One-stop shopping: Online payments and ID.

Why Nuggets is the way forward in our digital world.

Today, we live online. Clothes. Food. Banking. Whatever it is, we’re researching, we’re comparison-shopping, and we’re buying it online. It’s a global trend — and it shows no sign of letting up.

In this blog, I’ll explore the relationship between online payments, online identification, and how we’ll leverage the advantages of the blockchain to safeguard consumers, save e-tailers money, and change the very nature of e-commerce.

Bad things can be expensive

It wasn’t long ago that buying something from a brick-and-mortar store was the only option. Sure, there was mail order. But not every store could afford to publish a catalog, not every catalog was a comprehensive representative of the store’s offerings, and the words “free shipping” were unheard of. And then along came e-commerce. And behemoths like Amazon, JD.com, and The Otto Group. In a relatively short time, just about everything you could imagine could be purchased online. Today, on any mobile device, you can order anything from a book about cars to an actual car.

Fast forward: It’s projected that global e-commerce will reach USD 4.5 trillion in sales by 2021. Out of the entire universe of people who are online around the world, more than half of them have made an online purchase. Not unsurprisingly, two-thirds of millennials prefer shopping online. You can do the math: Those numbers will only go up.

Unfortunately, as those numbers rise, so do the numbers associated with fraud, identity theft, and data breaches of all kinds. Advances in payment and identification security haven’t kept pace with the rush of purchase activity. In 2016, credit card and identity fraud cost USD 16 billion in the US alone.

Status quo? No.

The costs of fraud and other payment issues to merchants are significant. But there’s the larger issue of consumer trust and frustration with the current systems. Nearly every retailer maintains their own customer database — and understandably so. But that’s not ideal for consumers, who have to create unique usernames and passwords for every site they’re buying from. And if they trust their personal and credit card information online with the retailer, they have to enter it for every new registration, which creates exponential opportunities for criminals. If and when fraud does occur, new card details have to be re-entered for every site.

Nearly two-thirds of all Americans have experienced some sort of data breach or theft. Alternatives to credit cards like PayPal and Google Checkout are a step in the right direction, but are still just front-ends to data silos susceptible to hackers.

ID and registration, please

So how do we move beyond what’s clearly not working and get to a system where payments are easy and secure no matter what you’re buying? A system that gets rid of the need to create unique username/password combinations for every retailer? A system that stores all of your essential personal and financial data while being impervious to hacking and fraud?

The answer is to put your identity on the blockchain, on Nuggets. So if a merchant doesn’t have your data, that data can’t be breached. Your usernames and passwords aren’t “anywhere” for hackers to harvest and manipulate. Together, biometrics and the blockchain effectively eliminate the potential for data breach — only you can initiate or complete a transaction.

There’s also a bigger, social benefit based on the organizing logic of the blockchain-powered, decentralized Web — the idea of a “trustless” system. When you’re using Nuggets, the more good transactions you make, the more you strengthen your trust, without ever having to share the details of those transactions. The same goes for every business using Nuggets. And all of that personal data — that currently can be harvested and monetized by others — remains exclusively yours. You’re in control of it. You can earn Nuggets Tokens if and when you decide to share any of it, tokens you can then decide to “spend” however you see fit. We’ll dive deeper into the token discussion in a future blog.

For now, the key takeaway is this: Nuggets is ushering in a new digital era for e-commerce. And it’s long overdue.

If you haven’t already, join us on Telegram.

And we invite you to learn more about our Token Sale.

Also, if you have any questions, please leave them below. I’ll respond to everyone.

Until next time…