OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace that uses Bitcoin, has revealed its high-level roadmap to get its users acquainted with its plans going forward.

The platform will be adding several features, typically found on centralized marketplaces, to its platform soon. The improvements to be made in the forthcoming months have been categorized into ongoing improvements, short term (< 3 months), medium term (~3–12 months) and long term (>12 months).

Short-term goals include integrating features such as email notifications, webhooks, backups, order management, inventory management, order process UI, and much more.

The ongoing improvements include moderation system, listing flexibility, reputation system, discovery and more. In particular, it includes improving the privacy feature of the platform. OpenBazaar said that the absence of network privacy, namely obfuscation of a node’s real IP address, has been often criticized. This feature is enabled through the use of a VPN, I2P, or Tor. Addressing this issue, OpenBazaar said that it will be upgrading the network backend to InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which will be a significant step forward to eventually integrating Tor.

“We wholeheartedly believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy, especially financial privacy. Pursuant to this belief, we aim to integrate network-level privacy using Tor, in OpenBazaar, as a medium-term objective”, it said.

The upgrade to IPFS is a medium term goal and will mark a “paradigm shift” in how OpenBazaar works. It will enable the distribution of store data (profile, following/followers list, listings, images etc) across multiple nodes on the OpenBazaar network. This will strengthen the censorship-resistant properties of OpenBazaar while eliminating the requirement for users to always have their node online for other users to access their content.

In addition to the upgrade to IPFS and Tor integration, OpenBazaar listed other medium term improvements – some big ticket items that will make 2016 a huge year for the platform. This includes improved search, advanced messaging, bitcoin wallet, mobile app and more.

OpenBazaar said that it will start to integrate features into the application to enhance the user experience (e.g. a Bitcoin wallet). It currently uses a basic BIP32 wallet to manage multisignature escrow transactions in a user-friendly way. However, it intends to include a full featured wallet in the application to make it easier for users to manage their bitcoin and incur fewer bitcoin transaction fees when transferring funds out of the app.

Lastly, long term improvement includes a plugin system which will enable third party developers to extend the capabilities of OpenBazaar without a need to change the core code of OpenBazaar; shopping cart which will enable the purchase of multiple listings at the same time; and contract flexibility which will allow users to create their own custom contracts, with user-defined fields, interactions, and trade flow.