Startup targets Amazon using blockchain tech

What if Amazon’s third-party sellers went into business as a decentralized collective? A blockchain-enabled inventory and sales management tool called Spl.yt boasts all the technological features to make it happen.

To buy something on Spl.yt is to buy it directly from the seller, with blockchain technology keeping things fair for merchant and customer alike. E-commerce sellers list their inventory for sale as tokenized assets on the blockchain, and the same technology instantly settles all payments and records customer feedback.

A robust affiliate program amplifies this decentralized signal by letting existing e-commerce list Spl.yt inventory for sale and collect a cut of whatever sales they make. By displaying its collective inventory to more people, Spl.yt can initiate more sales for its users without any risk of overselling — because this inventory is tokenized, it remains in perfect sync with reality while eliminating risk of affiliate fraud.

Deployed at scale, this system could cut Jeff Bezos out as middleman on lots of online purchases.

Despite non-mainstream cryptocurrency technology at its core, Spl.yt is backwards-compatible with today’s more preferred, conventional payment mechanisms. Your old-fashioned credit card purchase on Spl.yt will activate a third-party process that turns it into a blockchain-verified cryptocurrency transaction. Users who never want to touch cryptocurrency can still participate in Spl.yt’s vision of e-commerce.

“The end goal is to move society to become full adopters of cryptocurrency. Our job is to create the bridge to get there from today,” said co-founder Cyrus Taghehchian. The company plans to more fully educate people on topics like crypto wallets and private keys with aim of one day migrating everyone from fiat to cryptocurrency. We’ll see how it goes.

Spl.yt is currently operating in a closed beta with a small number of sellers before flinging its doors open to the e-commerce public next year. “We plan to go live with 20 highly selected e-commerce companies that will support each other in broadening their customer reach,” Taghehchian said. “From there, we will be scaling our protocol to host upwards of 400 marketplaces.”

Even Amazon had to start somewhere.