For this week’s special feature about the best performing token of the last week (October 7th – October 12th), we will quickly cover Swarm City, their proposal of a marketplace where reputation acts as a keystone and the possible reasons for their climb.
Swarm City is a conjoint effort of developers all around the world, with open channels for everyone interested in collaborating on an open-source section, and actively looking for help in more private developing areas. This has helped them to build a name among the blockchain community, but what exactly makes them different from other similar projects? Let’s find out.
A Needle in a Haystack
It is no mystery that blockchain-based marketplaces are becoming more and more popular, with not only more projects being released but also them moving more people and sentiment as they evolve. This means that entering the market is becoming harder as time goes on, which is why every project must have a visible edge over the others.
What makes Swarm City stand out from the rest is their focus in building a feedback-oriented community, where blockchain and smart contracts allow for customers and sellers to build and maintain a reputation, imitating how word-of-mouth publicity works in the real word. With this system, not only are sellers driven forward to giving the best service they can, but costumers can create communities based on shared interests and similar purchases.
This need for community in marketplaces is what made platforms like Amazon come to such lengths: you don’t need to trust the seller if you trust your peers, the other costumers. But this model comes with the limitation of having to trust the platform itself on how it handles your data, how much they charge you for the service and many other issues. This is where decentralized models come in, and Swarm City especially focuses on eliminating any need for third-party intermediaries. No big names to trust, no worries about your credit card data or fake sellers trying to scam you.
Philosophy drives Tech, Tech strengthens Philosophy
Projects of this kind that arise without a clear vision often find themselves failing in the long run, and Swarm City knows it. They want to offer the customers the tools necessary to self-regulate the markets they frequently visit, identified by “hashtags” that specify the good or service that’s offered within them, by creating hashtag-centered communities, or “hives”, where every user can join and share their experience with a certain seller, driving their reputation and clientele upwards.
Of course, given that there is no personal proof related to transactions as there is in the real world, customers can only gain reputation when they have completed a verified transaction, easily confirmed by the publicly available blockchain where every transaction and rating is stored. This will allow for a solid, trust-less system of customers discussing with each other about who are the best sellers within a specific hashtag that current or potential sellers can follow to learn how to properly engage with their target audience.
The Sudden Surge
Since their progress seems to be tied to publicly released milestones, it would appear that the sudden surge in their SWT token might be related to one of those. Their latest developing milestone is the ability for users to select new hashtags by their overall activity, in terms of completed deals and current following users, and implemented geographical filters for hashtags.
However, this milestone was published almost a year ago, so it is certain that this is not the case, and their latest update took place in May 21, so we might be looking at an unconfirmed reason for rise. We will keep looking for further information and update the article if needed.
In the meantime, it is a matter of time to find out if there is a solid reason behind their climb of last week, and whether Swarm City will be one of the leading marketplace projects by taking advantage of their reputation-based backbone.