My TL;DR: A platform that adds crypto payments and tokenized loyalty to existing Spoqa terminals, tapping into an existing offline retail space of 15 mn customers in South Korea and Japan.
E-commerce is very convenient for both buyers and sellers. Buyers shop from the comfort of their home or mobile phone, while sellers cut costs with physical locations, employees, maintaining stocks, and so on. Furthermore, the digital footprint of shoppers stays with the vendors, allowing them to know their customers and be able to proactively meet their demands better, thus selling more. Classical ‘brick and mortar’ retail, aka offline shopping, amounts to 10 times the volume of ecommerce (US, Dec 2017), but has a hard time collecting info about their customers. Carry Protocol wants to fix that, by implementing “offline” crypto payments and tokenized loyalty in retail stores.
They do so by tapping into the Spoqa terminals, already used by 15 million customers in South Korea and Japan. How it works: buyers in retail stores pay at these terminals with cash, card, CRE (native token), ETH, BTC, and get rewarded CRE as loyalty points. Optionally they can sell the transaction info, anonymously, and get targeted offers from vendors looking at that info. The platform can manage also custom tokens from partner stores - i.e. ABC Sushi Bar Coin: users can receive those in their wallets as incentive to go redeem them in the sushi bar.
What I like:
- Spoqa has 15 million users in Korea and Japan already, both markets ripe for such a product
- For advertisers: online advertising "experience" for offline purchases
- Facebook partnership means private access to messenger ads and fan page integration, something they claim their competitors don't have; Kakao partnership means direct interaction between stores and customers
- Good team, backed by Hashed
- There are rumors of a very large cap. Some figures have been flying around, the team is yet to officially confirm
- Application will be live only in the second half of 2019
Overall, I like this project a lot. Its biggest pluses are the existing network of terminals in Korea and Japan, which means it will see immediate adoption and use, which will mean real money behind the token price evolution. Before this can be considered an attractive investment, however, the team needs to decide on attractive token metrics. There were some figures floating around which placed the cap at 65.000 ETH for 40%, which is way too much. Officially the cap is yet to be decided, and might end up reasonable, which will make it very interesting and will change my mind. In the meantime, I will avoid the Carry Protocol ICO.
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