OpenBazaar 2.0: A global development strategy for the Bitcoin market

Rage Review : Although some people worry that the decentralized peer-to-peer market platform OpenBazaar will become the next black market "Silk Road", it has been several months since the platform was officially launched, and operational data shows that illegal business activities are almost non-existent. Moreover, the system has been upgraded to version 2.0. In order to attract global users, the platform has adjusted the interface color according to user preferences, cancelled some code libraries and toolkits, upgraded the Bitcoin wallet, and improved the security mechanism. After implementing the IPFS protocol, store owners no longer need to operate stores around the clock. In addition to the United States, the platform has currently received user support in China, Japan, Hong Kong and other places in Asia.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Within hours of the launch of the online marketplace OpenBazaar earlier this year, the first stores to join were selling illegal goods.

But this does not seem to have much impact on the e-commerce platform. Software startup OB1 has received venture capital support from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and other venture capitals to become the backer behind OpenBazaar. The new open source distributed market is called OpenBazaar 2.0, and its next stage goal is to cater to mainstream demand.

OpenBazaar continues to innovate to meet the needs of as many users as possible. It started with a new user interface to support large-scale sales for large companies, and later developed its own Bitcoin wallet to simplify the purchase process. In the coming months, it will launch more new features.

There are now more than 300 sellers on the platform, including Sam Patterson, who, in addition to managing upgrade services provided by members of the open source community, is also responsible for operating OB1's store on OpenBazaar.

He estimates that of the 7,000 products sold on the platform, only 200 are "illegal", and the platform's global application is also accelerating.

"Behind this enthusiasm, we see the coexistence of domestic and international users. Although the platform's main users are from the United States, they ship goods all over the world."

User identification

Although OB1 does not track the identity and location of the marketplace owners, it is not difficult to obtain user information by searching on sites such as Duosear.ch and BazaarBay.

Currently, users in 190 countries around the world have downloaded the OpenBazaar software, and the number of products available has reached 20,000.

Patterson, OB1’s chief operating officer, said he was surprised that users tended to set up small and medium-sized stores and had a “strong preference” for physical goods.

Patterson

Patterson said he and his colleagues expected users to prefer service offerings because of the distributed nature of the network (only a store owner can shut down their computer to stop it) and the borderlessness of Bitcoin (the currency that powers the network).

In an online chat last week with a dozen OpenBazaar developers, Patterson estimated that 90 percent of the goods on the platform are physical goods, 7 percent are digital goods, and 3 percent are services.

Although he said that there are more products on the platform that are not suitable for browsing during working hours recently, there are almost no illegal ones. "The most interesting thing is that, unlike what people expect, there are very few illegal transactions on the platform."

OpenBazaar concluded that most users are from the United States, with recent growth in Asia in places like China, Japan, and Hong Kong.

Better distributed markets

Last week, OB1 released a plan developed by the OpenBazaar open source community to attract more large companies and users around the world.

The new user interface will be toned down based on customer feedback, and an upgraded Bitcoin wallet will allow store owners and consumers who are unfamiliar with virtual currencies to conduct transactions seamlessly.

Moreover, the platform no longer requires the libbitcoin toolkit and C++ code base. "OpenBazaar now requires users to understand how to use Bitcoin. As long as users can transfer money on the OpenBazaar 2.0 platform, they can simply operate the internal Bitcoin wallet."

Other changes include improving security so that the key changes with the messaging session, preventing someone with access to the key from joining multiple conversations at once.

Next up is the tool to search for items for sale, so that private sellers can sell items, so that only buyers with the URL can find the item or service for sale.

Distributed Commodities

But the biggest change to the platform is to expand the number of markets available at any given time, while OpenBazaar's backend will move to the IPFS peer-to-peer distributed network protocol.

Although the current peer-to-peer system is designed to be audit-free and implements a distributed network, each store's data is also operated locally, and the store owner can hide the store information by simply turning off the computer.

But this also means that if the store owner wants to operate 24/7, he must keep his computer turned on at all times. After implementing the IPFS protocol, store data will be distributed across the entire network.

Patterson concluded: "For store owners, there is no need to run the store one day and one day. And the store can further get rid of the audit troubles because even if it is audited, the data will still be intact."