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OpenBazaar Portobello Released

Decentralized marketplace OpenBazzar releases beta 0.4.0 Portobello to facilitate peer to peer ecommerce transactions.

OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace focused on facilitating peer to peer ecommerce, has released a further beta iteration this morning, Portobello. Named after the famed Portobello Road Market in London. The OpenBazaar release is the fourth Beta from the team driving OpenBazaar.

“OpenBazaar is the next generation of uncensored trade through a safe and untouchable marketplace.”
— – OpenBazaar

Originally named Dark Market, and the winning project in the 2014 Toronto Bitcoin Hackathon, OpenBazaar is a fully distributed peer to peer marketplace, similar to eBay or Amazon. Users are able to list goods and services for sale, and purchasers can browse and purchase in a fully decentralized fashion.

The 0.4.0 Portobello release is for OSX and Linux users, with Windows binaries coming in the near future. The release comes packed with code updates, including Hierarchical Deterministic key signing, an internal messaging system, avatars, external image hosting, notary feature upgrades, search improvements and a simple walk-through tutorial upon start up.

BNC caught up with Brian Hoffman, OpenBazaars official project lead, to explain the technological advantages of the new beta release for consumers. “We completely overhauled our networking component. One of the legacy pieces of our application that was holding us back for a long time was ZeroMQ. It wasn’t really designed with P2P across the Internet in mind and we spent a long time trying to whip it into submission. We scrapped it and built our own UDP-based networking code. It’s not perfect, but we plan to continue improving it and evaluating other technologies as we go.”

Tackling the problem of a secure and free marketplace isn’t an easy feat, especially as an open source, volunteer driven project. The technological barriers are enormous, and OpenBazaar has been working diligently over the past six months.

“It takes time to build a strong peer to peer network, marketplace protocol, desktop application all on their own and this incorporates all of them and we do it in our spare time. It’s the definition of challenging.”
— – Brian Hoffman, OpenBazaars official project lead

Hoffman made it very clear that this release of OpenBazaar is not yet consumer friendly, and is just a sign that they’re still alive and making progress. It’s been quite some time since their last release, and they do not want to give the impression that this is any sort of a final product, although they feel that they have made huge strides in the development process.

In line with their product, OpenBazaar has a fully distributed team, with some public facing contributors, and some anonymous contributors. Hoffman tells us there will be updates in the near future regarding their team, but at the moment he says:

“Our team is very amorphous at the moment. It consists of contributors around the globe and there are no full-time members at this time. There are a few key individuals (~6-10) who spend a large amount of time helping us out.”
— – Hoffman

OpenBazaar is one of the only truly decentralized projects when it comes to the product and team hierarchy, which has given the project a great deal of community support. They are embracing the peer to peer movement, and want to keep the development process as open and transparent as possible. Hoffman tells us that they have some announcements planned for the near future, and that they will be issuing more frequent releases and soliciting additional feedback from users.

The 0.4.0 Portobello release has install instructions which can be found here, as well as quick start guides for buyers, merchants, and notaries. A very detailed technical overview of the newest release has also been indexed and is available on their blog. They are currently looking for a front-end developer, and encourage anybody who wants to contribute to get in touch via email.


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