eBay & web3 powered Digital Product Passports and what this could mean for the futur... | Devcon SEA

[Music] hi everyone thanks for coming to me see my talk so I guess we got straight into it we've only got seven minutes yeah so who am I so my name is James I am the engineering director for eBay small but hopefully impactful web 3 team uh I came from an acquisition about two years ago of an nft platform called known origin now really myself and my team are really interested in looking at the web three landscape looking at the eBay machine as it stands now and seeing how this technology can potentially impact them and find value for buyers and sellers and today I'm going to talk about a topic called digital product passports and why I intrinsically believe web3 is the right place for them um and I'm going to touch on four topics today uh a topic called connected products digital product passports we'll talk about web 3 and we'll talk about Commerce but first I want to set the scene and provide a little bit of vision of what Commerce could look like so you got to bear with me with this right so you walk into an office you see your colleagues stood around a board maybe you're discussing the latest mem coin you've got your Vision Pro 5000s on some AR enabled glasses not only that it's looked in your address book and it's noticed the pfps of your colleagues and displayed them on screen you know shout out to any x copy or squiggle holders in the in the room not only that it's noticed that your friend Dan at the board has got a killer watch and the latest greatest in sneakers these products are connected you've got to find out more you double tap your fingers some Machine Vision or AI Vision scans these items uniquely identifies them and starts working out exactly which unique product they are not the product skew the actual unique product after that the digital product passport pops up a digital layer linking the physical product directly in your face now this is a vision piece only right but you can see the potential you know and and you might notice as well this is very much similar to how maybe nft platforms uh looked trading nfts a few years ago from this digital link you can see ownership you might see if it's got a warranty you might see trading uh activity on the secondary Market traceability servicing in uh insights this is the vision that I want to talk about today and this is my vision and potentially the Future Vision of how Commerce might look in several years time but wait before we go on I think it's worth touching about some of the problems and challenges in Commerce at the moment and you know the first three topics you know the supply chain the supply chain is very difficult to Wrangle for physical Goods aggregating lots of disperate information maybe the digital passport is the perfect layer for this you know circularity I bought a good on the primary Market how do I sell it there's many websites many marketplaces all have different pros and cons maybe the product passport is is the place where circularity will start maybe it will also tell you how to recycle this good at the end of its life maybe this product passport is the place where you'll get additional utility after your first transactional engagement with that brand or with that shop and finally the last three um there's some emerging regulatory uh um insights coming from the EU so from 2026 2027 the EU will mandate digital product passports in things like batteries fashion white goods colle Ables now the goal is to make things more circular and give consumers more Choice maybe a tokenized digital product passport is the place where that will happen um the last two digital physical experiences a lot of the nft space sort of tried to tackle this over the last few few years with some mixed success maybe starting with a physical and adding on the digital is the right approach and then interoperability for your items for the things you own physically how do you interupt with the wider world again maybe this digital layer so this is the vision I presented slightly wacky really lowf you know this is not what we're building this is a vision piece um but really what does it enable it enables a digital lirer on physical which is interactive product experiences realtime information about your good you know empowering customers um and then interoperability where you you know you can take your physical good and use it anywhere and this is again what these could enabl and then really quickly I've only got a minute left last but not least what is this so first of all uh a physical item and a product connector really a connector comes in many forms QR codes RFD NFC chips you know Machine Vision we spoke about and then youve got this digital layer and this is what I talk about uh for digital passports and this could be you can own this thing right that's what crypto enables ownership of digital items um quickly a few industry examples 30 seconds left there is already people playing in this game in the fashion space in the luxury space you know maybe onchain is the next online and this Chang consumer Behavior would be a big driver for web to adoption Beyond training stons and mean coins um and finally wad eBay care it's massive we've got to be ahead of these Trends and Y web 3 it's credibly neutral it's a base layer for enemies can play together lots of composable great standards to build on and interoperability and ownership and that's it thank you very much okay thank you not as very very interesting in a very real world um uh do we have any questions question s in the audience let's see anyone okay cool oh hello James hello um quick question uh when do you imagine a plat a global platform like eBay uh showing it regular users as I don't know an icon and some verified as something that that says this come with a DPP and of course you can check it visually but when you acquire this pair of sneakers this Gat whatever uh well you will also acquire this this digital passport yeah is there some form of a estimate timeline or yeah so I guess you know we may already be playing in this place uh this place in Pilots but you may not notice and you know we also go down the Mantra of you know eBay users don't really care exactly you know what we're doing as long as they get lots of great value from it so maybe we're already doing this and they don't know and maybe next year it'll sort of be pushed up the rankings and things will become clearer so but there's also lots of luxury Brands already playing in this place is a reality just right over there oh nice hey James um based on uh eBay's uh sales numbers and and that what throughput do you think that you need from the underlying technology to to serve your users well that's a good question well I guess you know to get to eBay scale you know the the endgame you know it's hard to really talk about it's a reality it's hard to really say stuff in public but you know eBay's a big huge user base billions of products hundreds of millions of users you know in the last two years with the rise of l2s There's an actual credible path for actually how to achieve the throughput and the scale that eBay and that's what we'll be keeping an eye on you know as that space emerges one more question and the last one right over there the uh gentleman the cap it's going to be from over there yes beautiful um I forgot to admit I'm a bit confused as to what would be the advantage for for the end user this feels like a lot of overwhelming information that might not be tangibly beneficial and it also frankly seems like a bit of a privacy nightmare I can see how aggregating all of this kind of information in a not centralized but central point of identity could could be problematic so are there any do do you also Envision the level of of privacy associated with that yeah so privacy first very true you know we we think about this a lot and you know there there's is it right that you know this wallet owns 10 Rolexes probably not you know but we look at Technologies like uh you like providing proofs selective disclosure you know zero knowledge stuff you know that's really where I think this will go and it'll ultimately be at the behest of the holder of how much information that they should disclose I do agree that privacy is a big issue in this physical space much more than in digital is the reality um I can't remember your first question sorry okay so that's it for our question session today and can please reach out to James if you have any further question any discussion you want to continue thank you again thank you