Composable Commerce

Overview

Global commerce infrastructure—payments, logistics, marketplaces, and supply chain coordination—has become increasingly concentrated in a small number of platforms that bundle services, capture data, and impose high switching costs on merchants and consumers alike. While these platforms have driven enormous efficiency gains, their closed architectures create structural bottlenecks: merchants cannot easily compose services from different providers, consumers have no portable reputation or transaction history, and small-scale producers in emerging markets remain effectively locked out of global trade.

The promise of onchain commerce is not simply to replicate existing marketplace functionality on a blockchain, but to decompose commerce into modular, interoperable primitives—programmable payments, verifiable provenance, portable identity, and open order books—that any participant can assemble, extend, and audit. This composability enables new market structures: peer-to-peer trade with programmatic escrow, supply chains with cryptographic provenance from origin to shelf, and payment flows that settle across borders without intermediary rent extraction.

Ethereum's programmable settlement layer, combined with Layer 2 scaling solutions and emerging token standards for real-world assets, provides the technical foundation for this shift. The challenge is no longer primarily technical—it is about identifying the specific commerce verticals and coordination problems where composable, verifiable infrastructure delivers concrete advantages over incumbent platforms, and building the standards and pilots that demonstrate this.

Why Commerce

HYPOTHESIS #1: The current platform-centric commerce model creates artificial bundling—merchants must accept a platform's payments, discovery, logistics, and dispute resolution as a package—suppressing competition and innovation at each layer of the stack.

HYPOTHESIS #2: Cross-border commerce, particularly for physical goods, suffers from fragmented trust infrastructure: different payment rails, incompatible compliance regimes, and no shared mechanism for verifying product authenticity or seller reputation across jurisdictions.

HYPOTHESIS #3: The rise of direct-to-consumer brands, creator commerce, and local production networks is generating demand for lightweight, modular commerce infrastructure that platforms like Amazon and Shopify are structurally disincentivized to provide, as their business models depend on aggregation and lock-in.

HYPOTHESIS #4: Real-world asset tokenization—representing physical goods, invoices, warranties, and trade finance instruments as onchain primitives—is reaching sufficient maturity to enable practical commerce applications, but lacks the standards, tooling, and demonstrated use cases needed for adoption beyond crypto-native communities.

Call for Implementations

The Composable Commerce landscape is intended to map where coordination failures, rent extraction, and interoperability gaps are most acute in real-world commerce, and where open, programmable infrastructure can meaningfully improve outcomes for merchants, consumers, and producers.

As part of this work, the Ethereum Foundation Use Case Lab is issuing an open call for implementations. We seek collaborations with merchants, marketplace operators, payment providers, logistics companies, trade finance institutions, and organizations building onchain commerce primitives. Priority will be given to implementations that address specific, measurable friction points in existing commerce flows, work with real transaction volumes, and produce insights that can inform open standards.

Implementations may take several forms, including:

Sandboxed/Focused Pilots

Technical Primitives & Open Standards

Policy Frameworks & Regulatory Guidance

We anticipate supporting a select number of implementations through a combination of technical support, exploratory funding, and connections to relevant collaborators and ecosystems. The specific form and scope of resourcing will be determined through initial conversations as appropriate.

Inspiration

Programmable Payments & Settlement

The Case for Programmable Payments - Visa Crypto Thought Leadership

Stablecoin Payments in Cross-Border Commerce - Circle Research

Payment Streaming & Continuous Settlement - Superfluid

Programmable Money and the Future of Commerce - a16z Crypto

Real-Time Gross Settlement via Smart Contracts - Bank for International Settlements

Supply Chain & Provenance

Blockchain for Supply Chain Transparency - World Economic Forum

Verifiable Product Provenance from Farm to Shelf - IBM Food Trust

Digital Product Passports and the EU Regulation - European Commission

Tokenized Certificates of Origin for International Trade - TradeTrust

Combating Counterfeits with Onchain Product Authentication - Breitling

Open Marketplaces & Commerce Primitives

Composable Commerce Architecture - MACH Alliance

The Unbundling of E-Commerce - Benedict Evans

Decentralized Order Books for Physical Goods - Boson Protocol

Tokenized Loyalty & Portable Reputation Systems - Blackbird

Peer-to-Peer Commerce with Programmatic Escrow - OpenBazaar Legacy & Successors

Trade Finance & Real-World Assets

Tokenized Trade Finance: Bridging the $2.5T Gap - Boston Consulting Group

Real-World Asset Tokenization Standards - Centrifuge

Invoice Factoring on Public Blockchains - Goldfinch Protocol

Supply Chain Finance via Programmable Receivables - Maple Finance

The Promise of Tokenized Commodities - World Gold Council & Paxos

Use Case Radar

Shopify integrates blockchain-based tokengated commerce for merchant storefronts

Courtyard tokenizes physical collectibles with insured custody and onchain trading

Request Network processes $400M+ in crypto invoicing for businesses globally

MakerDAO's RWA vaults channel $2B+ into real-world trade finance and lending

Drip Haus enables subscription commerce with programmable payment streams on Solana

Breitling issues digital product passports as NFTs for luxury watch authentication

Mastercard launches crypto credential system for cross-border commerce identity

Walmart Canada uses blockchain to automate freight invoice reconciliation

Goldfinch provides undercollateralized lending to real-world businesses in emerging markets

Circle launches programmable wallets enabling embedded stablecoin payments for merchants

AgroToken tokenizes agricultural commodities as collateral for farmer credit in Argentina

Jiffy enables blockchain-based instant settlement for Indian merchant payments