https://www.loom.com/share/ebfdbb46492444f89790e0de9e3133b6
Most marketplaces rely on 3 core pieces of infrastructure to manage transactions on their platform: Identity, Escrow, and Reputation. Identity is both solved by wallets, but also other identifier like ENS, Farcaster IDs, and other Soulbound Tokens. Escrows are an open effort where early examples are beginning to emerge, but have yet to be tested at a major scale today. What we wanted to focus on was reputation data, or what we believe is the trust lubricant for economic activity on the Internet.
Airbnb, Uber, Upwork, eBay all use reputation data to help economic participants identify parties that they might want to work with. Airbnb listings with poor reviews are less likely to get guests and earn less than listings with better reviews, this incentivizes a set of behaviors from those Airbnb hosts to make sure they are catering quality services to guests. Similar effects work in other internet marketplaces.
Additionally, these marketplaces use this data to hold their participants hostage to their platform. Once you’ve gained enough reputation liquidity on Airbnb it doesn’t make sense to list on other platforms, because this will be good enough to get you revenue. But, platforms don’t last forever, it’s common especially in non-US markets for marketplaces to fail and completely erase their reputation data. This harms people who rely on these platforms for earning a living. Web3, particularly Tableland, can help change this.
Casama uses a smart contract, that will eventually be tied to an escrow contract, that writes verifiable reviews for a given transaction to a publicly readable reviews table. The benefit here is that review writes can be managed by a smart contract to ensure the quality and validity of a transaction, but the data is open for other dapp builders and users to verifiably show their earned efforts across the internet.
Please watch the video for an example of how this works :)