Bitzon
BetaA blockchain-powered online marketplace that settles seller payments in seconds and replaces percentage-based listing fees with a flat monthly subscription, accepting crypto, BTZ tokens, or fiat.
Year
2018
Category
Enterprise
Status
Beta
1
Flat Fee Model
3
Currencies Accepted
01 — The Challenge
By 2018, the marketplace economy was openly broken for the people who actually made it work. Sellers on Amazon and its peers were giving up double-digit percentages on every transaction, waiting weeks for payouts, and paying again for the privilege of being seen — visibility was gated behind ad spend.
Buyers were paying inflated prices to cover those fees and still ended up in algorithmically curated experiences they didn't trust. Crypto-native commerce promised to fix this — fast settlement, lower fees, programmable economics — but the early experiments were either developer-only ICO theatre or speculative-token-first schemes with terrible UX for actual buyers.
Nobody had built a blockchain marketplace that an everyday seller in Moncton or a regular shopper in Toronto could use without reading a whitepaper. The total addressable market — global e-commerce — was already a $2 trillion category, and none of it was being settled in seconds. That was the opening.
Our Approach
We co-built Bitzon out of 860 Main Street in Moncton — the same building that housed EduCode — with a five-person core team: Guyverson Vernous Jr. as CEO and lead blockchain engineer, Simon Henman as COO and financial lead, plus a three-person engineering bench (Jigar Sojitra as CTO, Hitesh Sardhara on backend, Abhishek Kumbhani on frontend), and three board advisors (Naviin Kapoor, Mike Kovach, Damir Dracic).
Three deliberate design decisions shaped the product: (1) Sellers pay one low flat monthly subscription for unlimited listings instead of percentage cuts on every sale; (2) Buyers and sellers can transact in cryptocurrency, native Bitzon tokens (BTZ — an Ethereum ERC20 token, 800M total supply), or regular fiat — the chain is invisible to anyone who doesn't want to deal with it; (3) Settlement happens on-chain in seconds, so sellers get paid the moment a buyer hits buy, not three weeks later when the platform feels like releasing the funds.
We layered token-economic incentives that aligned both sides: BTZ holders get a lifetime 10% discount on every purchase, and sellers who pay subscription fees in BTZ get 50% off their monthly rate.
The token sale ran July 15 to October 15, 2019, with token price set at $0.35 USD, a soft cap of $3M, and a hard cap of $15M. Distribution: 65% public sale, 13% team, 10% partners and advisors, 9% reserve, 3% bounties. Bitzon was accepted into Propel's Incite accelerator in April 2019 (a competitive Atlantic Canada cohort) and Henman was featured on Atlantic Business Magazine's 30 Under 30 New Brunswick list for the work.
The Results
Bitzon completed its public token sale at 100% of plan and shipped the foundational architecture for fast-settlement blockchain commerce: a working ERC20 token, an end-to-end marketplace front end, the dual-currency checkout, the seller-subscription billing model, and the discount-token mechanics.
The project remains a reference design in our portfolio for how to build blockchain infrastructure that hides the chain — buyers and sellers see Amazon, the chain just does its job underneath.
The thesis Bitzon pitched in 2018 — that crypto would settle commerce in seconds, not weeks — is now standard market expectation. We were early. Bitzon proved the architecture works.
What We Delivered
Fintech
Blockchain
Native Application
Impact
By the numbers.
Flat Fee Model
Currencies Accepted
Year Founded
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Where human intuition
meets machine intelligence.
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