The distributed ecommerce platform OpenBazaar (OB) soft-launched in April and has received $1 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. While the team admits “limitations” in the project’s current state ‒ for instance, a store must run the OB client in order to appear online ‒ buyers and sellers are now free to come together and buy and sell goods for various forms of payment, including bitcoins.
Unlike Silk Road and similar darknet-located platforms, OB promises no anonymity and warns users upon signup that their IP addresses are public.
The platform, largely inspired by modern social media, is likely to evolve like other social media sites, where people interact with you ‒ by, for instance, following you ‒ so that you become aware of their store.
The stores of OB are diverse. For instance, Dragibus sells a quarterly print publication on the botany, cultivation, history and usage of medicinal and entheogenic plants.
Physical products abound on OB, as well.
Surf and Skim City, which has had a brick and mortar store in Florida since 2006, is one of the best developed stores on the application. The store is selling on OB because it believes there is a “big need for decentralization” in ecommerce. At their storefront, they offer a 2 percent discount on Bitcoin purchases, the sort of rebate Bitcoin merchants will need to offer if they want to increase demand for the digital currency. The shop is run by a group of professional skimboarders/surfers in Florida who have been Bitcoiners for many years.
According to Mark Cole, founder of Surf and Skim City, “OB is the first thing to show what Bitcoin is capable of.” He laments some of OB’s glitches, but his tech team has been working with a “helpful” OB support team on the bugs. Cole says the […]
