Decentralized Marketplace OpenBazaar’s January Launch Likely

The much needed decentralized marketplace that uses bitcoin is arriving soon. OpenBazaar  is a platform for people who want to engage in trade directly with each other - a peer to peer network that isn't controlled by any company or organization.

"Bitcoin finally finds a killer app with the emergence of Open Bazaar protocol powered zero take rate marketplaces”, BraveNewCoin quoted Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures Partner.

OpenBazaar, however, has a different approach to perform online commerce. Instead of visiting a website, users need to download and install a program on their computer that directly connects them to other people looking to buy and sell goods and services. The "terms and conditions" of the trade are up to the buyer and seller individually.

The marketplace is uncensorable, there are no extra fees to conduct trade and Bitcoin is the only supported payment method. Bitcoin is used because of its unique benefits over other payment methods.

“Bitcoin gives people more control over their own money, and this fits in perfectly with OpenBazaar, a tool designed to give people back control over their own online trade”, the FAQ section on Github explains.

The project kicked off development in April 2014 and always encourages contributions from the public. BraveNewCoin reported that the Open Bazaar Reddit page has more than 3,800 subscribers, and the Slack room for the community has nearly 1,200 users on their 41 channels.

Although the launch date hasn’t been decided yet, the latest estimation from developers on the project suggests that it will be rolled out sometime during January. A fully-operational Debian Linux beta client available is already available from the team within the slack community. However, it is not easy to install and comes with no support, according to BraveNewCoin.

Last year, OpenBazaar raised US$1 million in seed funding with the help of Andreesen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and angel investor William Mougayar, CoinTelegraph reported.