What is Rayy

Rayy is a community-led, decentralised network that will foster open interchange & connections among suppliers & consumers transacting on various sharing platforms and applications.

The advent of the internet, mobile applications and IoT has proliferated the growth of the Sharing Economy. Today, sharing platforms drive transactions worth billions of dollars around the world every year. Not only are these platforms reshaping global supply chains but forever altering our consumption patterns.

Sharing Economy: The sharing economy is an umbrella term that constitutes online platforms or marketplaces that facilitate buying and selling temporary access to goods or services through mobile applications or websites.

These online applications behave as multisided marketplaces that enable direct interactions between suppliers with idle inventories of goods and services on one side and consumers on the other.

Sharing platforms generally leverage P2P, B2C or B2B distribution channels to provide services like lending, accommodation, transportation, logistics, staffing, music and video streaming and human skills.

By allowing us to derive economic value at scale from underutilised goods and services, the sharing economy has spawned new avenues of self-employment while providing potential pathways to sustainable consumption for everyone.

Centralisation in Sharing Platforms

Despite their immense potential, every sharing platform or application operates in an isolated silo that serves as a “store of value”. These silos are bound by sets of native protocols that compel consumers and suppliers to be on the same platform to execute transactions. This closed platform-centric approach not only limits discoverability for suppliers but also diminishes business opportunities for sharing platforms as we shall see in the following section.

Closed Platform Centric approach of Sharing Platforms

Bottlenecks

Balancing Supply & Demand

The siloed approach of sharing platforms creates a chicken and egg problem.

Consumers always prefer platforms with comprehensive supply and geographic coverage, while suppliers persist only when there is ample demand. Ergo, every application deploys enormous capital to incentivise both supply and demand while attempting to inculcate trust among the transacting parties. This becomes a repetitive process for every new market and geography where the platform becomes operational.

The extent of investment required to establish supply, demand and trust beyond which the platforms can operate profitably is very high. Furthermore, suppliers and consumers must be on the same platform to discover each other. This leads to the fragmentation of the sharing economy.

Fragmented Markets

Due to the fragmented nature of the sharing economy, no single platform is able to fulfill the diverse demands of consumers. Consequently users spend hours identifying the right platform to rent from. This in turn exacerbates distribution for suppliers as they must be present on multiple sharing platforms and marketplaces to maximize their revenue and probability of doing business with consumers.

Zero Reputation Portability

Trust is the cornerstone for every multi-sided sharing platform as their adoption relies on facilitating smooth transactions, often between complete strangers. Maintaining a good reputation when transacting on these platforms is of paramount importance for both suppliers and consumers as it ensures better opportunities for repeat business in the future.

Most applications deploy ‘Platform Mediated’ review systems that work on mutual ratings between suppliers and consumers after every transaction. The ratings are often accompanied by textual reviews that provide context to the ratings.

However, when suppliers and consumers wish to part ways with a frequently used platform, they cannot port their hard-earned credibility to other platforms. Users are obliged to forfeit their credibility even though their hard-earned reputations are built on their transactional data. Furthermore, if the review system does not have a robust layer for identity authentication, malicious users re-enter the platform with new identities, rendering the system ineffective.

In the following sections we shall learn about how Rayy's open network approach will fortify sharing platforms and the global sharing economy.