Spacelens – Decentralized eCommerce platform

[spacelens]

Short product url: https://www.spacelens.com

Abstract

Spacelens is a marketplace and semi-decentralized eCommerce platform. Users can use Spacelens to buy and sell physical products, digital goods, and services. The Spacelens platform also offers a digital and crypto wallet which is directly integrated in the marketplace. Users can access Spacelens through their computer or on a dedicated and native mobile app. The objective of Spacelens is to allow anyone to transact goods and service directly between each other, without the control or supervision of a centralized infrastructure for their commercial transactions. This allows for exchanges to happen more freely, provides an even playing field for all, and lets financial settlements happen directly between parties. 

If you are interested in trying Spacelens, you are welcome to sign up on your computer or mobile. We will constantly update this thread to add information on our latest releases, which we do usually every week.

----------------------------------------------Additional details-------------------------------------------

The Spacelens team has a long history of developing products and services and leveraging different marketplaces to distribute and sell brands and products. In the last few years, we have been increasingly frustrated with the control and power that centralized marketplaces had and the impact it could have on our livelihood. We spoke with many buyers and large vendors in various communities over the years who share the same concerns an experience the same pains.

Centralized marketplaces can today unilaterally make decisions which can rapidly break a company. Sometimes these decisions are justified while at other times, they are not. It’s all pretty subjective (and that’s the problem). They will often remove listings for the wrong reasons and vendors will have to spend an inconsiderable amount of resources and money to restore their listings. Funds would get blocked for one day to another. Fund reserves get set without prior explanations. Some vendors have preferred access making it hard for competition to truly exist as it should. Commissions are high and often difficult to understand. Ratings can be inflated and it’s hard to know the history of a vendor or the veracity of an offering in an accurate manner. The list of woes a centralized infrastructure creates goes on and on. It’s an imperfect system.

For individuals, employees, families, and organizations that rely on these marketplaces for their life subsistence, those issues are real, stressful, and borderline unfair.

The development of the blockchain allows today for the next evolution of eCommerce and provides a framework for a better solution. The decentralization of the information, the capability to provide real transactions transparency, the ability for individuals to really own their work and businesses, and the capacity to own your own funds, opens the door to new features and benefits for all parties involved in commercial activities.

Spacelens is currently developing a semi-decentralized infrastructure, trying to bring as many technical pieces of a full marketplace experience on the blockchain. We do it by stages and take into account the cost for users, performance, speed, and ease of use when choosing what system to use. With the rapid development and improvement of blockchain technologies, we believe that our entire infrastructure will be decentralized down the line. We develop our own blockchain technologies and prioritize our development based on the additional privacy and freedom those features can provide to our community. When we have no choice but to rely on a centralized infrastructure to provide specific aspects of our service on our technological stacks, we do so in a manner which minimize its implications in the overall platform. 

The capacity for an individual or an organization to have full control of their funds is also critical to us. No one should control someone else’s funds, dictate the amount of reserves required, or decide when one should get paid. This is one of the reasons why we are developing a unique crypto wallet which not only allows for users to hold their own private keys and have full control, but also allow for commercial transactions to happen directly between parties, and that can leverage the Spacelens ecosystem to offer unique functionalities that are useful on a daily basis.

Commercial activity is a key aspect of our daily life. This impacts what we consume, what we buy, what assets we hold, and how we work, and relate to others. Whether we talk about products or services, a decentralized eCommerce platform should allow users to freely create, buy, sell or exchange these goods or experiences. A decentralized platform should also provide granular transparency, and let people be accountable to others directly rather than have an authoritative organization trying to constantly monitor and control what is happening.

We also believe that the next generation of products that consumers want to use will be increasingly digital. The digitalization of the economy will impact much more categories than just the services, as it mostly did in the past decades with the development of the Internet. We see a future where digital goods will be more than a store of value, even for remote categories such as luxury or fashion where physical products have still a predominance. The shift to a decentralized economy as well as the development of technologies which will allow for this rapid digitalization of goods to happen is an important aspect of our vision. We aim to develop the new technologies which will make that shift as seamless and simple as possible.

As with every project, our focus will continue to evolve with our new developments and the guidance of our users. The support and feedback we have been receiving has been precious and we are truly thankful.

We love engaging with our community on what matters to them as we gradually pass to a fully decentralized infrastructure where those decisions will be fully directed and relied upon by our community.
 
To be continued 

Find more at https://www.spacelens.com

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[eckmar]

For a "semi-dencetralized" app, you are collecting a lot of information. From app store page:

Data Used to Track You
Identifiers

Data Linked to You
Contact Info
Contacts
User Content
Search History
Identifiers
Usage Data


Also question I just love to ask, why do you need custom token for this? Its not doing anything that can't be done with eth/btc/whatever other token/coin there is out there.

[spacelens]

For a "semi-dencetralized" app, you are collecting a lot of information. From app store page:

Data Used to Track You
Identifiers

Data Linked to You
Contact Info
Contacts
User Content
Search History
Identifiers
Usage Data


Also question I just love to ask, why do you need custom token for this? Its not doing anything that can't be done with eth/btc/whatever other token/coin there is out there.

Hello eckmar,

Thank you so much for your questions.

Regarding the App Store information, we currently have two components in our application.

One is our crypto wallet for example which resides fully on the blockchain and doesn’t require any information. We have many other features in the platform which won’t need any permissions.

The second component is when we need you to register an account to do certain things such as sending a chat to someone else. There, you can decide, like on most app, to share certain information. Please note, and it’s important, that by default you can access and browse the app without giving any permissions. But for certain things such as uploading a product, we will need to ask you an access (to your photo library in this case) in order for you to be able to upload a picture for example. Depending on the functionality you want to use, the App may ask you for specific permissions and this only when you want to use that functionality.

Now, our objective is to try to decentralize as many aspects of these processes as possible over time and remove as much as possible the required information. For example for our chat, we are developing a new way for you to be able to use the chat functionality without having to register. For listing creation, we are thinking about having as many pieces as possible on the blockchain and separate the other pieces which would not yet be compatible. As we are developing quite an advanced infrastructure, some of these technologies don’t necessarily exist today on the blockchain or exist but are not yet convenient. Our goal is to tackle them one by one in order to always separate personal information with other types of information which can help make the experience awesome (e.g. what are the trending products in a specific location, where is there traction in the marketplace, etc…). We are trying to focus first on everything that has to do with privacy so we can avoid asking you for certain permissions or asking you to share certain information. Over time, you will see that the amount of information needed will continuously be less extensive and will always intend to provide full control and anonymity of each user.

Regarding the second excellent question as well on the need to have a custom token, the short answer is that we want to develop many layers of functionalities on the blockchain and that for many of those, having our own token will be required.

The longer answer is that we envision Spacelens to be a marketplace platform that is fully controlled by its community. We want members of the community to be able to vote and delegate certain decisions. Because we are building an eCommerce platform, we also need to go much further and think about many use cases. For example, creating mechanisms for promotions, rewards, coupons, subscriptions, settle disputes, how do we guarantee authenticity of a product, how do we manage the flow of processing orders, settling specific transactions, invoicing, shipping, etc...
We also don’t want to limit ourselves to products but tackle all the service part. Think about time management, escrows, proof of delivery, and more. We also leverage maps extensively in our platform and want to bring specific of its components to the blockchain. There are no good standards for many of these today.

In order to execute some of these functionalities, we will also probably need to create additional smart contracts that can talk with each other and invent new layers of technologies that will require for our token to have very unique features, often new to this world which cannot be found in the current technological stack or even with existing standards of available coins.

We will try to constantly push updates in this thread, our blog, and our platform to provide all the milestones we achieve as well as sharing transparently what we have managed to bring to the blockchain and what is yet to come.

Wishing you all the best and much more 

[spacelens]

Mobile wallet update
The Spacelens team is happy to announce that its blockchain wallet now allows for all ERC-20 tokens to be sent and received directly from the iPhone mobile app here.

Choose your cryptocurrency
As we continue to develop the unique features of our decentralized eCommerce platform, we also aim to make as many tokens and chains available in an ongoing basis. Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to the cryptocurrencies they want to hold and use for their daily payment and shopping interactions.

You can now also easily switch between cryptocurrencies when searching for a product or service so you can directly see prices in that cryptocurrency when browsing on the Spacelens app.

[spacelens]

Automatic detection of all ERC-20 tokens and more

We are happy to announce today a new release of our Spacelens mobile app with major improvements in terms of functionalities, speed, and design. We continue to focus on our blockchain wallet within the app. We are adding many useful functionalities which can then be used across the Spacelens platform and make an even better bridge between our wallet and other eCommerce functionalities.

More details:

- Not only you can easily track the movements of prices of the global crypto market or the price of any coins directly from your wallet page, you can now also see the impact of market fluctuations on the value of the digital assets you track on your wallet.
- All ERC-20 tokens sent to you are automatically added so you never need to add a token manually in order to see it.
- You can access more timeframes on the charts to see the evolution of different coins and tokens.
- We have improved the flow to send and receive tokens significantly making the experience simpler and faster to use.
- The interface to import existing wallet has been improved for those who already have a wallet somewhere else to make it easy to switch.

We always make sure to talk about security and privacy because it's important. Never share your private keys with anyone and don't save them on any phones or computers. Take the time to write them down and keep them in safe place where no one can access them. Do not lose them. There is nothing we can do to retrieve them. Ever.

What's coming next?

We are now in the process of developing a similar interface for our website during the Summer and hopefully we can release it before September. We are also adding other functionalities to our iOS app which will come out sooner. We will share here the details when it's in production.

If you have an iPhone, feel free to try the Spacelens app here.

[Kakmakr]

I think the strategy of collecting information during the early days of the project and then later removing more and more of these requirements are flawed. First impression is everything...when you are launching an APP or Software that are focused on decentralization.

In light of the Chinese government clamping down on Crypto currencies and the gap in the market opening for more demand for "true" decentralized market places for these people to buy and sell goods... I should seriously reconsider my strategy if I was you. (Go full private or full public... but not something floating inbetween) 

[spacelens]

Thank you so much for the feedback Kakmakr. To be a bit more precise on our approach, we are not trying to collect more information in this phase of the project. The distinction we are making here is between what is the centralized part of our infrastructure and what is already decentralized.

As you know, many technologies, including the development of apps for iOS and Android still require today to use some centralized infrastructures (there is no way around it if you want to offer native apps and not only a mobile web experience). What we are doing is to try to minimize as much as possible the need for information we may collect when using centralized servers. Indeed if you look more closely, we offer already several ways for users to not have to share any personal information or require to collect any data. Many aspects of our app are already decentralized but for the aspects which are not, we are trying to develop our own technologies to do so. In each update, we are reducing the demand for information by implementing innovative ways to handle this modern infrastructure.

An online marketplace needs many technical components to work, ranging from User generated content, the processing or transactions, account management, and so much more. As we are building this platform on the blockchain, we also want to make sure the system is fully usable, and always offer a great experience to our users (if not it becomes a futile exercise). The blockchain aspect in our mind should be something that advanced users can understand from a technology, information, and benefits point of view. For the vast majority of users, the decentralized technology should be as transparent as possible, and simply aiming to offer a better experience and unique features as our community grows in building a scalable and successful eCommerce 3.0 platform.

Importantly as well, this seems to resonate with users across the world as we are seeing a significant increase in usage and on many other metrics in every countries where we have users. As we will always want to offer full transparency on all aspects of our endeavor, we will also soon create a module on our platform to let anyone see what is happening in terms of data and usage in real time.

To finish, we take your feedback at heart and know we will constantly need to speed up that process of decentralizing all the pieces of our infrastructure. The only thing we can promise you is that we are working full speed on it and are actively updating our system towards that goal!

Thank you and take good care.  

I think the strategy of collecting information during the early days of the project and then later removing more and more of these requirements are flawed. First impression is everything...when you are launching an APP or Software that are focused on decentralization.

In light of the Chinese government clamping down on Crypto currencies and the gap in the market opening for more demand for "true" decentralized market places for these people to buy and sell goods... I should seriously reconsider my strategy if I was you. (Go full private or full public... but not something floating inbetween)  

[spacelens]

Additional languages
The Spacelens team is happy to announce that we have now added several new languages to our iOS mobile app.

The Spacelens app is now available in 8 languages:

• English
• Spanish
• Mandarin
• Korean
• Hindi
• Vietnamese
• French
• Italian

NFTs
We are also happy to report that we have added a collectible section in our mobile app which allows to easily see the NFTs that you have in your crypto wallet. We went a step further and created a unique timeline view which allows you to easily see your NFTs in the order to have received them.

This is the first roll-out of the NFTs functionality in the mobile app and we will continue to add layers of development to the NFT aspect of the Spacelens platform.


 

[pawanjain]

I looked into the website and my only comment would be that the categorization is very poor.
Similar products should be categorized in one section so that user can select the section for which he would like to browse the products.
After that, the products should be categorized based on the payment method.
For example if someone is paying through btc then all there should be an option like a checkbox or something which the user could select and then the products would be displayed for that particular payment method.

This would ease out most of the things and will give your website a professional feel and experience.

[noorman0]

-snip-

In the end, you will submit personal information regarding the delivery. It is unavoidable. It just depends on this site whether it has some kind of database to record and store those addresses.

-snip-
without the control or supervision of a centralized infrastructure for their commercial transactions.

How to ensure the legitimacy of the sellers? In general, the marketplace acts as an escrow to secure buyer funds. If the user has full control, does that mean you don't want to interfere with user problems? I've read your WP (p. 7, "Additional protections for buyers and sellers"), but found no explanation of your role as a protector if users have issues, especially fraud.

[spacelens]

Hello pawajain,

Your remarks are absolutely correct and we are already working on the aspect of categorization on the desktop as it is very important. We are finalizing a major upgrade of the website which should be live before the end of the month. We will update here when it is.

In this upgrade, we will let users see all the different categories which are available so users can easily navigate them (this exists on the mobile already and will be transposed to the desktop). We will also let people display the different products price in different crypto currencies and add a filtering per price point so users can easily see different products within a different range.

We will be adding several additional filtering and search options and will describe them fully here as they are live.

Thank you for taking the time to provide this important feedback.

I looked into the website and my only comment would be that the categorization is very poor.
Similar products should be categorized in one section so that user can select the section for which he would like to browse the products.
After that, the products should be categorized based on the payment method.
For example if someone is paying through btc then all there should be an option like a checkbox or something which the user could select and then the products would be displayed for that particular payment method.

This would ease out most of the things and will give your website a professional feel and experience.

[spacelens]

Hello noorman0,

Thank you for taking the time to share these 2 observations.

Regarding delivery, this will depend on how and where the transaction take place. For deliveries of a physical product within a local community, experience shows that these deliveries often happen in person, having no need for a third-party system to receive or store information. For deliveries which require shipments, our intention is to dissociate ourselves as much as possible from that process so the required information would be managed directly between users without specific ties to an existing transaction on our end.

Regarding legitimacy of the sellers (and buyers on some aspects): this is a very critical point. Our roadmap includes an escrow and dispute resolution mechanisms. The main difference is that we believe these mechanisms can be handled by the parties themselves with clear and defined rules set on the onset and don't necessarily need to be managed centrally as the number of use cases is limitless. There shouldn't be a one size fits all mechanism here but the flexibility to let people choose how they want to handle their transactions (with some recommendations to help users take the proper decisions). We also believe that the community can play a better role in dispute resolutions and be incentivized to do so through several mechanisms.  

-snip-

In the end, you will submit personal information regarding the delivery. It is unavoidable. It just depends on this site whether it has some kind of database to record and store those addresses.

-snip-
without the control or supervision of a centralized infrastructure for their commercial transactions.

How to ensure the legitimacy of the sellers? In general, the marketplace acts as an escrow to secure buyer funds. If the user has full control, does that mean you don't want to interfere with user problems? I've read your WP (p. 7, "Additional protections for buyers and sellers"), but found no explanation of your role as a protector if users have issues, especially fraud.

[spacelens]

Upgrade to the Spacelens website app

The team is happy to report a major upgrade to our decentralized eCommerce platform with the addition of new web3 wallets to connect to the Spacelens website.

We have also added several important and new features to our website platform overall. This makes it easier for users to search, find, and navigate existing offerings on the Spacelens marketplace.

These are all the new updates that have now been made available:

• You can now connect with Metamask, Wallet Connect, and Coinbase wallet on the website making it easier to connect to the website with your current crypto wallet. Wallet Connect is an open protocol to connect wallets to Dapps and includes Rainbow, Trust wallet, WallETH, or Gnosis Safe for example.
• We have included in the website app all the different categories in the header so you can easily click on any of them and find related products and offerings.
• We have continued to redesign the product page to make the information easier to read. We have also added more information such as the specific category of each product being visited.
• We have added an easier way for people to switch between different cryptocurrencies when browsing all the different listings on the web (this functionality exists also on mobile). Simply clicking an arrow lets you choose among Ethereum, Bitcoin, SPACE or any other cryptocurrency of your choice.

We will continue to work in the next coming weeks in adding even more filtering options on the Spacelens website app as well as refining certain aspects on the website with additional functionalities.