Smartlink has partnered with the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to develop Web 3.0 escrow solutions. CEA is a French public government-funded research organization in the areas of energy, defense and security, information technologies, and health technologies.
Smartlink And CEA Start Research Partnership
In recent news you might know Smartlink from their Decentralized Exchange Vortex, which is built on Tezos. Smartlink is also a Tezos corporate baker. In April this year, we also reported on their decentralized escrow platform, which is being built on Tezos. The escrow platform is set to become a decentralized middleman for the global marketplace for both physical and digital products and objects.
“Our team is proud to be working with the CEA, ranked by Reuters as The World’s Most Innovative Research Institution. The CEA has worked with some of the most prominent companies such as Alstom, Vinci technologies, Engie, and more recently Tezos’ Tenderbake. Each escrow mechanism we are developing has its own degree of complexity. The CEA and Smartlink have been working together to identify the ideal framework for the Smartlink escrow module to function with digital and physical products — the latter being more challenging.” – Smartlink team
Marketplace 3.0
An escrow service provides a trusted middleman for transactions between two or more parties that involve more than tokens. An example would be an event where the seller delivers the product or service to the buyer, who, in turn, has a specific inspection period to verify the product and approve the payment. Other examples are freelance work payments, fundraising, payroll services and rental services of physical objects.
The trusted middleman makes sure the payment is kept until the payment conditions are fulfilled. In case of disagreement, an escrow service often also offers mediator services. Smartlink’s escrow service intends to decentralize these transactions through enforceable smart contracts on Tezos. These smart contracts will be presented in template form which allows parties to customize the terms of the agreement.
The payment will be held in the escrow smart contract until all the conditions are fulfilled and the buyer confirms receiving the agreed product or service. After that the payment will be released and automatically transferred to the seller’s wallet. Using decentralized blockchain technology (in this case the Tezos blockchain), we can cut out the middleman, eliminating the human factor. This increases speed while decreasing risks and costs.
First Escrow Implementation: Token Vesting
The first escrow implementation on Smartlink Escrow is a token vesting service and the first company to use this service will be Smartlink itself.
“To indicate our confidence in what we’re building, we’ll use it to create the token vesting schedule for our advisors, backers, and some of the new team members. The fee to use this feature will be charged in SMAK (% TBA)”.
The second implementation will be the digital products escrow service. An interesting use-case for crypto related trades, would be OTC trades where a number of tokens are sold off the market for a fixed price. This means that large buyers and sellers do not need to depend on healthy liquidity on decentralized exchanges. The digital product escrow service is set to go live in Q1 2022. Next, is the physical products escrow service. Think of buying and selling cars, jewelry, collectibles and other physical products of value. Rental services of physical objects can be arranged this way.
