Hello eckmar,

Thank you so much for your questions.

Regarding the App Store information, we currently have two components in our application.

One is our crypto wallet for example which resides fully on the blockchain and doesn’t require any information. We have many other features in the platform which won’t need any permissions.

The second component is when we need you to register an account to do certain things such as sending a chat to someone else. There, you can decide, like on most app, to share certain information. Please note, and it’s important, that by default you can access and browse the app without giving any permissions. But for certain things such as uploading a product, we will need to ask you an access (to your photo library in this case) in order for you to be able to upload a picture for example. Depending on the functionality you want to use, the App may ask you for specific permissions and this only when you want to use that functionality.

Now, our objective is to try to decentralize as many aspects of these processes as possible over time and remove as much as possible the required information. For example for our chat, we are developing a new way for you to be able to use the chat functionality without having to register. For listing creation, we are thinking about having as many pieces as possible on the blockchain and separate the other pieces which would not yet be compatible. As we are developing quite an advanced infrastructure, some of these technologies don’t necessarily exist today on the blockchain or exist but are not yet convenient. Our goal is to tackle them one by one in order to always separate personal information with other types of information which can help make the experience awesome (e.g. what are the trending products in a specific location, where is there traction in the marketplace, etc…). We are trying to focus first on everything that has to do with privacy so we can avoid asking you for certain permissions or asking you to share certain information. Over time, you will see that the amount of information needed will continuously be less extensive and will always intend to provide full control and anonymity of each user.

Regarding the second excellent question as well on the need to have a custom token, the short answer is that we want to develop many layers of functionalities on the blockchain and that for many of those, having our own token will be required.

The longer answer is that we envision Spacelens to be a marketplace platform that is fully controlled by its community. We want members of the community to be able to vote and delegate certain decisions. Because we are building an eCommerce platform, we also need to go much further and think about many use cases. For example, creating mechanisms for promotions, rewards, coupons, subscriptions, settle disputes, how do we guarantee authenticity of a product, how do we manage the flow of processing orders, settling specific transactions, invoicing, shipping, etc...
We also don’t want to limit ourselves to products but tackle all the service part. Think about time management, escrows, proof of delivery, and more. We also leverage maps extensively in our platform and want to bring specific of its components to the blockchain. There are no good standards for many of these today.

In order to execute some of these functionalities, we will also probably need to create additional smart contracts that can talk with each other and invent new layers of technologies that will require for our token to have very unique features, often new to this world which cannot be found in the current technological stack or even with existing standards of available coins.

We will try to constantly push updates in this thread, our blog, and our platform to provide all the milestones we achieve as well as sharing transparently what we have managed to bring to the blockchain and what is yet to come.

Wishing you all the best and much more