The much-awaited peer to peer marketplace, Open Bazaar is finally operational. The prize-winning open marketplace idea which was under development for over a year is now finally live. Open Bazaar is a decentralized marketplace where people can buy and sell anything only uses bitcoin as the standard currency.
As the first version of Open Bazaar gains users, it is still not a completely finished product. While people start using the brand new platform, developers of the project including Brian Hoffman and Sam Patterson will continue to include new features and improve the existing ones.
Started in early 2015 as a project in one of the hackathons, Open Bazaar managed to gain investors’ interest. The Open Bazaar team has raised investments from Andreessen-Horowitz and William Mougayar to develop the complete product.
Last month, Open Bazaar released its test version, which saw over 25000 downloads across the world. During a span of one month, even while in the testing phase, the platform received over 3000 product listing. The latest live version of Open Bazaar can now be downloaded from the company’s website.
Most of us are familiar with BitTorrent clients and torrent files. BitTorrent is a peer to peer file sharing protocol where the user installs a client on his/her computer and downloads the files of interest (shared by other peers) from the internet. Open Bazaar also shares few similarities with BitTorrent ( when it comes to setting up the desktop client and the peer to peer nature). In order to use Open Bazaar, one has to first download and install the Open Bazaar client on their PCs. Once the client is installed and initial configuration is completed, they can browse through the available stores and purchase anything that is on sale. If the users have something to sell, they can also create a store and start selling across the Open Bazaar. However, all purchases have to be paid in Bitcoin only.
Open Bazaar gets rid of any third party interference like in the case of Amazon and other e-commerce players. Anyone can now set up a store for absolutely free on Open Bazaar and start listing things. With the kind of interest garnered by Open Bazaar till date, we can expect more and more people to start using it within a short period of time.