Tradenet

Tradle is building a decentralized blockchain-based business network. Our long term goal is to help Internet morph into a Tradenet. Out first product is P2P Verifications.

Verifications

When you trade with people online it is important to know a bit more about them before you give them your money. Since the birth of the Web, we have relied on product and seller reviews. It is time to go 5 steps further. Marketplaces like Alibaba do identity and address checks, and even check the seller's ability to fulfill the orders. But their service is centralized, not transparent and not audited. The quality of these assertions can not be assessed and thus it leaves the buyer wary of entering into a commercial relationship, slowing down commerce.

We are creating a Verifications network for user and object claims about themselves. Unlike existing authentication services, the network will help with the kinds of claims that are essential to the emerging P2P commerce models. Tradle aims to help users find answers to the following questions:

• B2E: Am I hiring employees with verified certifications? Am I hiring a person with a verifiable medical degree? Where has the driver passed his safety classes?
• B2C: Am I selling a service to a confirmed US citizen? Can the address and phone number be verified?
• P2P marketplaces: Does the car I am purchasing have verifiable repair and maintenance history? Does the artwork I am looking at have a verifiable chain of custody?
• B2B: Does the seller have verified capacity and credit records? Does the producer have the verified legal, environmental, and quality compliance records?
• IoT: Does the device have a verified identity? Are device readings trustworthy based on certified calibration records?

Our expertise in supply chains, specifically in decentralized business networks, based on Semantic Web ideas helped us realize that the blockchains are a foundational data sharing (transactions, not files) and trade coordination layer.

Tradle bridges this gap with a verification network based on the use of the blockchain and offers the SDK / API service for easy integration into mobile and the Web.

Goals

• Commercial. Government forces businesses, like banks, to institute Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) programs. It is a burden for businesses and irritates their customers. We offer instead a way for anyone, individuals or companies, to make money on assertions.

• Privacy-preserving. All data are encrypted by the network participants to be decrypted by their partners, and never seen by Tradle or node operators in clear text. Thus, the participants own the data. The software is open source, so the security can be audited by the community. How it works can be seen in KYC use case: banks will acquire a method of proving to the government that they followed the KYC/AML rules while preserving the privacy of our data. In return for the inconvenience of sharing our data for the KYC purposes, we get assertions from the Banks which we can use in the marketplace, without revealing the underlying private data.

• Transparent. Bitcoin Blockchain today is a staple of transparency. Never before we had a system where anyone could audit all money movements within a bank. But transparency of bitcoin seems to contradict privacy, e.g. it is easy to find out the amount of your paycheck. It is possible to have a healthy balance though. In our prior startup, we have built and run a transparent business network across 20 countries. Every transaction, like order, shipment, invoice, could be seen by all parties participating in the transaction, but by no-one else. This level of transparency drastically reduced the disputes, without breaching the privacy.

Shift from SaaS to DApps

Decentralized Apps (DApps) communicate without a center. Machines on which our software runs are operated by you, your partners, and the independent parties, like in the bitcoin network.

This makes creating apps much harder. Tradle SDK bridges this complexity gap by overcoming the following problems:

• Software distribution. Without a server, where do you download the software from?
• Finding users. There is no sign up, and no sign in anymore. How do you search for other people?
• Direct communications. How do you connect without a server orchestrating?