Trench: Open-source fraud prevention platform for marketplaces

TLDR: You can now self-host an open-source fraud prevention solution as a marketplace.

Hi everyone! We’re Bowen (left) and Max (right) from Trench. We used to work at startups that let you purchase NFTs/crypto via credit card/ACH, and we spent a lot of our time there fighting payment fraud.

🔥 PROBLEM

Fraud vendors can’t solve fraud for you. Every business outgrows their vendor.

There will always be fraud that is specific to your application or business, that no vendor will solve. This is because:

• They don’t know your business.
• They have a thousand other customers to worry about.

At one point, fake NFT sellers on our marketplace accounted for 90% of our fraud, but none of our vendors cared about sellers, let alone NFT projects.

To reduce fraud, we needed to build new tools and processes that were completely specific to us, like reviewing NFT sellers and analyzing blockchain activity.

But existing vendors lock you in.

Because existing fraud vendors are hosted and closed-source, it’s a nightmare to build around them:

• You can’t integrate your own data. Every time we needed to add a custom field to our vendor’s dashboard, we needed manual approval. This process would take an entire week, during which we’d be losing money to fraudsters.
• You can’t export all your data. To retrieve our own payments data from our vendor, we had to write web scrapers because there was no API or export button.

🧱 SOLUTION

Trench grows with your business and doesn’t lock you in.

• Trench is open-source. You can modify it for your use case and share your solutions with others.
• Trench is self-hosted. You have full control and access to your data, and you can respond to fraud without asking third parties for permission.
• Trench comes with tools out of the box. You can deploy a dashboard and rule engine in one click and you can collect device data with one line of JS.

🏠 FOR MARKETPLACES

If you’re a marketplace, Trench can help you:

• Prevent buyer and seller fraud in one platform
• Review sellers by KYC, KYB and transaction history
• Set transaction limits for both buyers and sellers
• Automatically assess payments based on both buyer and seller data
• Integrate directly with Stripe Payments, Identity, and Connect

👀 How do I get started?

You can set up Trench in two steps:

• Deploy an instance of Trench in minutes
• Add a code snippet to your checkout page

Visit our repo to get started or talk to us and we’ll do it for you.

🙏 Our ask

We’d love to chat if you’re a marketplace thinking about fraud or if you find yourself building a lot of fraud tools in-house: founders@trytrench.com

⭐ Star our repo on Github