Beckn: an open source protocol for decentralised transactions

Abstract: This is seminar will feature a presentation by Sujith Nair on Beckn, an open protocol for decentralized commerce.

​Beckn consists of several specifications for building open e-commerce networks across which sellers and their offers are universally discoverable from any Beckn-enabled app or platform. As a protocol, Beckn is multi-layered, with layer structure and organization resembling that of HTTP.

​The architecture of the Beckn ecosystem has five layers (from top to bottom):

​Application layer

​Network and Transaction layer

​Infrastructure and Security layer

​Certification layer

​Specification and Support layer

​The system has the power to break the silos of proprietary platforms in order to enable interoperability of digital services across platforms.

​From the paper "Beyond platforms — Growing distributed transaction networks for digital commerce":

​Context: We talk of the internet as digital infrastructure; but we leave the building of digital 'rails' and 'roads' to the quasi-monopolistic platform providers that benefit from both vendor and customer log-in. Decentralised architectures provide a number of advantages: They are potentially more inclusive for small players; more resilient against adversarial events, and seem to generate more innovation. However, it is not well understood how to evolve, adapt and govern decentralised infrastructures.

​Objective: This article reports empirical qualitative research on the development and governance of the Beckn Protocol, an open source protocol for decentralised transactions, the successful development of domain-specific adaptations, and implementation and scaling of commercial infrastructures based on it. It explores how the architecture and governance support local innovation for specific business domains, and how the domain-specific innovations feed back into the development of the core concept.

game theoryhuman-computer interactionsocial and information networkslaw and economics

Audience: researchers in the discipline

( chat | video )

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Metagovernance Seminar

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The Metagovernance Seminar invites individuals working in online governance to present their work to a community of other researchers and practitioners. Topics of the seminar include, but are not limited to, computational tools for governance, governance incidents and case studies from online communities, topics in cryptoeconomics, and the design of digital constitutions.

See archived videos: archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Metagovernance%20Seminar%22

The seminar is intended for researchers and practitioners in online governance, broadly defined. We welcome guests and curious members of the public, but please note that the discussion is moderated. Our governance structure is defined here: metagov.pubpub.org/metagov-governance

Please contact a planning committee member (Nathan Schneider, Divya Siddarth, Michael Zargham, Joshua Tan, and Seth Frey) if you are interested in becoming a member of the seminar.

Where available, a direct link to the archived video is linked beneath the video tags.

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- Time: every Wednesday at 12:00pm ET (GMT-4). - Meeting Link: us06web.zoom.us/j/89433841305?pwd=lIX1rkSiVfqDd7hwwTUppQS8kDmbno.1

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