Off-line Retail is still the king when it comes to capturing consumer spend. It is a 25 Trillion market and accounts for roughly 90% of the retail market. Even on-line retail giants like Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent and others realize that this trend is not changing anytime soon and are investing heavily in brick and mortar shops and setting up Hypermarkets.

However, unlike on-line retail, where merchants have complete access to consumer data, the data in off-line retail is fragmented between merchants (who have product and amount details, but not customer details), payment systems (like VISA, Mastercard, Amex etc., who have complete customer details, but not what product was purchased) and other service providers. Apart from this, where possible corporates use and monetize consumer data, but consumers never benefit from their own data.

There is a huge opportunity to bridge the gaps in consumer spend data, merchant and advertiser access to this data, rewarding consumers to share their data and ensure no breach to privacy and protection laws for such data. This is exactly where Carry comes in.

What is Carry

Carry is a platform that is connecting merchants and consumers using blockchain. It has the following on-chain and off-chain components:

1. Carry’s blockchain
1. Carry transaction database – for housing transaction data generated and uploaded by consumers
2. Carry Smart Contracts – supports issuance and use of tokens (CRE and BT) on Carry Protocol
2. Carry’s APIs that connect 3rd party software to blockchain
1. Carry Wallet API – APIs for Wallets apps to support Carry protocol and let consumers manage their cryptocurrency and control transaction data and privacy settings.
2. Carry device API – APIs that allow devices at stores to support Carry Protocol and provide function to pay with Cryptocurrency and send payment data to consumers wallet.

What Off-line Commerce Issues is Carry Solving

When it comes to connecting merchants and consumers in the offline retail market, some key issues are:

• Merchants don't have complete consumer data for targeted advertising. They are spending heavily with online giants like Facebook and Google or providing flyers and coupons to random consumers without any idea of conversion coming from them.
• Consumers have no control over their own data while corporates use and monetize it without any benefit to consumers. Very soon corporates will not be able to do so as the privacy and protection laws are getting stronger and more consumer friendly.

For the benefit of both consumers and merchants Carry is creating a platform (and protocol) that provides the following:

• Make consumer king of their own data by sharing transaction data to their wallet and allow them options to monetize it by sharing with advertisers (not breach of privacy as data is only shared if consumers wishes to do so).
• Protect consumer data through anonymity shield and data encryption.
• Empower merchants by accepting both crypto and fiat payments
• Build merchant and consumer relationship by facilitating loyalty programs
• Enable targeted advertising for a high conversion rate
• Help advertisers reward consumers directly for seeing ads. Some of the huge ad revenue saves are shared directly with consumers who are the most important people for advertisers.

Details of the Carry Protocol

• Carry provides 2 tokens - CRE (Pronounced Carry) is the main currency of the Carry protocol. The blockchain is powered by this token. BT is the brand token and Carry provides mechanisms for its merchants to issue branded tokens to customers.
• There is a blockchain where consumers can upload their transaction data and can receive CRE tokens as rewards for doing so.
• Smart contracts that merchants execute for generating Branded Tokens (BTs) and need to pay CREs to Fuel these contracts.
• Consumer Wallets store the transaction data and provide options to consumers to upload the same to blockchain if they so wish to do for gaining monetary rewards from the Carry Ecosystem
• POS devices connect to Carry protocol to transfer transaction data to consumer wallet.
• CRE reward pool for issuing reward tokens to consumers and other players supporting and building the Carry ecosystem
• Service Providers enabling the entire Carry ecosystem.
• Advertiser participating in the Carry ecosystem to benefit with targeted advertising ability.

Value added services

The following value added services will be provided in the Carry ecosystem

• Settlement service provider - To convert crypto payments of consumers to fiat in case merchants don't accept payments in crypto
• Wallet service providers - All consumer data and crypto currency is placed in the wallet and therefore this is important for Carry Protocol.
• Device Service Provider - This is interface (POS) supporting Carry Protocol, between consumers and merchants.
• Advertising service provider - Initially the merchants will be the advertisers, but as the ecosystem grows, there will be advertising agencies that would join and provide this value added service to merchants as merchants may not be skilled to analyze the consumer transaction data to identify target audience for advertisers.

The following diagram will illustrate how the Carry Protocol may work once launched.

Tokenomics

• Name of Project - Carry (Carry Protocol)
• Name of token - CRE (and BT for branded tokens)
• Website - https://carryprotocol.io/
• Total number of Tokens - 10 billion CRE
• Total tokens in Sale - 4 billion (this includes both private sale and public sale)
• Current stage - Whitelist (as on June 15th 2018).

Since Carry price is not yet disclosed, it is difficult to comment on token valuations.

Carry's Competitive Edge

Carry’s team is the founding team of Spoqa, which is behind Dodo Point, the No. 1 tablet based loyality platform in Korea and Japan securing 10,000 merchant partners and 15 million customers and are tracking $2 billion worth off-line payment data annually.

AS Carry’s flagship partner Spoqa will use its existing merchant and consumer base to scale Carry Protocol into the market. Also since Spoqa already has 10K devices already installed and its only a matter of software update to those devices to support Carry, Spoqa will also join as the device service provider in the Carry Ecosystem.

Disclaimer - I am only sharing my limited knowledge and for the sake of
knowledge alone. This is in no way an investment advice or legal or taxation
counsel. I am not qualified to provide any of these. This is also not a
recommendation or encouragement to invest in cryptocurrencies or ICOs