Singapore headquartered e-commerce firm Qoo10 is set to launch its blockchain-powered marketplace, reports Tech in Asia, December 20, 2018.
The newly unveiled DLT-based marketplace named QuuBe is slated to launch on January 1, 2019. The company also announced that QuuBe would use the native Q* private blockchain crypto tokens as fuel for the platform.
The tokens will utilize smart contracts for every transaction between buyers and sellers. Notably, QuuBe is already available on desktop and mobile in beta version.
QuuBe’s blockchain network is built on the Ethereum protocol. An in-house team of 20 developers based in South Korea built the platform from scratch. Further, the firm has an additional team of 20 people in Singapore responsible for handling sales, marketing, and operations.
Qoo10 CEO Ku Young Bae noted that the platform utilizes a novel revenue model to better serve customers with more competitive prices. Qoo10 does away with the ten percent merchant fee and payment gateway fees usually charged by the traditional e-commerce platforms. Elimination of such fee will help merchants to provide better prices to customers and also foster a healthy price competition.
It’s worth highlighting that QuuBe will allow its merchants to bid for advertising spaces on the website and app.
The South-east Asian e-commerce giant serves customers in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Hong Kong and sees almost six million daily active users. Bae hopes that the platform will also benefit the millions of unbanked people in Indonesia and Thailand. He stated:
“You usually [put your]money in the bank; you wouldn’t put money into a private company’s [mobile wallet]. The company could go bankrupt, they could just change the data, or [money]can be stolen. Unless trust is built, you can’t be very sure that top-ups into the wallet can be the same. Those hurdles are sorted out by blockchain because the blockchain wallet is not something that we can change and access. Only you can access it.”
E-commerce Firms Actively Engaging in DLT
The company has an ambitious target of achieving $1 billion in gross merchandising value by 2020. It will be interesting to see how the firm goes about it considering the use of blockchain technology is still in its early stage and has largely failed to find mainstream adoption yet.
Being an emerging technology with immense potential has made blockchain technology a favorite among firms the world over. BTCManager reported on November 30, 2018, how Amazon unveiled a quantum ledger database and managed blockchain services.
