Cyrus Taghechian on Splyt's decentralized ecommerce platform

0:20to dive right into it and if we could just kick off the interview with an overview and the focus of split and some of the solutions that you're solving for in the e-commerce industry that would be great yeah yeah it you know what we're really looking forward in our mission is to bring trust and transparency back to the way we do business you know a lot

0:43of things have gone digital and you know with that there's a lot of opaqueness in the way we operate and sometimes you're just kind of left out and you know shrugging of like what's going on and you know we want to bring that trust and transparency back into what we do in e-commerce transactions really empower brands of all shapes and sizes

1:06to be able to succeed and build a sustainable business online without getting exploited by like an amazon or anybody else you know that sort of censorship kind of you know makes me sad you know like whether however you feel about parlor for instance when they just got shut off you know they were paying customer it was their right you know so

1:26you know how far does freedom of speech go so you know having the ability for small medium businesses to survive online is really important for us definitely and i completely agree cyrus and it seems like the e-commerce industry has turned into especially with the lockdowns you know and oligarchy or almost monopoly and it's getting a little crazy

1:47And one of the things that amazon is trying to pride themselves on is you know getting it to you fast and getting it to the cheapest but it really seems to cut out all of the mon paws and the people that are trying to survive and sort of consolidates that power so i'm glad that there are great other alternatives like split and you're doing some really unique

2:04things as well could you talk about what makes split unique and if you have any competitive advantages from other platforms like this yeah so you know are your uniqueness comes two full one in the crypto space and one in the traditional e-commerce space i'll start with the traditional e-commerce space most platforms out there are trying to make a profit

2:27right so they have their best interest in mind not necessarily yours as a small medium business so how do you trust them how do you trust that they're taking care of your data they have your best interests in mind you really don't there are some questions but that's not to say there aren't good platforms out there definitely are but you just never

2:45really know and then it's becoming more and more convoluted in the whole e-commerce and what e-commerce means there's so many different players now from logistics to fintech and so many different vendors you're gonna have to choose from how do you know what to do where to go where where's all your data going again it's just you know makes people feel uncomfortable

3:07Split you know one of the things that we decided to do early on is becoming a non-profit really we're trying to build a social utility similar to what linux did for servers and you know they're widely used for enterprise even a cms system a content management system which was what you build websites on drupal is a non-profit that's really commonly used at enterprise

3:28so we modeled our system to be something like that for e-commerce and e-commerce doesn't have it everybody's trying to make a transaction cost or put their hand in the cookie jar when you're making a business online i haven't really seen anybody bring that sort of you know social aspect to e-commerce it's really easy to you know become a middleman and get a transaction fee it's

3:47like oh it's only one cent but you know that turns out to be millions or billions of dollars per year that could be redistributed back into the pockets of you know small mom and pops to keep them in business pandemic or not definitely and that's so interesting i didn't know that you've built it into a non-profit and i am familiar with drupal as a non-profit and they're really doing

4:09the same thing they're giving back to the community now do you think that having it as a nonprofit competing with all of these for-profit businesses is going to create disadvantages but as well have advantages yeah i mean there's always an opportunity cost and any type of decision you make in life and you know it's really within our purpose to be

4:27doing it as a nonprofit so you know whatever whatever types of hurdles we're going to have to overcome we're conscious of them and we're willing to do so and one of them is you know necessarily finding like funding for instance it's really hard to you know get a non-profit going but you know we've been building this for four years and we haven't stopped and

4:46when you're purpose driven like it'll happen it'll manifest it's not necessarily driven by the dollars you know we everybody on our team has heart and they really believe in what we do so you know that's another unique thing about split it's really it's really our team and you know we do care about you know you know sustaining a business but we

5:09really care about purpose you know that's what driver does yeah so but back to your question what makes us unique in e-commerce in plus crypto or blockchain a lot of crypto companies have built really cool things i'll have to say it's really like i've been in the industry we're just talking right before at the show and you know we've been you

5:28know here both both in this industry for about seven years and i'm pretty sure we've both seen some really cool things back in 2017 and 18 there was tons of you know yeah there's a lot of you know your head scratchers coming up but there's also a lot of cool things and ethereum was one of them right that was born in 2016 2017 time time period as well

5:46and but they always made you leave how you're comfortable working with computers and internet to something where you're just like really scared there wasn't that safety like in like using the product it was really intimidating just a normal person luckily for me i have a background in computer science and tech so you know i just like picked it

6:07up you know very quickly but i understand it can be empathetic for others that don't i would have to say there are players out there that make it really easy with education and awareness and we would love to be part of that story that narrative that helps you know general population feel safe lindsay malin our cmo is doing a great job right

6:26now like taking all those harsh blockchain jargon and decomposing them so it's really easy for you know the general population to understand so with that being said like all these cool technologies have been built and no one's really using them i mean yeah i use them and maybe you use them and other people in the crypto industry does but the general population doesn't and that

6:50saddens me because blockchain technology is really awesome so the way we thought about split is rather than having people come to our platform let's make it more of an infrastructure so it's kind of like just running in the back end and let's take it to where e-commerce is happening today so think shopify woocommerce magento or other e-commerce platforms that businesses

7:12build their online stores that's a front end so that could remain the same for all the users buyers brands sellers but the piping underneath we could connect all those stores in the whole ecommerce supply chain using using nfts and that becomes really fascinating because you could get all the advantages of using blockchain technology and nfts but without the whole you know scariness

7:37of you know looking at a terminal on your website trying to figure out how to ssh into like a blockchain or server definitely yeah i completely agree cyrus and so many great points there about you know all these innovative technologies that have been in the works you know ethereum and nfts were you know nfts back when crypto kitties first sort of made a name for nfts years ago

8:01now and now it's finally getting into the mainstream and now is the time and your team's been working on this platform for four years and it just seems like the timing is perfect to be releasing this to the mainstream when they're ready right and now sort of seems like the time and i just want to continue that discussion with the nfts in the e-commerce

8:20store you have a marketplace and you have shopping you have you know non-nfcs and nfts integrating that nft aspect i think is going to have a huge competitive advantage and as you talked about you know with lindsay trying to make it so that people that don't know what an nfts don't know how to buy it can get involved you know what can you just elaborate a

8:40little bit more on how is the nft part going to work inside of the shopping and how are you going to make it so that you know my grandma can buy an nft off of split yeah so great questions ashley so first thing is like there's a misconception that split is an e-commerce marketplace we are not we are a marketplace in marketplaces we are the piping that connects a bunch of

9:05stores together that decentralizes the supply chain or the distribution of the inventory so that being said our system really runs again in the back end and it's for businesses to use so a buyer a shopper would never know right it would be as if they were shipping on your favorite online store hosted by shopify today the only change really is on the buy

9:31on the seller side but even then because of like the app store phenomenon that we've seen over the past 10 years you know start with apple's you know iphone store and now shopify has their own app store magento commerce they all have app stores we could just build that app that connects you know has the middleware to connect into the blockchain

9:51That everybody then could take advantage of without actually knowing that using the blockchain so let's get into how it really works it's as easy as just downloading an app from an app store and once you download an app there's a couple questions that asks you and you know it just input like you would with any other application and then you click save and that's

10:11pretty much it now it walks you through the mechanics of exactly how it works like hey if you push this button then you would broadcast your inventory to synchronize within all the stores within the network what that really happens on the back end though is we meant an nft for that inventory item that you have put onto your shopify store that nft will then get broadcasted to

10:33every other database within our system so all other shopify stores will now see hey there is this nft that's tied to this inventory item and this inventory item is a baseball cap do i want to sell this on my store oh there's a 10 commission if i source a buyer oh since the information is tracked at it you know with an nft i know i'm going to get paid on my efforts

10:57so you create a super affiliate network that's incentivizing other stores that pick up your inventory sell it for you and then there's a drop ship element that happens so it's a win-win situation by you know sharing inventory and creating this you know large pool of stuff to sell you know you can create businesses online without the need of having to pay

11:19facebook or google for advertising costs and that model is dying in my opinion what we call an e-commerce space is cocktail tv what's your customer acquisition cost to your lifetime value why would i pay a bunch of money up front crossing my fingers that traffic that comes to my site will convert where i could just put a pay for performance contract

11:40using you know our nft smart contracts and if anybody picks up the item and sells it that nft will then make sure i get paid for my efforts every single time and that is that is such a competitive advantage to have the in the smart contract you know if you want to have 10 resale value and you know you have an original piece of something you can program that in and you know you

12:06don't have to have that third party you know you're going to get paid i think that's a huge advantage yeah yeah absolutely so you know just to make it that much more simple like you know it's really just a couple click up buttons once you download the app and that's basically all it takes and it looks like you're working in shopify so you never

12:23need to leave shopify you know i was i was asked a question recently hey how would you explain this to a five-year-old and i was like well think of think of e-commerce as your lego set and if you take one lego and you try to you know play with it's not that much fun right but if you bring all your legos together and you start clicking them all

12:46on each other and you can make something big and beautiful and fun to play with and it's just really you know a marvel to look at that's what split does we band together all the like small pop moms and pops to you know share and be collaborative with the with each other but still hold their own boundaries and privacies using nfts and in a way such that you could kind

13:08of have that same movement that you saw on wall street bets and gamestop where they kind of like you know all the little guys you know took on the big hedge funds you could do the same thing with e-commerce so we're not trying to kill amazon or any of these other bigger players in fact we're grateful for what amazon has done for not just not e-commerce but society

13:26like aws the servers the internet wouldn't be what it is today without amazon so there's a time and place for everybody you know maybe i think that their time is coming with having a monopoly on e-commerce but not to say they wouldn't be able to have a successful business either but i just feel like we need another option for other players to come in

13:46For users to have an option with other players to choose from so you know split if we take the fragmented market of like 40 and by the way amazon has like almost 50 percent market share which you know is a monopoly at least you have an option where i could go to amazon if that makes sense for me and if it doesn't then i could go you know work within a split network

14:11and if it'll keep both parties honest both split and amazon to keep on doing what's best for the customer and society definitely cyrus and you there's a lot of advantages to the nft strategy that you've implemented but you also have a fungible token that i want to touch on and that's the split token and there's our advantages in the ecosystem of utilizing that as

14:32well can you just talk a little bit about how the split token works within the split economy and does it create a sustainable ecosystem yeah absolutely so you know our token represents trust and transparency again that's that's what the dna what i was saying earlier who we are what our missions are what our mission is about so our token prevents any type of

14:55fraud and promotes good behavior so for instance in order for me in order for me to mint my inventory as an nft so i could take advantage of all the data distribution that comes with it and you know increase my sales i need to deposit a little bit of this token into that nft once the transaction is successful i get it back and again we do this seamlessly

15:16on the back end so you don't have to go buy tokens sell tokens you know you have your little system you tell it what to do within the parameters and i'll give you alerts like if you're running low like kind of like a car tells you're running low on fuel and it tells you how to replenish it so we made it as easy as possible for people to understand and use

15:35One and the thing is it's sustainable right it's cyclical because every time i make the sale and the customer gets the item and i actually fulfilled my part of the bargain i get those tokens back so in theory i would probably you know i would not need to have to go always to an exchange and or find source tokens somewhere i could continuously build my business

15:56now the cool thing is as gdp or the gross domestic product of sales within our network goes up then those tokens represent selling bandwidth the more tokens i have the more i could list on split and if the gdp is higher then i would have more of an incentive to list on it because you know there's more sales activity that's going on so that's essentially

16:17the model that we created that's both sustainable and promoting good behavior but also creating a healthy sustainable economy that's incentivizing players to have a healthy and increasing gdp and you know our smart contract escrows that's baked in to all our nfts uses our token to escrow the funds to protect buyers so if i'm making a transaction online with someone that i

16:42don't know in a decentralized e-commerce manner you know trust and reputation become very important and a way to you know ensure there's trust is using escrows so that's another thing that we use our token for so it's really built around the security of our network our tokens secure secures our mfts and e-commerce transactions definitely and that's exciting and

17:06i like the part about increasing the gdp and selling bandwidth for sellers and i think that's going to be a huge advantage as well and we are running short on time cyrus but i have one last question in terms of releasing the platform getting it to the mainstream and capturing that market share in the fragmented part of the market that you were talking about

17:24what do you see as one or some of the main factors to success you're going to need to have to capture all of that market share and get mainstream mainstream adoption yeah you know i think really it's just kindness and empathy to be honest really hearing what people need or society needs too many times i've seen people trying to push down a product to be like use

17:47this use this and use them this way without really making the person feel hurt you're not gonna get a long you know a lifetime customer right so really changing those few people's lives and like density and depth to me means a lot and then they will become your advocates and they will tell everybody oh my god you know split really made a difference

18:07for what we're doing by doing you know this and this and this for me and by being a non-profit we're also open source right so it's not like we're telling people how they have to use the technology we left a little bit of flexibility because every e-commerce business is run a little differently right so while we're standardizing the nft data which again all runs on the back and no

18:28one really needs to know about how they build their business on the front end still remains completely into their to their discretion they have autonomy over their whole business model i think that's really important that we the way we built it and when to market you know so i it's really just doing what's right for the customer is really going to make the difference long

18:49term and that starts with kindness and empathy definitely and i completely agree cyrus and i agree also that to be customer oriented and you know if you provide what your customers want they will stay and they will return so that's great and now for the viewers that are looking to learn more on split get involved with the community as you continue to grow what's the best

19:08way for them to learn more yeah so you know we have our twitter channel which we tweet and we're pretty active it's split spl yt core c-o-r-e and then we also have our telegram channel same split core and then we have our website splitport.org which is informational about how to get more involved in our decentralized ecommerce ecosystem great

19:35well i will leave all of those links as well in the description box below for the viewers thank you so much for taking the time cyrus it's been a pleasure learning more about split all the best with everything going forward and let's follow up in the near future thanks ashton you