Time flies when you’re having fun, and indeed it’s flown for us! A quick roundup of our progress to keep you posted as we continue to beaver away on our MVP.

Over the past three months we’ve been busy building our demo ecommerce app and spent conference season sharing it with everyone we could think of who might be up for giving us feedback. We also gave two talks about the project, describing our architecture, motivations and goals at EthPrague and EthCC. Our EthCC talk included the demo of our ecommerce app for merchants and showcased how it integrates with Hamza, the first multi-vendor marketplace to build on top of our decentralized protocol.

If you used our point-of-sale app at EthRome or EthDubai, you’ll notice that the interface in our new demo looks quite different now. To transform the Mass Market point-of-sale into an ecommerce application, we developed a self-checkout process that allows customers to browse a shop and purchase items independent of an in-store clerk. In the process of designing these new screens we underwent an accidental re-skin that was somewhat unintended, but not unwelcome, although we did end up being a bit squeezed for time as a result!

While in Brussels for EthCC we also co-hosted a ‘DeCom Dinner’, though the skies sporadically opened up that evening and our dinner got drowned! Still, some good connections were made and we’re excited to be in discussion with several new projects sharing various aspects of our long-term vision. Many of these we aim to integrate with across different axes as we build out our infrastructure over time.

On the topic of connections and vision - we were recently chatting with Ryan Berckmans, who shared his insightful chart categorising 5 types of checkout on a spectrum of cryptonativity in ecommerce:

As pointed out in Ryan’s tweet, Mass Market is building a Type 5 system. Our goal is to create a privacy-preserving decentralised and permissionless inventory management system with order data and payments verified onchain.

A protocolised and permissionless ecosystem means the elimination of platform risk and sky-high take rates, and we believe that such a system will unlock a whole host of new crypto-native tools for the next generation of merchants and customers to use. These include the ability to track provenance, fractional ownership of items and stores, token-gating, self-sovereign identities and ownership of personal data, ultimately forming a crypto-native ‘composable commerce’ ecosystem, where merchants can plug-and-play with a variety of technologies, creating a tailored commerce tech stack uniquely suited to their business.

However, table stakes in the commerce industry are high and we’re planning something of an architectural revolution, so we’ve got our work cut out for us as we progress.

Post-EthCC the four of us gathered in London for a mini-hackathon and planned out our next cycle of work. While there, we implemented a new and abstracted StateManager. This library forms a layer between the transport messaging client and the UI or anything else that needs to interact with the state of a shop. Our priority for the StateManager is to improve the developer experience for those building with Mass Market. It does this by providing a single API for interacting with the state of shops. You can check it out here https://github.com/masslbs/Tennessine/tree/main/packages/stateManager. The first consumer of the StateManager will be our own UI, but we hope others will utilize it too.

Over the coming period we will implement a fluid merchant onboarding experience as well as functionality for basic product variations and an improved order management screen that allows merchants to track orders as they come in and get fulfilled.

This will take us up to Devcon in November. We have no plans for a talk or demo at that event, but we’d love to meet and speak with you if you’ll be there so do hit us up on email if you’re going (or even if you’re not)!