Working with existing B2B platforms

Ron Whitney writes about Universal Currency
UC was created in 1997 with the same vision - to be a inter-exchange system for barter exchanges to trade seamlessly between themselves.
After 22 years, UC has over 110 participating exchanges that are transacting over 1.3 million a month, and UC continues to set new trading records virtually every month.
In April, of this year UC also transitioned to the well respected Nextrade360 software platform [Mat says: NexTrade has a one page web site http://www.nextrade360.com] that provides state of the art software functionality for our UC members - which has improved our UC user experience and help increase UC's trade volume.

The barter industry has seen a number of private sector inter-exchange trading systems come and go over the last 20 years. Their failures were the result of a number of factors;
a) lack of trust in the system, b) too high transaction fees, and/or c) poor management. Since UC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of IRTA, (the impartial non-profit trade association for the barter industry), our members have trust in UC and it's management team. Additionally, UC has always been considered as an add-on benefit of membership in IRTA, and as such we are able to offer extremely low transactions fees, (a half of one percent cash on purchases and a half of one percent in trade on sales), which makes UC a financially attractive trading option for our members.

As you know, UC is its own private barter currency - which means UC is no different than any other barter exchange - it had to grow its own trade dollar supply over the years, (via transactions, credit line extensions and new member additions), in order to be large enough to create the level of transaction volume UC is experiencing today. New inter-exchange trading platforms that create their own trade currency face the same challenge of building their trade dollar supply fast enough, and large enough, in order to successfully survive the new venture start-up curve.
Further, as I'm sure you've noticed, the barter industry is comprised of hundreds of independent entrepreneurial-minded individuals who often times resist the call to cooperate with their peers, (who in most cases are their competitors), even when such cooperation would actually be in their own best self-interest. Based on this dynamic, I would submit that UC has done an amazing job of pulling together over 110 exchanges to work in unison for the collective good of the group.

My reply to Ron suggests that IRTA should be thinking about standards and suggests that whatever platform is used, UC is clunky because the concept is wrong...

The Credit Commons is not a barter platform, and would not replace any existing barter platforms - I'm aware that things cost millions to develop these days and have many requirements and features. The credit Commons is just a standard way for two barter platforms to keep account with each other through a third party, but it leads to quite a different technical and political configuration which I hope will interest you.

Standards are critical for the development of many industries. Think how chaotic the world would be without USB, VHS, HTML, ISBN, IBAN, the meter, the kilogram etc. Why can all the banks pay each other but the barter exchanges not? Can you point me to any discussions about standards for trade exchanges?

Anything could be a standard, even NexTrade, however to declare it so would be to give NexTrade an advantage over its competitors but more importantly limit the competitors to what NexTrade can do. This happens a lot. An organisation like IRTA could preside over standards development to ensure fairness and quality.

UC, if I understand correctly, is a platform whose members are other platforms. However those platforms are barely integrated with the NexTrade 360 software, I suppose - how could they unless NexTrade published an open API and every platform upgrading their software? Without integration, end users have the experience of being members of two platforms instead of one. Do individual members of participating platforms receive individual usernames and passwords? How are members balances reconciled when they trade on two platforms or do they have two currencies? Who grants them the UC credit and covers defaults? As far as I understand it, all these questions have messy answers.

If the platforms were to use a standard protocol however, a much better user experience would be possible.

Users would log into their own platform to make a payment, and pay with their own currency limited by their own balance limits on that platform. Ordinary users would not have a UC balance and would not have to balance trade in two currencies.
Payments would be converted to UC as they went through NexTrade and converted to the payee unit in the payee's platform.
Each platform would have UC limits imposed at the NexTrade level.
New levels could be added to allow for fine-grained governance.
Standards would serve barter network operators because they would be much less captured by their software providers.

And importantly for you, platform developers would have to implement only one API to become compatible with all other compatible platforms - this is something that IRTA as a standards body, could be pushing for.

To me as a software engineer, I can see why UC started off as a platform of platforms fifteen or twenty years ago, but I think if UC was an open standard rather than a proprietary platform, the barter industry could grow by orders of magnitude.

Ron replied:
IRTA has already contracted with Nextrade360 for the creation of an API for UC - which we hope to release in the near future. We are confident that the API will increase UC trade volume along the lines that you suggested it would.

I replied:
If I understand correctly, you are planning an API to open up the NexTrade360 database to other platforms to read and write. In other words to allow other providers to build their own user interface onto NextTrade350.
This means IRTA would be:
- unilaterally declaring NexTrade360 to be a standard
- fragmenting the market because other APIs already exist for other platforms
- allowing NexTrade360 to define a new standard, and then
- ensuring that the new standard supports the NexTrade360 feature set and not anybody elses.
- inviting others to invest in the NexTrade360 standard,
- giving NexTrade360 an unfair commercial advantage by proposing that other players invest their resources in building user interfaces for NexTrade360.
This would have been really helpful done ten years ago as a multistakeholder exercise, but now it is too late. Because other APIs exist you would be creating a competing API, it would be platform dependent, it might be less appropriate than existing ones, and you would be reducing overall interoperability.
The Credit Commons is an API for accounting only - it works at a deeper level to all these platforms, and therefore doesn't compete with them.
It would provide a standard way for any platform to read and write transactions.
And it would enable platforms to (effectively) write transactions to each other's databases, subject to agreement.
It would reduce the long term costs of building barter software, because each platform could use a common component for accounting while providing different features and user interfaces and membership agreements to their users as they do now.
This is a paradigm shift, and I don't expect it to click immediately!

"This is a paradigm shift, and I don't expect..." IRTA will ever catch up !? - lol

@Matthew Are you describing an extensible abstraction layer for a class of APIs? (If so, that may share some elements with a proposal I pitched in Bristol earlier this year: https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/XjlamPYp-OyiHv5b9-3x685X/ -- although that had very different focus.

Yes John. Everything you said in the cryptpad applies to the business barter industry, and doubtless some of the APIs around are doing the same functions. Bristol Pound probably never thought to be a member of the IRTA because they barely touched on Reciprocal Trade. It might be helpful to pull these orgs together with the argument that we are greater than the sum of our parts.

Annette Rigs said:
When UC was using Richard Logie’s software he created an RSS Feed of UC offers that UC platforms could display. The members that used it, liked it. Nextrade has some great features that allows their users to see each other’s listings but that doesn’t help members using their own or other 3rd party software. So as a step towards greater visibility of UC offers to the members of exchanges, we asked Nextrade to develop an API to accomplish that. I don’t understand how this makes the users platform dependent or what it is competing with. It doesn’t make Nextrade a “standard”, rather it allows exchanges on any platform to have better access to UC listings.
Years ago we had a representative from ISO - the International Organization for Standardization) at a conference and they spoke about standardization in general but it didn’t generate a lot of interest and their were definitely not the funds to enter that process.
I know I’ve said this before but this industry is made up largely of independent minded entrepreneurs who don’t like ANYTHING imposed on them. Getting them to go this direction themselves (instead of via the software companies) would be a heavy lift to say the least.
I don’t feel I have a good grasp of what you are recommending from a strategic standpoint but it has to speak to the value for the operators themselves because they aren’t going to participate otherwise.

I replied.
Possibly I was using the term 'standard' too loosely. I meant it in a de facto sense - anybody can create an API but when IRTA says NexTrade is the platform for the Universal Currency, and everyone who want to connect to that platform must implement that API, that would be a de facto standard.
Can you confirm that the nexTrade API you commissioned is only for visibility of UC offers? They could do worse than implement an RSS again! If so, that is much less than I imagined when I said "If I understand correctly, you are planning an API to open up the NexTrade360 database to other platforms to read and write." And this also means most of what I said about creating a competing standard doesn't apply.
Instead of that, I'm still concerned that UC is a very clunky piece of technology, which connects people between networks on the one hand, but also gets in the way.
- Are individual members allowed to log in to UC or do they need an admin?
- Do members maintain one local balance or do they have to balance UC separately?
- Are members offers automatically visible on UC or do they have to create and edit their offers on two platforms?
Ideally there wouldn't be a platform in the middle because all the platforms would speak the same language. There could be a tension between platforms each of whom is theoretically seeking a monopoly (that's what happens in capitalist tech) and regulators who want to see the whole system work better for the sake of end users.
Annette when you talk about 'value for the operators themselves' it sounds like IRTA exists to serve the operators, more than the software companies. I agree. Can we clarify the following tension within your constituency?
Operators are happy to be local, they would like to trade with other operators, but their platforms only allow them to trade with other operators on the same platform.
Software companies are competing to capture operators by telling them that their platform has the most members. They don't want to operators to trade with members on other platforms because they want to attract those operators into their own networks using their own platform, and get revenue from those intertrades. Software companies fear that if all software were interoperable, operators would no longer be captive, and further they would lose revenue from the intertrading?
Putting the UC platform in the middle provides this clunky interoperability that I described in the three bullet points above. It means you select a software provider who will bend over backwards for a high status customer (GETS, Bartercard, and now NexTrade). It means you don't have to develop any software or engage too much with tricky problems of software architecture such as I'm bringing now. But it means that you have created a global barter platform by basically copy pasting local barter platform. So I'm trying to re-imagine how things should be at the global level.