OpenBazaar growing fast, with major upgrades on the horizon

Since its launch on April 5th, the first truly decentralized marketplace, OpenBazaar, has been growing steadily, both in popularity and in features.

Due to the peer-to-peer nature of the platform, it is difficult to quantify how popular it is, but there are various secondary indicators. The most apparent is how many users are following the @OpenBazaar account inside the program.

The default selection when installing the program is to follow the channel for updates. While there are currently 16,675 followers, there is no way to see how many have unfollowed the channel, or how many may be duplicate accounts.

BazaarBay provides further indications. The first search engine for OpenBazaar products, modeled after Google, offers statistics on their search indexing. There are various charts that can be used to gauge network strength, although none of these statistics have been checked by an outside party and cannot be verified.

BazaarBay currently reports over 300 online nodes, out of a total of more than 27000. The service has indexed almost 16,000 products, although finding them all is difficult and duplicate or out of date items may be included.

The number of ratings, currently at 580 according to BazaarBay, is perhaps the closest comparable for a sales figure, because it is very easy to leave a rating for users once a purchase is completed. However, people looking for maximum privacy and those in a hurry will often skip leaving a rating.

A second OpenBazaar search engine, Duo, offers some live stats on users and listings as well, but the newer service has collected fewer results.

There is also a similar app that lets you browse listings on and Android smartphone. BazaarHound is a gateway application that allows you to browse the OpenBazaar shopping network from your mobile, and according to the site, lets you make purchases through their app as well.

Although you can’t run a store with BazaarHound, it appears to be everything a customer would need, complete with access to their OpenBazaar account and the ability to leave reviews for vendors.

Another way to look at OpenBazaar’s popularity is to see who’s using it. The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) provided an in depth report on OpenBazaar, and they opened a storefront (@FEEstore) for selling books and clothing.

While major brands have yet to make an appearance, many big names in bitcoin already have storefronts, including Ledger hardware wallets and BitMain mining rigs.

While the platforms growing popularity can be gauged indirectly, the growing functionality is more easily distinguished. There have been various changes since launch, with the latest version alone implementing 25 updates.

Some of these changes have been cosmetic, such as how the minimize and maximize buttons look. Others are more functional, like adding more caching to the system, which makes browsing it faster.

The project lead and CEO of supporting company OB1, Brian Hoffman, recently announced that the next major version will integrate a full bitcoin wallet.

While details on the wallet are not publically available, the team says it won’t be from a major wallet provider; the new wallet will be far more closely integrated into the platform.

“Yes @openbazaar will have a full Bitcoin wallet in the next major release. #fact”
— – Brian Hoffman, OB1 CEO

Changes to the projects road map also show integration of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) which promises to profoundly improve OpenBazaar’s usability and performance.

IPFS is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol for building distributed file systems. The IPFS project itself aims to replace the hypertext protocol (http), with a more decentralized and robust option.

A post from the OB1 team explored their upgrade plans, describing IPFS integration as “an extension of the OpenBazaar network architecture that allows for user data (such as listings and product images) to be distributed across many nodes in the network.”

“Similar to bittorrent, when you visit another user’s store, your node will download and begin seeding that store data to other users. This means that the more people who visit your store, the more your data will be replicated across the network.”
— – OB1

IPFS should allow a lot of the stores on OpenBazaar to stay up and running without a dedicated, always on computer, or alternatively paying for hosting. “Vendors should have the ability to close the app and still have their products visible on the network,” the team said.

Censorship resistance is another bonus, states the developers. “With data spread across potentially hundreds or thousands of nodes,” the team said, “it will be impossible for would-be attackers to prevent others from reaching your content.”

However, IFPS does not guarantee that a store will be up 100% of the time. Businesses will likely want a hosted solution too, like the popular HostedBazaar service, or a package from Agorist Hosting. Both are customized to run OpenBazaar with minimal setup and maintenance.

IPFS will also help with searching and indexing, one of the big projects that OB1 can’t get to fast enough. “Presently, finding new listings occurs on an ad hoc basis while you scroll down in the Discover page,” the team acknowledged.

The current process for vendors to get their products found involves vendors tagging their products with relevant keywords, and keeping their stores online as much as possible. “Search results tend to be inaccurate since it relies on users accurately tagging their products and it has a low signal to noise ratio,” the team says.

While IPFS will help alleviate this problem, “Supporting curated listings to enhance discovery and search will most likely be the dominant means of browsing items on the network,” the team said.

“We’re working on a way to significantly enhance the discovery of content on the OpenBazaar network.”
— – Washington Sanchez, OpenBazaar Co-Founder

The plan is to introduce third party search functionality, which will point the search bar at an API endpoint, which runs a crawler and indexes listings.

While BazaarBay and Duo already actively index every OpenBazaar listing that they can find, they display the listings on their own websites. The new plan to curate OpenBazaar search internally would let users choose from a selection of similar third party services from within the system. “If a particular endpoint goes down (as happens frequently in Popcorn Time), user’s can just change the API provider to get the app back up and running.”

Since users will have the ability to switch their search provider, it won’t be a centralized search function, and OpenBazaar can continue to run in a completely decentralized manner.

BraveNewCoin spoke with Washington Sanchez, Developer and OB1 co-founder, about the upcoming additions. Before IPFS, better searches, and the wallet arrives, many smaller jobs will be completed. Store statistics for vendors is one of the first that will be completed, Sanchez explained. “Vendor stats should be coming out really soon. Brian has been working on this the last couple of weeks.”

More privacy will also be added to the already confidentiality focused chat client. Sanchez revealed the service will use the Signal protocol for encryption, “This will enable forward secrecy that’s superior to basic end-to-end encryption (which we have now) or OTR.” Privacy focused users will be catered to further this year with TOR integration.

The ability to run backups on your OpenBazaar account is also an imminent feature. The plan is to allow users to “Connect to cloud storage provider, or save to disk, a backup of the OB data folder.” Webhooks are also in the works, enabling mobile notifications, state triggers, and “several other features.”

Vendors are also being given an expanded set of management tools. “If orders go unfunded after X time, these orders should automatically disappear from Sales,” says the OB1 team. “The Vendor should be able to manually cancel the unfunded order before this time. These should be reflected in the reporting UI.” Inventory management is another useful vendor tool coming out soon, including inventory tracking of listings, and Batch edit, import, and export tools for listings.

A better visual understanding of where users, sellers, and moderators are in the overall order process is being addressed too, as is the distinct lack of vendor success tracking. A sales control center will be included in the next few months, designed to give vendors “better visibility into comments, updates and general activity within their store front.”

Once all of the short-term upgrade code has been released, some much-needed, better documentation for OpenBazaar is also on the agenda. “We’ve been hesitant to release better documentation because we’re still not done making some big architectural changes to the protocol and the application,” Sanchez told BraveNewCoin.

“Overall, the goal is to get OpenBazaar to a place where it is a compelling substitute for Shopify, eBay or Taobao… This means offline listings, offline ordering, store management tools, to name a few. At the same time, we’re going to make a push to significantly improve privacy. In other words, we’re really busy!”
— – Sanchez