OpenBazaar Nears Beta Release, Presenting at d10e Con

Decentralized Bitcoin marketplace, OpenBazaar, is nearing open beta release and will be holding an exhibit at the d10e conference in Amsterdam, February 17-19. They’ll be presenting in the main conference and running a smaller event of their own on the 19th, showcasing their standalone app. This marks an enormous milestone in the project’s maturity.

Also Read: BitGo Instant — ‘Eliminates Bitcoin Transaction Delays’

OpenBazaar Tests New Developments as Beta Release Approaches

The Project that spawned OpenBazaar

Originally a darknet hackathon proof-of-concept, OpenBazaar has been in active development since the spring of 2014, and it’s come a long way since then. Upon inception, the marketplace was explicitly for darknet use, aimed at solving the issues with existing darknet markets with trustless transactions, escrow, and decentralization. As OpenBazaar evolved, though, the focus shifted to empowering small merchants using the same features. In its current state, OpenBazaar is a platform similar to Etsy or eBay.
The difference lies in its P2P implementation. Because the network is hosted collectively by the people using the app, there’s no central authority to skim off of the merchants, which is the primary utility of OpenBazaar as a service.

With the public release so close on the horizon, I was curious to see what was in store for early adopters. After teasing the test build into functionality on my desktop, I got on the test network and took a look around: