OpenBazaar releases development roadmap, plans to integrate Tor network and develop mobile apps

Bitcoin-powered decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar has officially released its long-term development roadmap, aiming to become a global leader in censorship-resistant commerce.

Since its launch, OpenBazaar has signed cooperation agreements with many suppliers, who have begun selling products on OpenBazaar, including caramel muffins, red peppers and cannabis seeds. The OpenBazaar market project was even called a black market in the early days, so they seek to build a market that cannot be completely shut down through its distributed nature.

Now, with an updated development roadmap, the OpenBazaar team is looking forward to pursuing extensive expansion in the coming months.

The roadmap includes deploying private listings, posting job postings, building a built-in social network, integrating the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), and anonymizing the Tor network. The OpenBazaar team is also planning to release a mobile app.

The roadmap explains:

"OpenBazaar has always been a 'big project' with the ambition to become the backbone of global commerce."

The OpenBazaar marketplace was officially launched in April this year, and the distributed marketplace has quickly gained a large number of supporters. The developers said that its marketplace software was downloaded 25,000 times on the first day of opening.

Its parent company OB1 swept the blockchain awards at the Consensus2016 blockchain conference hosted by CoinDesk earlier this month. Its marketplace app has been downloaded more than 110,000 times.

OpenBazaar's future features and products

According to the roadmap, OpenBazaar's current goals are to improve the user experience of the application and manage the content of other products that can be purchased on the marketplace platform.

The marketplace will add “advanced digital products” including music in the next three months. In addition, OpenBazaar plans to add support for registering blockchain IDs within the application.

Other features planned for the next three months include email notifications, webhooks, cloud storage backup, improved order and inventory management, a more intuitive user interface, and an enhanced sales control center.

OpenBazaar's open source contributors have several "big products" planned that have the potential to create some 'turmoil' in their own right. The contributors plan to use IPFS to "extend" the existing network. Considering the functionality is similar to BitTorrent, IPFS integration will provide visitors with a store to download and distribute data.

Potential benefits of IPFS integration include improved censorship resistance and more persistent app content — even if the provider shuts down the app.

"That means the more users that visit a store, the more data is copied across the network."

Support Tor network and mobile APP

To provide OpenBazaar shoppers with greater privacy, OpenBazaar contributors plan to integrate with the Tor network, which is designed to increase the anonymity of online browsing by routing data through a global network of computers.

While the details of the Tor network integration are still unclear, the most likely path for early integration is to create "onion" nodes, which, according to developers, can run as dedicated hidden services for other Tor nodes.

While the roadmap acknowledges that the solution is not ideal because it would likely result in an isolated Tor network, a timeline for a "dual stack" configuration has not yet been provided.

A more sophisticated feature that OpenBazaar is also looking to launch next year is a mobile app that integrates with third-party messaging bots, including Slack, WeChat, Telegram, Facebook, Kik, and other third-party technologies designed to relay messages from “remote” nodes.

“We plan to develop a mobile app that will allow users to fully control their nodes remotely and securely.”

In the long term, the OpenBazaar team said they hope to improve the existing reputation system, add more functionality to the marketplace shopping cart, and create a plug-in system that allows third parties to develop plugins on top of the basic infrastructure.

The OpenBazaar team also noted that they plan to develop an internal contract signing system.

“The flexibility of the contracts will allow OpenBazaar to scale to facilitate transactions of any complexity.”