Introduction MerchDAO
Introducing MerchDAO: a DeFi marketplace for unique items designed by the users
Hello everyone, and welcome to the blog of MerchDAO — the first blockchain marketplace for limited-edition items where you design your merchandise yourself. In this first post, we’ll tell you what MerchDAO is all about and why it’s going to be your favorite marketplace.
Combining real-life merchandise and NFTs
There are lots of decentralized marketplaces out there: you might know OpenBazaar and Decentraland, for example. Some sell regular goods for crypto, others only sell virtual objects — NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. The beauty of NFTs is that each of them has its own unique digital identity, and the owner’s property rights are recorded on the blockchain.
The problem with non-fungible tokens is that they are, well, virtual! You can’t touch them, you can’t easily show them to your friends — in short, owning a digital object isn’t as fun as owning a real item.
That’s why MerchDAO will focus on real, physical merchandise — AND combine it with the NFT technology. A non-fungible token will be issued for every item in the marketplace, authenticating the property rights of whoever buys the item.
Why limited-edition?
We tend to view rare items as more valuable than regular merchandise, even if their practical value or production cost is the same. Perhaps you’ve heard about Lidl sneakers: they are sold for less than $15, in the store but since they are limited-edition, people spend hundreds of dollars to buy them on eBay. The market for collectibles and rare items is huge: around $370 billion.
There are many marketplaces for limited-edition items. What makes MerchDAO different is that we’ll let users design new merch and decide what will be produced. Everyone who holds our native MRCH tokens will be able to propose their own designs — and vote on the ideas submitted by others. Our role is as a link between the users and the manufacturers: if the community votes for an item to be produced, we’ll take care of the production and delivery.
Types of items, costs, & prices
The final word will belong to the community of MRCH holders. But the most obvious types of items are those that allow for easy printing of the user-created designs:
- T-shirts & hoodies
- Face masks
- Phone cases
- Backpacks
- Mugs
- Baseball caps, etc.
Even though we’ll offer rare and unique items, they will be surprisingly cheap. That’s because we already have agreements with a number of manufacturers in Russia. So, for example, we’ll be able to offer unique iPhone cases for $10 or t-shirts for $20. Those will be high quality products that you yourself voted into existence — and extremely rare. The whole process from the community approval to delivery will take about 10 days.
Apart from voting on new products and designs, our users will be able to do much more with their MRCH tokens. In fact, MerchDAO is a DeFi project as much as it is a marketplace. We’ll have staking rewards, a staking-as-a-service system, and a voting system. Token holders will even decide on profit distribution!
In our next post, we’ll tell you more about our decentralized governance model, MRCH token, voting, token buyback-and-burn, and more. See you then!
