Developer(s) OpenBazaar Team Development status Active | Repository github.com/OpenBazaar | |
Original author(s) Initial release 4 April 2016; 11 months ago (2016-04-04) | ||
OpenBazaar is an open source project developing a protocol for e-commerce transactions in a fully decentralized marketplace. It uses the cryptocurrency bitcoin and was inspired by a hackathon project called DarkMarket.
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History
Programmer and bitcoin enthusiast Amir Taaki and a team of other developers created the prototype of a decentralized marketplace, called "DarkMarket", in April 2014 at a Toronto Bitcoin Hackathon. DarkMarket was developed as a proof of concept in response to the seizure of the darknet market Silk Road in October 2013. Taaki compared DarkMarket's improvements on Silk Road to BitTorrent's improvements on Napster.
Soon after DarkMarket was revealed at the hackathon, developer Brian Hoffman forked the project and renamed it "OpenBazaar". OpenBazaar, like DarkMarket before it, was initially licensed under the GNU AGPLv3, but after a discussion by the developers it was relicensed under the MIT license on September 8, 2014. In mid-2015 the OpenBazaar development team began rebuilding the code base entirely; no original DarkMarket code remains, with the first release of the software published on April 4, 2016.
In an interview with Bitcoinist.net, OB1's COO Sam Patterson explained the goals behind OpenBazaar's feature launch: "Existing centralized marketplaces like Amazon and eBay have had decades to build up an impressive suite of features for their users. Our first release has the advantage of 0% fees and using Bitcoin, but it will be a long time before we are as feature-rich as the big platforms."
On December 2016, the project received $3 million in funding from venture capitalist firms and investors , adding up to a $4 million investment in the project. As of February 2017, OpenBazaar had 10,000 online listings from 300 vendors.
Design
OpenBazaar is built on several existing technologies. For sharing routing information it uses a Kademlia-based Distributed Hash Table, transactions between all parties are built as Ricardian contracts, and each step of a trade is cryptographically signed. This ensures authenticity of the data, prevents tampering with contracts, and allows for arbitration if a dispute arises. Escrow is achieved using Bitcoin multisignature. These 'moderated transactions' are 2-of-3 multisignature, with the buyer, seller, and a trusted third-party each having a key. Work began on the 2.0 version of the software in mid-2016. The new version of the software relies heavily on the InterPlanetary File System to ensure distribution of data, and since February 2017 it also supports Tor integration.