Beckn: an open source protocol for decentralised transactions (with Sujith Nair)
This is seminar will feature a presentation by Sujith Nair on Beckn, an open protocol for decentralized commerce.
Beckn consists of several specifications for building open e-commerce networks across which sellers and their offers are universally discoverable from any Beckn-enabled app or platform. As a protocol, Beckn is multi-layered, with layer structure and organization resembling that of HTTP.
The architecture of the Beckn ecosystem has five layers (from top to bottom):
Application layer
Network and Transaction layer
Infrastructure and Security layer
Certification layer
Specification and Support layer
The system has the power to break the silos of proprietary platforms in order to enable interoperability of digital services across platforms.
From the paper "Beyond platforms — Growing distributed transaction networks for digital commerce":
Context: We talk of the internet as digital infrastructure; but we leave the building of digital 'rails' and 'roads' to the quasi-monopolistic platform providers that benefit from both vendor and customer log-in. Decentralised architectures provide a number of advantages: They are potentially more inclusive for small players; more resilient against adversarial events, and seem to generate more innovation. However, it is not well understood how to evolve, adapt and govern decentralised infrastructures.
Objective: This article reports empirical qualitative research on the development and governance of the Beckn Protocol, an open source protocol for decentralised transactions, the successful development of domain-specific adaptations, and implementation and scaling of commercial infrastructures based on it. It explores how the architecture and governance support local innovation for specific business domains, and how the domain-specific innovations feed back into the development of the core concept.
More about Metagov Seminar: The Metagov Seminar invites individuals working in online governance to present their work to a community of other researchers and practitioners. Seminar topics include, but are not limited to, computational tools for governance, governance incidents and case studies from online communities, topics in cryptoeconomics, and the design of digital constitutions.
The seminar is intended for researchers and practitioners in online governance, broadly defined. We welcome guests and curious members of the public. Note that the discussion is moderated.