meetup - HARBOR

Software Store

The software market is divided into the desktop PC market and the mobile market. In the PC market, there are Windows store for windows, and mac app store for Mac. Steam is famous as a game software distribution platform. In the mobile market, there is Play store for Android, and App store for iOS. Therefore, we have a large market. Usually, there are separate stores for each platform and they usually have a system where the sellers and the platform provider divide the revenue as 7 to 3. In order to enter the platform, there is a little screening procedure. To sell the software successfully, it should be ranked on the top of the store through competing with many other apps. Of course, you can also distribute your software directly without using a software distribution platform like those.However, to distribute your software directly to users, you should create a product site, develop and integrate payment functions. To reduce piracy, you need to develop license function and operate a license server. You need to develop and integrate in-app purchase function, if necessary. Building a system to sell products independently needs much time and effort and it is not easy for a small size project to realize it. However, it has advantages of selling and promoting products freely compared to the platform store, building its own brand and identity of software, and selling products without intense competition and standardized marketing

Decentralized Store

I would like to introduce the Harbor Project as a new software distribution platform that can innovate the software distribution market through blockchain technology. The Harbor Project aims to create a decentralized application store. Here, you can easily become a software vendor and create your own store. You can distribute your products through existing software platform stores and sell your products on the platform without paying fees. You will sell your products and receive payment in cryptocurrency and take it out safely. If you want, you can sell your software through your independent site or SNS channels, and you can receive payment cryptocurrency in existing platform stores such as App Store or Play Store. What the seller has to do in order to use Harbor Platform is to deploy the Harbor Smart Contract on the Ethereum Blockchain and include the SDK provided by us in the software you want to sell. The Harbor Smart Contract distributed to blockchains serves as a license server for selling products as well as manages license and checks piracy of software. Consumers can purchase a product or ask refund within certain period and sellers can collect the payment through In-app Purchase. You can implement safe payment and license check through distributing software on Homepage or SNS, as Smart Contracts on the blockchain enables software sales and license management without a server The seller can take the payment without fees and the consumer can safely purchase the software with cryptocurrency and ask refund within a certain period of time. You can sell software to consumers at a lower price as you can save sales related cost. You may think that the Harbor Platform is similar to existing app stores such as App Store or Play Store or is competing with them. However, I believe that the Harbor Platform will be a complementer rather than a competitor of the existing platform stores. We will help consumers to buy software with cryptocurrency, sell software on large platform stores, and construct an independent site or SNS channels to promote software sales. The Harbor Platform can be utilized as a means of payment using cryptocurrency in the growing retail and service markets.

Structure

To explain the overall structure once again, the software developer can sell or distribute his software anywhere by including the Harbor SDK in the software he wants to sell and distributing the Harbor Smart Contract in the blockchain. Consumers can download software and purchase products with In-App Payment of Harbor SDK. At this time, price information is obtained through smart contract distributed in the blockchain and application validation is performed together. When a consumer buys software, a license certificate is issued in the blockchain and the ownership of the software can be verified through the issued certificate information. And the cryptocurrency paid by the consumer is safely stored in the Vault Contract, locked for a certain period of time for the possible refund process. When the refund period ends, the lock is released so that the seller can request a withdrawal of the payment from the Vault Contract. All of these procedures will be done through the Harbor Smart Contract and Harbor SDK in the blockchain, and sellers can sell their software and earn money safely from anywhere. Currently, the Harbor Project has developed a prototype through the Proof of Concept(POC) phase. The development goals of the Harbor Project are as follows. We will build a decentralized software store so that sellers can sell their products without having to go through the platform store, and supports cross platforms to reduce the troubles to connect each store for the payment. In addition, we will support various in-app payment methods for software purchases and aim to mark product price in dollars or national fiat money instead of cryptocurrency which is very volatile. cryptocurrency prices. We will support safe payment, refund and payment collection so that sellers and consumers build trust and prevent illegal copy or malicious modification of the software. In the long run, we are also looking into ways to increase consumer accessibility through the Independent Store of the Harbor Platform and store-building services

License & Purchase

Now, I will tell you the functions that the Harbor Platform is supporting. First of all, the Harbor Platform supports diverse licenses. It supports various kinds of licenses such as permanent license which allows you to have the license perpetually once you purchase it, volume license which has limit of authentication times, per-device license which limited the number of devices where it can be installed, time period license which allows the license for the fixed period only, consumable licence which can be consumed such as special service or game items and free license which has no restriction. The Harbor Platform supports various payment methods; Ordinary payment, procedural payment with cryptocurrency gift vouchers, combined payment allowing purchase of multiple products and subscription with automatic renewal. In the long run, we are also thinking of a dedicated payment model supported by the Harbor Platform.

Technical Issues

Currently, the Harbor Project is under development. We completed to develop a prototype through the POC phase. During the process, we had some technical issues and some parts are still not completely developed. But I would like to share the current status with you. First of all, there is a certificate related issue. When a consumer buys software, he must leave purchase information in the blockchain. However, blockchain does not fully protect important information because it also serves as a common ledger. Therefore, we designed to protect important information by storing the purchase certificate information of the consumer with the one-time private key in the client through certificate issuance and storing the public key of the authentication information in the blockchain. Next, there is a function to give price in US dollar(USD). Currently, cryptocurrency is too volatile to be used as pricing unit. Therefore, we designed the payment service to purchase the product at the price marked as USD and pay the price with cryptocurrency equivalent to the USD price at the time. For this, we implemented the Global Price Contract and made it synchronized with the exchange rate information by bringing the real-time price in the Foreign Exchange through Oraclize. This Smart Contract is commonly used on the Harbor Platform and will provide the price in cryptocurrency by bringing the price information in USD from the Price Contract which manages price of the products of the seller. In addition, it is possible to differentiate the sales price policy by country as it provides the function to change the price policy according to the purchasing power of the country in the Global Price Contract. In addition, we implemented the Global Privilege Policy to support efficient management of various smart contracts distributed by sellers. We also developed the Vault Contract so that consumers may be refunded for a certain period of time, while allowing sellers to securely collect their payment.

Business Model

In general, the more centralized the distribution service is, the better quality products can be supplied at lower prices. Instead of reducing the profit per unit, you can sell more products and the profit in total will increase. We aim to build not only a decentralized market but also the independent store such as the Harbor Store to offer consumers an opportunity to purchase products at a lower price, and sellers an opportunity to promote their products. In order to lower the entry barrier of cryptocurrency to the payment, we will provide the function to purchase cryptocurrency easily. We plan to increase the accessibility of consumers to cryptocurrency through cryptocurrency gift vouchers. We are also contemplating a service model to allow sellers to selectively receive a portion of the sales payment in either cash or cryptocurrency in order to reduce the risk of price volatility of the cryptocurrency.

Business Strategy

Next, I would like to talk about the business strategy of the Harbor Project. First of all, game software market is growing more actively than the general software market in PC market and Steam Store is the most famous one. It is not easy to sell general software in PC market and it is not so activated as Mobile Market. The initial strategy of Harbor Platform for PC market is to focus on the secondary sales market for software and games. Especially for games, most of the sales tend to be concentrated at the time of release just like in the movie industry. We plan to help sellers to create additional revenue by supporting them to resell games and software that are out of date on a relatively cheap price. We will induce activation of the Harbor Platform by supporting pre-sales so that one-person startup or Indie games can be funded. Mobile software market has grown up greatly and it is being changed into Red Ocean because of fierce competition. Thus, the cost reduction emerges as an important issue. The game sector accounts for a large portion of product purchase, and it also has a unique economic model that encourages payment. In addition, o2o market and retail market are growing rapidly as various services in the real world and offline store services are combined with the mobile service, and mobile is becoming an important payment method for various services and products. The strategy of the Harbor Platform in the mobile market focuses on the provision of additional payment system through cryptocurrency and low service charges necessary for retail and o2o service. We will provide In-App Payment environment for games and we believe it will be useful for event product sales or special offers. Another market is a Cross Platform Market which combines mobile and desktop PC market Games and software supporting various devices through game engines such as Unity3D or Unreal or providing service-based applications based on Web-Apps are increasing. However, in the case of payment, each platform should have separate payment module. Therefore, we plan to support a payment system through Harbor that can be used in various devices through interoperation. We will also provide game specified payment such as payment solution which is appropriate for the economic model in the game and it is base system so that developers can save their time and money. We are also planning to provide an independent cross-platform sales solution to facilitate the sales in the platform stores as well as the sales in its independent store.

Value and Future

In general, cryptocurrency is not suitable as a physical means of trading because it has high volatility and the price may drop down below the production cost. However, it can be possible in the software distribution field because software can be sold without the burden of the production cost once the sales exceeds the minimum sales volume. Additionally, it has high potential for cost reduction and service utilization, because it has the advantage of providing various services safely through blockchain technology and smart contract without additional cost and effort for server construction or operation. We believe that it will contribute to the activation of the Harbor Platform through a system that returns some of the issuance benefits of UAICO-based Harbor Currencies to software developers and contents providers. Currently, the investment value of cryptocurrency or blockchain technology is widely recognized, but it does not create added value in the business or service market. We expect that the Harbor Project will be the best practice to show that blockchain technology and cryptocurrency can be used as platforms for business services, as a software distribution platform utilizing cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.