The truly terrifying thing about a card shop that runs off isn’t that the owner disappears—it’s that the consumers’ money and goods are, from start to finish, controlled by the same person.
Recently, the Taiwanese card store “Little Goat Card Society” suddenly closed and went missing. A large number of players’ pre-order payments and undelivered items have been stuck in limbo, once again exposing the risks of the card pre-order model.
I’ve been wondering: can Web3 projects like Renaiss @Renaiss Collectibles reduce this kind of problem?
In the traditional model, consumers send the money to the card shop first.
In the Web3 model, the funds can be put into an escrow contract. After the goods are confirmed to have arrived, the payment is then released to the card shop.
This at least helps prevent the merchant from pocketing all the pre-order payments before delivering the goods.
But the hardest problem is right here: who will prove that the goods really arrived?
If the confirmation is done by the card shop itself, then it’s basically meaningless.
If a third-party warehouse verifies the goods, you still have to trust the warehouse—and you also have to guard against collusion between the warehouse and the merchant, as well as fake inspections.
So Web3 can’t completely eliminate trust. What it’s better at is this: let the funds be controlled by a contract, and require the supplier, logistics, warehouse, and buyers to each provide proof. This breaks apart the single point of trust that used to be concentrated in the card shop.
It may not be able to fully prevent disappearances, but it can make it much harder for a card shop to simultaneously control consumers’ money, goods, and the right to verify—and it can also reduce losses when problems do happen.
Recently, the Taiwanese card store “Little Goat Card Society” suddenly closed and went missing. A large number of players’ pre-order payments and undelivered items have been stuck in limbo, once again exposing the risks of the card pre-order model.
I’ve been wondering: can Web3 projects like Renaiss @Renaiss Collectibles reduce this kind of problem?
In the traditional model, consumers send the money to the card shop first.
In the Web3 model, the funds can be put into an escrow contract. After the goods are confirmed to have arrived, the payment is then released to the card shop.
This at least helps prevent the merchant from pocketing all the pre-order payments before delivering the goods.
But the hardest problem is right here: who will prove that the goods really arrived?
If the confirmation is done by the card shop itself, then it’s basically meaningless.
If a third-party warehouse verifies the goods, you still have to trust the warehouse—and you also have to guard against collusion between the warehouse and the merchant, as well as fake inspections.
So Web3 can’t completely eliminate trust. What it’s better at is this: let the funds be controlled by a contract, and require the supplier, logistics, warehouse, and buyers to each provide proof. This breaks apart the single point of trust that used to be concentrated in the card shop.
It may not be able to fully prevent disappearances, but it can make it much harder for a card shop to simultaneously control consumers’ money, goods, and the right to verify—and it can also reduce losses when problems do happen.