OCP is a shared set of communication standards for commercial transactions. OCP is an industry-agnostic, interoperable, open protocol connecting any buyer and any seller across any industry to engage in permissionless, location-aware transactions.
The OCP specification defines a standard, technology-agnostic API description that allows any application to discover new commercial services without requiring api keys, source code access, additional documentation, or integrations with ad-hoc services. When properly defined, a software application can interpret and transact with remote services with a very minimal amount of implementation overhead.
Developers can use OCP to build new consumer marketplace applications without having to think about acquiring customers, hiring a sales team, or talking to a sales rep to acquire access to necessary infrastructure.
- A community-curated list of OCP-related projects, core working groups, and collaborators lives here.
- To make contributions to the protocol, please see our guidlines.
Every commercial transaction follows the same standard series of order lifecycle API requests. This specification standardizes this lifecylce through a series of 4 stages:
This is the stage where a Buyer searches or explores the product(s) or service(s) they intend to purchase from a Seller.
The Buyers intent is typically defined by a Client application performing a specific function, like food delivery. The Explore API enables a Buyer to query the network with their Intent. The Explore API has a callback mechanism that returns a Catalog which includes a selection of Sellers offering the intended product(s) or service(s).
The discovery process requires both a query to the registry contract and an API request to at least 1 server.
This is the stage where the Buyer creates an order for the
selected product(s) or service(s). The Buyer selects the Item(s) and/or Offer(s)
they plan to purchase from the Seller, establishing a direct connection with
an SSN, and broadcasting their intent to purchase.
This is the stage where the Seller processes the order, packages the product(s), and, if applicable, ships them to the Buyer’s specified delivery address. Order fulfillment broadly represents the event when a Buyer receives the Item(s) from a Seller.
This is the stage where the Buyer receives the Item(s), and inspects the Item(s). In this stage, the Buyer may provide feedback, require customer support, or initiate a return/refund if dissatisfied.
When editing, test to ensure schemas are validd by running the following command in your terminal:
swagger-cli bundle postman/schemas/index.yaml --outfile api/api.yaml --type yaml