OpenBazaar grows rapidly, achieving many firsts

OpenBazaar is the first truly decentralized marketplace and has been growing steadily in popularity and functionality since its launch on April 5.

Due to the peer-to-peer nature of the platform, it's difficult to quantify how popular it is, but there are various secondary metrics that can give some indication of this. The most obvious is the number of users following the @OpenBazaar account within the app.

When you install the program, the default option is to follow the channel for updates. But with 16,675 followers, there's no way to see how many have unfollowed me, or how many duplicate accounts there are.

BazaarBay provides further pointers. The first search engine of the OpenBazaar product is modeled after Google, and provides statistics for their search index. Various graphs are available to measure the strength of the network, although none of these statistics have been reviewed by an outside agency and cannot be verified.

Currently, there are more than 27,000 online nodes in total, and BazaarBay reports that more than 300 of them have included nearly 16,000 products, but it is difficult to find each of them, and duplicate or expired items may be included.

Icons showing Bazaarbay item listings and reviews from the past 24 hours. In the future, the OB1 team plans to build out their crawler to create more official statistics.

According to BazaarBay, the current number of ratings is 580, which is perhaps the most comparable to sales figures because it is easy for users to leave a rating once a purchase is completed. However, people who value privacy or are in a hurry to complete the transaction often skip the rating step.

The second-generation OpenBazaar search engine, Duo, offered some on-site user statistics and listings, but the newer service collected relatively few results.

There is also a similar app for browsing listings and Android smartphones. BazaarHound is a gateway app for browsing OpenBazaar on mobile phones and, depending on the site, making purchases through their app.

While you can't run a store through BazaarHound, it appears to be all a customer needs to do, complete everything through an OpenBazaar account and leave their reviews with suppliers.

Another way to look at OpenBazaar's popularity is to see who is using it. The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) has an in-depth report on OpenBazaar and they have a storefront (@FEEstore) selling books and clothing.

While major brands haven’t shown up yet, some of the biggest names in the bitcoin space already have storefronts, including Ledger hardware wallets and BitMain mining rigs.

The platform’s growing popularity can only be measured indirectly, but its growing power is easily discernible. Since its launch, the platform has been updated in various ways, with the latest version alone having 25 updates.

Some of the changes are merely cosmetic, like the appearance of the minimize and maximize buttons. Other, more general updates are practical, like adding more cache to the system to make browsing faster.

Brian Hoffman, the project leader and CEO of supporting company OB1, recently announced that the next major version will integrate a full Bitcoin wallet.

Wallet details are not publicly available, and the team says it will not come from a major wallet provider; the new wallet will be more tightly integrated with the platform.

Yes @openbazaar will have a full Bitcoin wallet in the next generation. - Brian Hoffman, OB1 CEO

Changes to the project roadmap also show the entirety of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which will profoundly improve OpenBazaar’s usability and performance.

IPFS is a P2P hypermedia protocol for building distributed file systems. The IPFS project itself aims to replace the Hypertext Protocol (HTTP) with a more decentralized and robust alternative.

An email from OB1 discussing their upgrade plans describes IPFS integration as "an extension of the OpenBazaar network architecture that allows user data (such as listings and product images) to be distributed across multiple nodes in the network."

“Similar to BitTorrent, when you access other users’ storage, your node will download and start seeding the storage data on other users. This means that the more people visit your store, the more your data will be replicated on the network - OB1”

IPFS should allow many OpenBazaar stores to run overnight without instructions on the host, or to host payments. "Sellers should have the ability to make their products visible on the network even when the application is closed," the team said.

Anti-censorship is another added feature, according to the developers. The team said:

“With data dispersed across hundreds or thousands of nodes, it’s impossible for a potential attacker to prevent someone from accessing your content.”

However, IFPS does not guarantee that the store is online 100% of the time. Businesses may want a hosted solution, such as the popular HostedBazaar service, or the Agorist hosting package. Both are custom-built to run OpenBazaar with minimal installation and maintenance.

IPFS will also help with search and indexing, one of the things OB1 can’t get going fast enough. “Currently, swiping through the search page to find new listings is done on an ad hoc basis,” the team admits.

At this stage, in order to make their products more discoverable, stores will add relevant keywords to their products and keep their stores online as much as possible. The team said:

“Search results are often inaccurate because it depends on users accurately labeling their products, and right now, the signal-to-noise ratio is low.”

While IPFS will help alleviate this problem, the team says that support for building listings to improve discovery and search will most likely become the primary means of browsing items on the web.

“We are working on a way to significantly improve content discovery on the OpenBazaar network.” — Washington Sanchez, co-founder of OpenBazaar

The plan is to introduce third-party search functionality, which would base the search bar on an API endpoint that runs a crawler and indexes listings.

BazaarBay and Duo have been actively indexing every OpenBazaar listing they can find, and they publish the listings on their own sites. The new plan to create OpenBazaar search is to let users choose from a range of products that resemble third-party services in the system internally. "If a specific endpoint fails (as Popcorn Time often does), users can change API providers to get the application back up and running."

Users would have the ability to switch their search provider, they would not opt ​​for a centralized search functionality, and OpenBazaar could then operate in a fully decentralized manner.

BraveNewCoin spoke with developer and OB1 co-founder Washington Sanchez about the upcoming additions. Before IPFS, better search and wallets emerged to do many smaller tasks. Store storage statistics will be the first to be completed, Sanchez explained.

"Store statistics should be available soon. Brian has been working on this in recent weeks."

The already confidential chat client will get even more privacy. Sanchez revealed that the service will use the Signal Protocol for encryption.

"This will enable forward secrecy or OTR which is better than basic end-to-end encryption (which is what we use today)."

This year, TOR is going to further satisfy privacy-conscious users.

Running database backups on OpenBazaar accounts is also a much-requested feature. The plan is to give users the ability to “connect to a cloud storage provider, or save to disk (backup of the OB data folder).” Webhooks are also on the agenda, enabling mobile notifications, status triggers, and “several other features.”

Store owners also have a richer set of management tools. The OB1 team said:

"If orders are paid after X time, they will automatically disappear from the sale. Sellers should be able to manually cancel unpaid orders before this time. This should be reflected in the UI reports."

Inventory management is another useful upcoming store tool, including inventory tracking, bulk editing, and inventory export tools for listings.

Visual understanding of where users, sellers, and moderators are throughout the order process is also being worked on, as it was notably lacking in vendor success tracking. In the coming months, a sales control center will appear, designed to provide merchants with "better insight into reviews, updates, and general activity within their storefronts."

Once all the short-term upgrade code is released, some much-needed, better documentation for OpenBazaar will also be put on the agenda.

“We have been hesitant to publish better documentation because we haven’t made any major architectural changes to the protocol and applications,”

Sanchez told BraveNewCoin:

"Overall, our goal is to make OpenBazaar a viable alternative to Shopify, eBay, or Taobao... This means offline listings, offline ordering, store management tools, to name a few. At the same time, we're working hard to significantly improve privacy. In other words, we're really busy!"