Casama is an attempt to fix the broken model of marketplaces.
Marketplaces have traditionally been a place to aggregate supply and demand in a way that benefits all participants involved. For example, in most developing nations you buy your groceries or clothing from a local marketplace that is located in a specific place and has numerous vendors to shop from. This creates open-competition among the vendors to keep prices at a reasonable rate, allows people to buy all of their different needs in a single shopping spree, and discover new items outside of their immediate needs. For vendors, they get to benefit from larger foot traffic allowing everyone to get an increase in sales, allow them to provide a unique good to avoid competition, or sell non-essential goods to the people passing by. This model is everywhere! Local food halls, all types of malls, Disneyland, Walmart, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb are all examples of various types of marketplaces. They are generally great for commerce.
But marketplaces require some initial capital, land, investment, and/or effort made by a single party to get things off the ground. This party will charge a fixed or variable rate for access to this marketplace to recoup the investment, and ongoing service and maintenance costs. This is also fair. They play a critical role in creating a positive sum situation for a whole host of people and increasing economic output in the locale or service industry. But, over time the incentive of this party gets corrupted because they realize that the marketplace has network effects and/or serious platform lock-in and it's difficult or virtually impossible for someone to leave.
I'm not here to bash marketplace operators, this is simply a result of the current model that marketplaces operate on.
Casama believes there is a better way to do this. That's where Web3 comes in. Web3 allows us to incentivize participants to join and engage in a network through direct ownership of that network. They become valuable participants through their efforts, but also have a control/say in the direction of the network over time. Additionally, the network being built on blockchains means that the network can get forked if it is becoming overly extractive as an economic coordinator. These checks and balances create a much better model for building and managing marketplaces in the long run. Marketplaces should be owned, operated, and improved by its participants, and through fair and reasonable incentives or compensation.
Casama intends to build a decentralized marketplace servicing the Crypto User Research problem. Crypto has a well-known, oft-discussed UX issue, and that is to be expected from such a new industry that is establishing new patterns. We want to help crypto builders of today improve their products by creating a marketplace of user research opportunities. A marketplace where builders can permissionlessly create user testing opportunities with a specific type of user and have quick facilitation of the process. Today, we are focused on providing value to builders all over the world compensate these users for valuable feedback while building the infrastructure necessary for a fully autonomous decentralized marketplace.
Check us out at: https://app.casama.xyz