Commerce today is bundled inside platforms that control payments, discovery, reputation, and dispute resolution as a package. Ethereum provides the primitives that could let participants coordinate directly and compose their own commerce experiences.
Commerce is a coordination problem between buyers, sellers, logistics providers, and payment processors who currently depend on platforms to mediate trust between them. A seller on a major marketplace can lose 20-40% of gross revenue to layered platform fees (payments, commissions, fulfillment, dispute handling) before accounting for their own costs, and their reputation, customer relationships, and transaction history remain locked inside the platform that collected them. The question is where Ethereum can give these participants the ability to coordinate directly, and where platform bundling still serves a legitimate function.
The path forward isn't replacing Amazon with a "decentralized Amazon." It's building composable primitives that any builder can assemble into commerce experiences where participants set their own terms.
This track is scoped around three hypotheses about where the gap between platform-mediated commerce and self-sovereign coordination is widest.
Platform-centric commerce bundles payments, discovery, logistics, and dispute resolution into a single package, suppressing competition at each layer. The growing wave of direct-to-consumer brands, creator commerce, and local production networks needs modular infrastructure that incumbents are structurally disincentivized to provide. Composable onchain primitives could let these participants assemble their own commerce stack from independent, interoperable services rather than renting a bundled one.
Autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of users could dramatically reduce the role of platform intermediaries, but only if the infrastructure they operate on is open and local-first. A user's local agent could query an open product registry, verify a seller's onchain reputation, and execute a purchase through programmable escrow, all without routing through a centralized platform. Without self-sovereign rails (portable identity, open order books, programmable escrow, non-captive reputation), agentic commerce simply shifts the intermediary from a platform to an AI provider, recreating the same extraction dynamics in a new form.
Stablecoins and real-world asset tokenization (physical goods, invoices, warranties, trade finance instruments) are reaching sufficient maturity for practical commerce applications, but lacks the standards and demonstrated use cases needed for adoption beyond crypto-native communities. The question is where tokenized commercial instruments deliver concrete advantages in supply chain transparency, trade finance, and consumer trust.
Marketplace infrastructure for peer-to-peer local commerce with onchain payments and EAS-verified reviews. Built with BuidlGuidl, piloted at Edge Patagonia.
Exploring decentralized commerce as a design space.
We're looking for builders, researchers, and partners exploring composable commerce on Ethereum.
usecaselab@ethereum.org