Carry Protocol - Bringing offline retail online with blockchain

Problem with offline retail

Let's face it, offline retail needs some serious disruption. How a retailer manages and makes their data is of increasing importance to their competitiveness in a tough industry.

With retailers facing smaller margins and larger competition on an international scale, customer data can make or break an offline retail business.

Retailers are using their data to:

1. Manage their supply chain more efficiently.
2. Design better products.
3. Target customers more effectively.

A data-driven decision can also lead to smarter retail strategy. In fact, data can help retailers to confront many of their biggest obstacles.

The Data Silo problem

One of the key challenges for retail is that data gathered across a business often exists in silos. Information from different sources is stored in separate systems, they are often not compatible with one another.

‘Information from different sources is stored in separate systems, they are often not compatible with one another.’

WTF is Carry Protocol

At its heart, Carry is an incentive mechanism that drives consumers to merchant stores that participate in the protocol. The whole system is geared toward enabling consumers, merchants and advertisers alike.The business model anchors on 4 parts:

1. Carry Device API — The Carry protocol creates a set of API that connects 3rd party software to the carry blockchain.
2. Trading Customer Data — Trading consumer’s purchase history and transactional information.
3. Branded Token — Customer decides whether they want to share their transactional data for carry token with the merchant which can be rebranded by merchants.
4. Smart contract — Carry protocol has a smart contract which will secure and issue token on the carry protocol.

Transaction data will be stored in the Carry Blockchain. Customers can only access these data via the Carry Wallet. Token transactions are handled via the smart contract automatically.

How it works?

The transaction is performed with her phone by scanning a QR code on the tablet by the counter.
Sarah is a young female business executive. She goes to Floria — a local Florist that participates in the Carry network to get a bouquet of flowers and pays a portion of the bill with CRE tokens which she has accumulated over time. The transaction is performed with her phone by scanning a QR code on the tablet by the counter. A portion of the CRE is converted to Floria branded CRE token which Sarah can use to purchase items from Floria in the future. Data sharing would still work if she had chosen to pay with cash which reduces friction for adoption.

Get paid CRE tokens for sharing past transactions.

When Sarah walks out the door, she can choose to receive advertisements that are targeted to her in exchange for CRE token. By choosing to receive Ads, she trades her transaction data with local advertisers anonymously and securely. Based on her past transaction, similar profiles also purchased items in a nearby fashion accessory shop — she goes to check it out.

Value Proposition: Merchant, Consumers, Advertisers

Carry protocol is solving the problem for 3 key parties: Offline retail merchants, consumers and advertisers. The table below shows the value proposition of Carry protocol.

Team & Advisors / Partnership

I gotta say, the team is pretty impressive. Top management has vast experience in the Brick and Mortar rewards sector. Business team has a lot of corporate experience in the internet startup space including Rocket Internet, Mckinsey, SK Chemicals, Yahoo, Daum Communication and Naver.

The tech team is no slouch neither, JC Kim(CTO) was listed as Forbes 30 under 30 — Creator of South Korea’s first Twitter SMS client, 10+ years of dev team management experience. With other high-level backend developers such as Hong Minhee and Swen Mun. Strong technology will certainly be the leverage for this team.

Partnerships

Carry Protocol was started by the co-founders of Spoqa — Carry Protocols parent company. Spoqa is South Korea’s largest brick-and-mortar rewards platform. Spoqa already has customer-facing tablets installed in 10,000 stores across Korea, for use with their Dodo Point loyalty service which is great for immediate CER token adoption.

Advisory Team

Both Simon Kim and Ryan Kim are onboard as the key advisors of the Carry protocol project. Simon and Ryan are both partners Hashed. They are well known for investing in the next Blue Chip blockchain projects.

Hashed is one of the best blockchain investors in the world. Early investors of ICON, Bluzelle, Ontology and many other great blockchain projects.

ICO Details

Details regarding the ICO is available on their website.

Analysis: Positives

1. Parent company - Spoqa has massive partnerships onboard such as Kakao, Line and Facebook together with 50mil customers. They also claim to have 60% Korean market share for loyalty points market.
2. Customer facing business - Carry will be launched on top of the tablets installed in more than 10 thousand stores in Korea.
3. All-Star Team - Team has great target market experiences. A mix of talents including business, product development, blockchain experience, designers and project managers.
4. Korean loves crypto - Koreans contribute to the highest trading volume from the crypto exchanges. They are also viewed as the forefront adopters of the blockchain technology.
5. Backed by Hashed - Hashed has a strong track record for investing in successful projects in the early stage such as ICON.
6. Staking mechanism - Branded tokenisation for merchants. This encourages merchants to hold the CRE token which will then stabilise the price in long-term.

Analysis: Negative

1. Super early stage — With no MVP yet and main-net only ready by Q1- Q2 of 2019. The Ad Management System is only ready in the 1st half of 2020. This project will need some time to see true commercial adoption.
2. Very high cap — For such an early stage project, Carry is asking for 48K ETH (approximately 23mil USD) which is very high compared to other similar projects. Some argue that the distribution of tablets to the stores they are partnering with justifies the amount raised.

Final Thought

Using Cryptocurrency and blockchain as a reward system is nothing new. We have yet to see any project implementing it successfully. It really depends on the team's execution and whether the market is ready for adoption. Nonetheless, we think this has a good chance of success due to the Korean demographic for adoption, a very promising team, successful parent company — Spoqa and backing by Hashed.

Disclaimer

This is NOT Financial advice. I am NOT a licensed or professional financial advisor. I fully encourage you to do your own research and make your own choice when making any financial decision.