ChallengeBarter breaks down the moment two parties value a trade differently — someone always comes up short, and the deal dies. Solving that normally means reintroducing a central currency and the dependencies that come with it. The goal was a marketplace where unequal trades still settle fairly, without a bank in the middle.
ApproachTekel is a mobile multi-platform application — one marketplace shipped to iOS, Android, and web, plus merchant and admin surfaces. We designed the economic mechanism, not just the screens: a token that absorbs the imbalance in any trade, priced by an oracle built from the network's own trade data, with credit limits and a non-inflationary treasury funded by transaction fees rather than printing supply. On top of that protocol we built the full marketplace end to end — Stripe Marketplace for credit card processing and merchant payouts, escrowed payments, multi-party dispute resolution, milestone and time-and-materials billing, and five fulfillment models.
ResultA complete multi-sided commerce platform run by a one-person engineering org, on edge infrastructure at near-zero fixed cost — the trust mechanics (escrow, disputes, phased payments) that normally require dedicated payments and operations teams, delivered as a single coherent system across mobile and web.