How can you explain Syscoin to someone who has, for example, only ever used eBay, and is not familiar with cryptocurrencies? Cointelegraph spoke to Dan Wasyluk, Developer at Syscoin, about their innovation.

“Syscoin is like eBay stores or "Buy it Now" listings, except with a payment and escrow system built-in”, explains Dan Wasyluk.

Syscoin do not have an auction system in place yet. They connect buyers and sellers directly, and the fees are substantially lower than any competing platform because there is no-one in the middle party taking a percentage of the sale.

Syscoin is both a currency and a platform. The fees only exist to keep the network running autonomously. Syscoin can easily be exchanged for USD or other currencies, Bitcoin can also be directly used on the platform.

Syscoin has integrated messaging features that offer a higher level of privacy compared to eBay's messaging system.

Getting started

Cointelegraph: What’s the first step in getting started with Syscoin as a buyer or a seller?

Dan Wasyluk: Downloading the wallet and getting an alias is the first step in getting started as a buyer or seller. An alias costs a small amount- 1 SYS is plenty (at the moment 1 SYS costs approx $0.007 USD). Aliases are like usernames on the Syscoin network and can be used in place of a long and complicated address. Once you have an alias you can use any of the Syscoin platform services- buying and selling on the decentralized marketplace, storing and selling information using digital certificates or secure communications using encrypted messaging.

OpenBazaar competition

CT: Do you consider OpenBazaar a competitor, or do you think you have fundamentally different uses?

DW: We only consider OpenBazaar a competitor insofar as they also provide a decentralized marketplace offering. Syscoin and OpenBazaar provide similar but different services using very different technologies. Syscoin builds on Bitcoin's blockchain technology while OpenBazaar relies on p2p technology using Bitcoin only for payment. Because OpenBazaar, a privately funded company, doesn't have this foundation in blockchain tech the possibilities and potential for Syscoin are quite different than those of OpenBazaar - ranging from sidechains to new BIP operations and more. We feel that competition in this space is healthy and will only result in better products for end users.

Future development

CT: How is Syscoin planning to develop the cryptocurrency/platform in the future?

DW: Syscoin 2.0 only launched a few weeks ago, so at the moment we're really listening to the community - both buyers and sellers - and trying to make sure we address their key pieces of feedback before attracting more users to the platform. Many of these pieces of feedback are being addressed in the upcoming Syscoin 2.1 release which brings many new features, some suggested by the community. We don't plan on stopping there - we're exploring other potential features ranging from assets to voting on the Syscoin chain.

In parallel with blockchain development we're also developing products on top of the Syscoin platform - the first of which is Blockmarket, a hosted blockchain commerce platform. Blockmarket's release will be followed by plugin integrations for major centralized e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, Prestashop, OpenCart, etc which will allow merchants on those platforms to easily sync their inventory to and from the Syscoin marketplace/blockchain. We also have plans to develop integrations for eBay and Etsy which will provide sellers on those platforms similarly simple methods of listing their items on Syscoin's marketplace.

Decentralized marketplaces

CT: Do you think decentralized marketplaces will be able to penetrate the mainstream? If so, how?

DW: Yes, we think decentralized marketplaces have major potential for penetrating and disrupting mainstream commerce channels. We think the key to this will be ease of use, while still being able to realize all the benefits of decentralization. Products will need to mask the implementation complexity from the users interacting with the technology. There is a lot of power in the borderless and secure technology offered by the blockchain. In our opinion there are two major keys to this tech and moreover decentralized markets penetrating the mainstream - packaging up the technology in a user-friendly manner (ie: can your grandma use it?) and enabling users by providing them with easy methods of moving in and out of their native currency.

Cointelegraph spoke to Brian Hoffman, Project Lead at OpenBazaar.

He says about Syscoin’s emergence in the decentralized marketplace industry:

“We built OpenBazaar in order to give people the ability engage in decentralized trade, and we're glad to see others doing the same thing. We chose not to build our marketplace directly on top of a blockchain for numerous reasons, but it's good to have different projects take different approaches and see what works best.”