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OpenBazaar adds altcoin support after receiving $3 million more in funding

The development team behind the decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar recently released a new version of the platform with ShapeShift integration. The ShapeShift exchange platform supports 36 altcoins, including their most recent addition, the fully-anonymous ZCash.

The development team behind the decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar recently released a new version of the platform with ShapeShift integration. The ShapeShift exchange platform supports 36 altcoins, including their most recent addition, the fully-anonymous ZCash.

OpenBazaar is a decentralised e-commerce solution, with no fees nor restrictions. Instead of visiting a website, users download and install a program that directly connects them to each other. This peer to peer network isn’t controlled by any company or organization, it’s a community of people who want to engage in trade directly with each other.

The platform was a big winner during the 2016 Blockchain Awards in May, held at the Coin Center annual dinner in New York City. Over 200 nominations were recorded for the 2016 contest, and OB1 took home three of the five awards including ‘Best New Startup,’ ‘Bitcoin Champion of the Year,’ and ‘Most Promising Consumer Application.’

The dinner gala also saw a speech from US Representative Mick Mulvaney, a libertarian-leaning Congressman from the state of Arizona, who president-elect Donald Trump just picked to be the Director of the US Budget.

“We feel a distinct kinship with the OpenBazaar project, both companies foster permissionless exchange between anyone, anywhere on Earth.”
— – Erik Voorhees, ShapeShift CEO and Founder

The development team, OB1, recently raised an additional US$3 million in venture capital funding, following a US$1 million fundraising round in May, despite not having a primary means of generating income yet.

OB1 exists to develop and support the OpenBazaar platform, but does not own it, nor take any fees from it. OB1 CEO Brian Hoffman told BNC that there are no immediate plans to become profitable, even after the “Seed 2.0” round of funding. “We have some other plans we’re not revealing right now,” he explained. The company has previously toyed with the idea of offering their own moderation services for the platform, although there hasn’t been much demand for arbitration so far.

The one small source of revenue that the team is known to generate now is in the form of affiliate referral sales for website hosting, using their server one-click ‘deploy’ process. The store deployment tool makes it easy for users to install and run their OpenBazaar store on DigitalOcean’s servers, keeping stores fast and online around the clock.

“Deploy is the fastest and easiest way to create an OpenBazaar store that will stay-up 24/7, auto-update, and operate securely. Join Digital Ocean using our referral link and you’ll receive $10 credit for your account, which is about 2 months of free runtime for your OpenBazaar store.”
— – Dr Washington Sanchez, Co-Founder, OB1

The latest investment round was led by Berlin-based VC fund BlueYard Capital, with further investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. While the later two investors are well know in the bitcoin space, OB1 is BlueYard’s first bitcoin related investment.

BlueYard is a relatively new fund based in Berlin’s suburb of Kreuzberg, also known as Germany’s ‘Bitcoin city.’ The fund has a focus on early-stage startups that feature the theme of decentralization, although this is the first bitcoin related investment. Previous investments include startups that do 3d printing and peer-to-peer data distribution.

“If OB1 can develop OpenBazaar into a marketplace that is suitable for mainstream adoption and provide a substantially better business proposition to merchants and buyers, it could become a superior trade platform for large global markets,” states BlueYard Capital. “This would put OB1 into a position to build a very large business around OpenBazaar.”

“This new round of funding will allow OB1 – with assistance from contributors around the world –  to continue improving the open source software and growing the peer-to-peer trade community.”
— – Brian Hoffman, OB1 CEO

The funds will help OB1 with an upcoming OpenBazaar V2, a major, sleek makeover designed to fix several inconveniences from the existing software. Having been in the works since early summer, the new platform version makes searching for products much better, navigation faster, offers more user convenience like subscription lists.

Stores will be able to stay online far more with a new network backbone built on IPFS, and the privacy network TOR will also be available to users. Hoffman shared with BNC that the development team is aiming for a release at the “end of Q1 2017.”

Some of the systems replaced in version two, including the lackluster search capabilities, are widely known to be souring the user experience. Search results in the software are clearly sub-par compared to what can be found online at sites like eBay and Amazon. The results are also slow and restrictive, and getting your store’s items seen is likewise very difficult.

The new client will offer third party search integration to alleviate the search issues, Hoffman explained. Search engines like Duosearch and Bazaarbay are better at indexing products than any decentralized program could be by itself. Starting from version 2.0, when you search for a product in the app, you’ll have a choice of which search engine to use to help find the results.

For now, the team plans to simply keep adding value to the upgraded system, ensuring that their investors see a useful and popular marketplace rise that offers features for everyone.

“We’re going to be super busy building the search crawler and tool with promoted listings for merchants and doing curation using the new Channels feature. Other than that it’s still too premature.”
— – Hoffman


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