Decentralized Taobao, OpenBazaar will start testing on March 1

Founded in the United States, OpenBazaar is a decentralized e-commerce platform that uses Bitcoin for transactions. The platform directly connects users to conduct transactions, and the entire platform is open source, so interested users can contribute to the platform on their own.

OpenBazaar enables direct transactions between buyers and sellers without the need for a centralized platform. Unlike Alibaba, which is equivalent to a third party, OpenBazaar can directly facilitate transactions between the two parties based on trust. Due to the decentralization and unorganized management, this means that when users trade on OpenBazaar, they do not need to pay additional fees, their files will not be leaked, and any transactions conducted will not be reviewed.

Killer apps continue to attract attention

OpenBazaar has been promising since its inception. Last June, OpenBazaar announced that it had received a million-dollar investment. Chris Dixon, a well-known Silicon Valley investor, led the investment from Andreessen Horowitz, and Brad Burnham, the managing partner of Union Square Ventures, led the investment. The two companies invested $500,000 each in the seed round, and later angel investor William Mougayar also invested $10,000.

After nearly a year of development, OpenBazaar released a pilot video on February 11 this year. Yesterday, Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik tweeted that OpenBazaar will begin testing on March 1. Judging from the number of retweets and likes on this tweet, OpenBazaar has quite a few followers.

The pilot video was released

In the OpenBazaar pilot video released on February 11, we can clearly see the complete transaction process on OpenBazaar.

The purchase process is very simple. You can publish products, browse and purchase, pay with Bitcoin, receive goods, and have a review system. At the same time, the interface is also very simple and elegant.

Browse and buy

For a decentralized trading market, what should be done if a transaction dispute arises? At this time, a third party needs to intervene. Multi-signatures require two of the three private keys to withdraw the payment from the multi-signature address. The third-party notary controls the third private key, so the bitcoins in the multi-signature address will not be moved until the buyer and seller reach a settlement or the third party believes that the seller or buyer is correct.

At the same time, OpenBazaar has a reputation rating system that allows all users to provide feedback ratings to other users. In this way, even if the user information is not made public, you can still use the reputation rating system to judge whether to trust others.

Credit rating

Judging from the pilot video, it is very convenient to conduct transactions on OpenBazaar with no additional fees, guaranteed privacy, security, speed, no category restrictions, and no borders.

The lack and challenges of decentralized trading platforms

Decentralized trading platforms have always been a relatively missing link in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Like OpenBazaar, Bitmarkets and Bitsquare are also targeting the decentralized trading market. Currently, Bitsquare is also still conducting tests within a small group.

Openbazaar's model reminds people of the now-closed Silk Road. Just last year, it was called "probably the most dangerous technology startup in the United States" by NetEase Finance. OpenBazaar has also repeatedly reiterated that it does not want to create "Silk Road 3.0". The dream of Silk Road has been shattered. Some people say that OpenBazaar is the future. However, Openbazaar has not yet made a clear statement on how to prevent illegal transactions.

For OpenBazaar, which is about to release a beta version, it is inevitable to encounter some trivial problems. The development of its reputation system in the future and how to obtain transaction volume in the early stage of online are also challenges that it will inevitably face.

Editor: Meng Dada
Source: Babbitt Information