Want to place a bet on where VRM will finally take off? Try India.
Because India is home to the Beckn protocol: one that enables peer-to-peer e-commerce at scale without the big platforms taking a large cut of the pie just for matchmaking. The possibilities are endless and extreme—especially for customers and small businesses.
Beckn is open source (here on Github), moving into deployment, and expected to grow toward ubiquity on the same slope as Aadhaar, the government ID now held by 1.35 billion people.
To put this into perspective, India has more people than all of Europe (even when you throw in Russia and Turkey), and more than twice the population of North America. Only China has more people, but India is ready to overtake it in just four years.
We will discuss all this and more with Sujith Nair this coming Monday, 20 February, from 2-3:30 PM Eastern Time. He is the CEO & Co-founder of FIDE.org, the nonprofit behind the Beckn protocol, and may have the clearest vision in the world toward an e-commerce future that isn’t contained inside big tech’s walled gardens: ones in which every business and every customer can operate with both independence and minimized friction.
This will kick off the Workshop’s next Beyond the Web salon series . Stay tuned for more in the coming months, but be sure to catch this one. It could hardly matter more for what our project has worked toward since 2006.
It’s both in-person and online, and free. But you need to register. Do that here.