To Make Personal Data Fair In Our Offline World.
We all shop online in 2018? Who doesn't?
With the growth of ecommerce (sales on online stores have increased by 1.4% since 2016 ) and the collapse of household names like Radio Shack and Toy 'R' Us, you would expect brick and mortar stores to be something meant for the history books by now.
Wrong!
From going to an electronic showroom to get that cool TV to getting groceries from store, the offfline world is still invaluable to retail spending.
Being a 25 trillion dollar industry, offline commerce is quite huge when compared to online and mobile retail commerce (they have market values of 1.8 trillion and 600 billion dollars respectively).
In countries such as China, which have a high online sales penetration, spending in offline stores still accounts for more than 80% of the total retail sales.
As anticipated, O2O ( Online-to-Offline) commerce is really exploding with major online stores acquiring offline retail businesses (remember JD.com's opening of 7Fresh in China and Amazon's astonishing acquisition of Whole Foods at 13.7 billion dollars) thereby showing the significance of offline trade to ecommerce.
Despite its seemingly profitable attribute, the payment system model of offline commerce is fraught with many problems which are attributed to its low levels of technology (yes, some stores still use paper coupons). They include merchants not having essential and complete information about their customers, consumers having no control over their personal data which can be accessed by anyone and advertising methods of the offline commerce industry being outdated and unreliable.
Now, this is where the Carry Protocol comes in to create solutions to the above mentioned issues and makes it a win-win for everyone involved.
How Can Carry Protocol Save The Day?
You might wonder how the Carry Protocol might solve these problems that plague the offline payment system model, well, here is how.
The Carry Protocol offers a platform that helps offline traders to interact better with consumers, enables buyers to have control over their data and at the same time earn revenue for sharing such data. Advertisers are not left out by this platform as they are provided with viable channels of marketing.
Why Carry Is Special?
It basically connects sellers, buyers and advertisers utilizing blockchain technology to help them communicate in different ways and makes them profit from such interactions (trade) which occur on a daily basis.
Carry is designed with two major concepts in mind. The concepts include The Blockchain technology and APIs, which each has components that make Carry effective.
The Blockchain concept consists of, first, a virtual database built on the blockchain. This is the site where consumers store and generate their transaction data. This database is called the carry transaction database. Next is the smart contract component which allows tokens to be used on the platform.
The APIs on the hand include the Carry wallet API which allows consumers to have absolute control over their personal data and cryptocurrency. The Carry device API allows connected devices to enable cryptocurrency based transactions at stores that implement Carry.
Carry: Making Stores Pay You While You Buy.
Yes, you read right.This is what Carry does in layman's terms. Here is a scenario in the real world. Let's say you walk into a clothing store that is a merchant user in the Carry Protocol. While paying the seller, he offers you, let's say 5% of your money back on your next visit to his store.
You agree, noticing the cryptographic terminal at the store (Carry with its major partner Spoqa plan to provide more than 10,000 of these terminals in various brick and mortar stores) you see a message requesting for your phone number and at the same time offering you a certain amount of branded tokens. After inputting your number, the tokens are awarded to you. Remember, this transaction was carried out under anonymity and your mobile device was not needed.
If you decide to share your transaction data on the Carry blockchain from your wallet app, you will be rewarded in CRE (the major token of Carry Protocol).
No Losers In This Field.
As a platform that caters for both sellers, consumers and marketers, everyone leaves with incentives that make the effort worthwhile.
Tokens are awarded to customers that patronize stores and upload transaction data on the Carry platform. Furthermore, it provides an easy way for buyers to manage all coupons in the Carry Wallet App. It also protects the monetization of your data by third parties.
Merchants who support the Carry Protocol will have the following benefits:
Increased sales as a result of the reward (tokens) offered to consumers. Research shows that 84% of consumers are more likely to choose stores that offer rewards to shoppers.
Also, store owners are able to an idea about who their customers are and can also conduct surveys with relative ease with data obtained from the consumer.
Flyers are outdated and not everyone likes having one. Viable marketing channels are created by Carry Protocol for advertisers(who usually start out as merchants). The protocol also helps advertisers track the effectiveness of ads placed.
CRE and BT : Tokens of Carry Protocol
The tokens on the Carry platform are the CRE, the main token of the Carry protocol and the BT also known as the branded token.
CRE will be used as a means of payment for goods and services by consumers at stores that support the Carry Protocol. It is also used to reward consumers when they share personal data over the blockchain. CRE is open to inflation and such inflation is used to reward the buyer/consumer.
BTs or branded tokens very much (like Kodak's KodakCoin) are created by the sellers using CRE on the Carry platform. Its validity and value can also be set by the merchant. BTs are used to award coupons or loyalty points by merchants to customers to encourage future visits. They can also be used to conduct surveys to determine the levels of how products and services supplied by firms meet or exceed the expectation of the customer.
Does Carry Have Any Partner(s)?
Spoqa is a startup based in South Korea and is a major partner with Carry. It has up to 7 years experience in developing mobile marketing solutions. Dodo Points, its loyalty program is installed on terminals in about 10,000 locations around the country.
Spoqa now offers a variety of services to different businesses both small and large scale. These services include targeting advertising, marketing automation and an analytical customer management interface.
Spoqa terminals which are tablet devices connected to the seller's POS making it an ideal platform to support the Carry Protocol with just a simple update. With Spoqa having 15 million customers and having terminals in numerous locations already, integrating the Carry Protocol into these terminals gives Carry easy access to the offline market. Partners like Spoqa will be rewarded with 25% of the 10 billion tokens available.
Will Carry Face Any Competition?
Competition is a must in a very business and Carry has some.One of which is the California based start up known as Nucleus Vision. This startup creates a platform which offers rewards in the form of nCash (at the discretion of the retailer) to customers that work into a store or make purchases at such stores. Data gathered are used by store employees to know more about the spending habits of consumers.
A major difference between both startups is the number of locations, they operate in. Carry Protocol will be operational in more than 10,000 locations while only 10 stores support Nucleus Vision. With these numerous locations, Carry will have maximum publicity and quicker exposure than the other named startup. Unlike Carry's founders who have 7 years worth of experience in the retail industry, the Pitti brothers of Nucleus Vision have no proven background in retail.
Roadmap
Meet The Carry Team
The team that founded Carry have prior experience in the retail industry and believe they can bring major strides in the brick and mortar retail industry. They include as follows:
Grant Sohn, a Stanford University trained economist with more than a decade of experience in retail trade. He is a co-founder of Spoqa.
Richard Choi is the founder of Carry's major partner, Spoqa. He also has a solid background in the retail industry. And other notable members of the team that have all come together, bringing their ideas to provide a solution to the payment system model of offline commerce.
Is Carry Worth The Hype?
The final question comes up, is this startup worth investing in? Well, with the track record of its founders and partner, Spoqa ( its 15 million customer base and expansion overseas is quite impressive ) Carry is sure to be a big name in the retail industry within a short period . I see the Carry Protocol as a promising project, one worth watching closely. Who knows, Carry might be the next big thing globally in the offline retail world.
ICO OVERVIEW AND TOKEN DISTRIBUTION
TOKEN SALE: 24TH JUNE – 8TH JULY
TICKER: CRE
TOKEN TYPE: ERC20
TOKEN PRICE: 1 CRE = 65,000 CRE (Pre sale bonus: 15%)
FUNDRAISING GOAL : 48,000 ETH
TOTAL TOKENS: 10,000,000,000
AVAILABLE FOR TOKEN SALE: 40%
To learn more about Carry Protocol, visit the following links for more information
SOCIAL LINKS
TELEGRAM
ADDITIONAL LINKS
I like this project but I don't consider investing in it at this time. I think lots of projects that will be listed now will go under ico price.
It’s not a fact, but getting the tokens in exchanges at a much lower price isn’t a bad idea, but you might not get it below ICO price again.
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Retailers and consumers will really benefit from this awesome project.
Very informative piece @gwensarah1
This project solves so many issues faced by we the consumers, would be using this product more often.
Now things just got easier for everyone