Blockchain — Creating a level shopping field

It takes a dyed in the wool entrepreneur to spot an opportunity so good it woos him at twenty paces. Yes there are a lot of clichés in my opening sentence, but I really feel I have to speak the obvious. Steven Lin joined Gojoy as CEO in February. The retail online shopping platform operating in China was the brainchild of his fellow co-founders Peter Wu, Juan Vargas, and James Zhang. The tagline of the platform is the ‘world’s most rewarding shopping community’ and it does indeed create a community that is rewarded for shopping. Not the platform, but the shoppers.

It takes a dyed in the wool entrepreneur to spot an opportunity so good it woos him at twenty paces. Yes there are a lot of clichés in my opening sentence, but I really feel I have to speak the obvious. Steven Lin joined Gojoy as CEO in February. The retail online shopping platform operating in China was the brainchild of his fellow co-founders Peter Wu, Juan Vargas, and James Zhang. The tagline of the platform is the ‘world’s most rewarding shopping community’ and it does indeed create a community that is rewarded for shopping. Not the platform, but the shoppers.

“It is a justice oriented project,” he says right at the beginning. “Our mission is to eradicate poverty.”

This is a big claim until you examine one critical difference between the poor and the rich and how that might be ameliorated. Steven points out that by and large poor people do not own assets. They typically only earn an income for their time, often badly paid, while their employer converts that labour into thousands of dollars. And once you are stuck in the poverty trap it is very hard to break out of it — or even to be aware that you are in it.

The founders of Gojoy wanted to create a platform that addressed this inequality. They had deep sectoral experience in ecommerce. They also understood the co-dependent connection between vendors and shoppers. “Neither can exist without the other.”

The result was a mission to create a more equitable ecommerce platform where vendors are paid fairly for their goods and shoppers are rewarded for their purchases in the form of both fractional ownership of the underlying asset and in real cash — hourly.

That mission would make your eyes water — at first — but when you break it down both the rationale and the practical application are very straight forward.