Jump on board the Mass Loaded Spring!

Welcome to the second ever Mass Labs newsletter: we’re on a mission to Make Crypto Currency Again! and we love that you’re joining us for the ride.

In case you’re here by serendipity: Mass Labs is building Mass Market, a crypto-native commerce infrastructure that decentralizes in-person and online sales and empowers buyers, sellers and developers instead of extracting from them.

Our past few months have been extremely busy and we have a lot of work to report on.

The first bit of news is that we open-sourced our contracts! We have three contracts running on the network, which are as follows:

• The store registry contract is an ERC721 with some extra functions added to allow for managing multiple users. This is where creators and sellers can mint a shop as an NFT.

• The relay registry contract is an ERC721 with no extensions, that will allow us to register relays from the network. It is these relays that will eventually hold shop item listings and route interactions between buyers and sellers.

• The payment factory contract is used to create the counter-factual payment addresses. This is where buyers send their payment for a purchase, from where it is then routed to the seller.

In addition to publishing the contracts, we hired a new developer and got our front-end up and running. She hails from an ecommerce background and had fun getting her teeth into web3, engineering the front-end application to lock-in with the chain via Wagmi. We now have a revamped point-of-sale app which we demoed with stickers and plushies at EthDubai!

Check out our store

To test & demo the app (and get the critical feedback that we rely on) we’ve been busy creating our own in-house crypto-souvenir shop. We have a whole range of crypto-themed stickers, plushies, magnets and brain-twister puzzles for sale - all pocket-friendly and portable for you to experience buying physical items directly with crypto. We flogged these for (nominal) crypto at our booth at EthDubai - with over 100 items sold using our decentralized commerce infrastructure.

In Q2 this year we’ll be building out our skeleton ecommerce app, so stay tuned for our upcoming announcement if you prefer to shop online.

Partnering up ❤️

In other big news, we found our first partner! Fellow visionaries who are motivated by disassembling corporate lock-in and the exploitation of merchants and customers by bringing ecommerce onchain. While we’ve been focused on the underlying protocol, they’ve done a lot of careful thinking about the social architecture of an online marketplace: incentivizing positive buyer-seller interactions and disincentivizing exploitative behaviors to create a safe and reliable user experience. We’re chuffed to have been introduced and are excited to be collaborating on our work.

Looking forward to a Mass Loaded Spring

We wrapped up Q1 of 2024 by attending Pragma London to meet our new partners IRL and testing out our app at EthDubai. We have a packed spring schedule up ahead, building out our skeleton ecommerce app in time for EthCC (also catch our founder Martin Becze’s tech talk here) and members of our team will be attending EthBerlin and EthPrague. If you see us around come say hi - we’d love to meet you there!

Last but not least - we’re working hard to figure out the app’s ‘buyer experience’. If you have a minute to spare and can zip through our very short (and optionally anonymous!) buyer survey you can become the lucky owner of a Mass Market “Pathfinder” NFT!