Heracles

(Under Development)

The Heracles Protocol will connect sharing platforms and applications with suppliers of assets and services through a blockchain-based data marketplace. Heracles will allow suppliers of the sharing economy to tokenize their assets and services and broadcast their real-time availability to consumer facing applications.

Most sharing platforms and marketplaces operate on centralized and siloed databases that fundamentally restrict the growth of the sharing economy. This creates an insular ecosystem where individual platforms are incapable of supporting reciprocal operations among themselves as information such as inventory availability of assets and services are not adequately shared but secluded within each platform. Ultimately, this proves to be a massive obstacle for the platforms themselves as each has to individually establish its own chains of supply and demand, thereby reinventing the wheel over and over again.

The Heracles Protocol attempts to revamp the manner in which individual suppliers and consumers interact with sharing platforms. It will leverage the ERC 1155 and ERC 20 standards to help individual suppliers of the sharing economy tokenize their assets and services so that they can freely publish their real-time inventory to platforms across the world and accept reservations.

Introduction

Every asset or service listed on the Heracles protocol will be represented by a Non Fungible Token (NFT) compliant to the ERC 1155 standard, while the inventory's real-time availability would be cached and indexed as hot data by the protocol's user operated data nodes. Sharing platforms that intend to onboard a particular asset or service can use its respective NFT to reference and query its real-time inventory availability from the protocol's data nodes.

This unique and open approach of storing, referencing, caching and querying real-time inventory availability will unlock the segregated inventory silos by reorganizing them into a unified network. The protocol's open architecture, will ensure better inventory distribution and significant abatements in sunk costs that platforms incur to establish their supply network. Simultaneously, platforms and marketplaces that have excess inventory but inadequate demand can broadcast and cross-sell their inventory through Heracles.

Proposed Architecture

The protocol shall be hosted by user operated nodes that will query sharing platforms for their asset and service inventories. The user nodes shall then cache and index the inventory data so as to make it accessible to other consumer facing platforms that can query them through the Rayy API Gateway.

Heracles: Proposed Architecture

User Nodes

User nodes shall provide the computational and storage resources required to index, cache and query real-time inventory data on the protocol. Users nodes shall earn Rentalcoins (the protocol's native currency) from platforms that consume the inventory data. Users will be able to establish a node by staking Rentalcoins and running the protocol software on their respective systems. The nodes will crawl, cache and index the real-time inventories of assets and services listed on Heracles to serve queries from platforms.

Node Rewards

To incentivize adoption, the protocol shall reserve a dedicated reward pool of Rentalcoins that shall be distributed to user nodes, in addition to the fee that they receive from sharing platforms and marketplaces.

(Further details coming soon)