Bitcoin Marketplace OpenBazaar Officially Launches

Decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace OpenBazaar recently announced that the OpenBazaar platform is officially online and its first full version of the software has been released and provided for download.

Two years ago, OpenBazaar announced that its team was developing a decentralized market and would be publicly tested in 2014. The news caused a lot of discussion at the beginning. In the following two years, this decentralized, disorderly open source market has undergone multiple tests.

Today, OpenBazaar finally stepped out of the beta stage and launched its first complete version to the public.

Although the feature-richness of this release is not yet fully satisfactory to users, the project has fully completed 18 months of initial development, which has excited the cryptocurrency and digital currency fields.

As the full version goes live, the OpenBazaar project leader said:

We were inspired by the idea that transactions should be free, and we spent two years building the OpenBazaar platform.

Starting today, anyone in the world with internet access can use Bitcoin and OpenBazaar to trade goods and services for free. We can’t wait to see what people do with this tool.

OpenBazaar was born out of a project called DarkMarket, which is considered to be the eBay of Bitcoin users. It eliminates the middleman. Because there is no central authority, users can trade directly and without paying fees.

The announcement adds:

OpenBazaar is a free trade platform. There is no central authority that can restrict trade.

It is reported that in 2015, the OpenBazaar core team received financial support from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz (venture capital companies), as well as angel investor William Mougayar. These funds helped the development team create a company called "OB1", allowing the development team to fully study market protocols and develop software.

Additionally, users and Bitcoin enthusiasts can expect to see a steady development schedule in the future.

"OB1" will continue to release improved versions of the software in the coming months and will provide a series of services to Internet users.

Early versions showed that the company began public testing at the end of August 2014. In October of the same year, OpenBazaar released version 4.0, which had early vulnerabilities in the GUI (graphical user interface). In November 2014, the third version was being prepared for release.

Sam Patterson, head of operations at OpenBazaar, elaborated on the need for decentralized digital marketplaces in an earlier interview with CCN.

We are all in the vortex of the Bitcoin movement, and we deeply understand that decentralized and unregulated funds need the support of a decentralized and unregulated platform.

Once people started trying to do it, we decided it was time to make it a reality.