Taraxa: empowering people, businesses, and machines to track off-chain transactions.
Informal agreements bear a lot of hidden risks losing people time and money every day.
80% of the world’s transactions are informal, hence difficult to capture and verify.
In our hyper-connected world, individuals and businesses remain vulnerable to the confusion of informal daily agreements between buyers and sellers, lenders and borrowers, clients and contractors, companies and employees. This is especially true about the informal economy sector where agreements and payments are made under the counter without proper tracking or accounting in place.
At the same time, even with today’s abundance of messengers and collaboration suites, there’s still no handy way to keep track of those offline deals that are made every day through talking, calling, and texting — from trivial pay-upon receipt services and parenthood or property relations to auto repairs, employment relations, or simply signing off on an invoice. In all these cases, both parties are left vulnerable to a sudden change of heart or other extenuating circumstances.
Lawyers will tell you that even a verbal agreement can be binding if it has explicit mutual consent. The problem is that in the absence of a legal contract or a comprehensive track record of pre-contract discussion, the parties’ intentions remain very hard to verify — even more so in informal scenarios when there’s no contract implied. This sort of confusion is typical of verbal intention and bears a lot of risk leading to costly disputes and even legal action.
Taraxa aims to take this burden off by anchoring trivial daily agreements to a public blockchain ledger making them explicitly and openly available to everyone. Now you can be 100% sure you got that ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the record and protect yourself from the dire financial and reputational consequences in case things go awry.
DLT audit trails to keep everyone accountable.
Through inline capturing and audit logging, Taraxa minimizes the cost and risk associated with daily informal interactions by making them clear, trusted, and convenient.
With Taraxa, individuals, independent contractors, and businesses alike will benefit from increased visibility and trackability of offline and off-chain transactions. Our flagship platform helps to record and track everyday agreements, no matter where the discussion takes place — on the phone, in SMS-threads, email, or in some app chat. It makes transactions transparent and stakeholders accountable by letting you go back and check on who said what when at any point in time. This can be used as proof of consent in all sorts of disputes and even serve as chain-of-custody in legal proceedings.
It’s a win-win for both parties because blockchain-based accountability is even more efficient than actual ‘good faith’ — you are incentivized to fulfill your obligations by knowing that your consent is explicitly recorded. So it’s not only the money but also reputation at stake.
Some sample use cases for Taraxa’s audit logging.
The use case scenarios for Taraxa’s tamper-proof audit logging range from peer-to-peer lending to construction change orders, remote work, and blockchain governance disputes — all those cases where people need to explicitly agree and go ahead quickly and hassle-free.
Remote and fieldwork:
- COVID-sparked a new wave of the self-employed, casual and gig-workers, and small-scale entrepreneurs and businesses, making it much harder to coordinate work. Yet, the abundance of collaboration suites makes it even harder to do — what we need is a fast way to bring everyone on the same page.
- Independent contractors and gig workers who render service and want to be sure they’re getting paid on time, especially when doing ‘pay upon receipt’.
- Every time an IC or a gig worker gets the green light from the client, but then the client backs off and won’t pay.
Construction:
- Sharing construction reports and getting approvals from the office can take days, while the clock is ticking and the costs keep piling up. Yet, subcontractor daily reports need to be intact at all times — and if they’re not, beware of delays and costly disputes.
- Quickly put every change on the record and be sure you and the client are on the exact same page. With all change orders digitally signed and stored in an easy-to-use dashboard, you can forget about misunderstandings.
Supply chain:
- Our customer is a global supply chain quality management and control operator that faced the problem of checking the authenticity of auto parts coming to the warehouse. It is critical for them to make sure that application and inspection processes remain transparent every step of the way, with all the parties involved held accountable for the counterfeiting.
- We offered them a hardware solution that makes it possible to identify auto parts through cryptographic keys to ensure secure communications and data sharing. All the shipment-related data is captured by cryptographically-enhanced sensors with a secure boot to guarantee that only an entity with the right private key can load applications into the microcontroller. So the only access control performed is whether or not the transaction was signed by a correct private key — whoever has access to the private key is the owner. Along with proper hardware support, Taraxa’s blockchain is used here to establish a complete audit log of all transactions related to a particular shipment — from the moment it is loaded on the factory to when unpacked at the warehouse.
