OpenBazaar is a new way to buy and sell goods and services online. By running a program on your computer, you can connect directly to other users in the OpenBazaar network and trade with them. The network isn't controlled by a company or organisation. OpenBazaar is a decentralised peer-to-peer network, which means there are no listing fees and the marketplace is censorship-resistant.
Goods and services are bought and sold on OpenBazaar using Bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency that is decentralised and censorship-resistant. Transaction fees on the Bitcoin network are typically less than a dollar.
Bitcoin and OpenBazaar together are the future on online commerce.
Right now, online commerce means using centralized services. eBay, Amazon, Alibaba and others have restrictive policies and charge fees for listing and selling goods. They only accept forms of payment that cost both buyers and sellers money, such as credit cards or PayPal/Alipay. They require personal information, which can lead to it being stolen or even sold to others for advertising or worse. Buyers and sellers aren’t always free to exchange goods and services with each other, as companies and governments censor entire categories of trade.
OpenBazaar is a different approach to online commerce. It puts the power back in the users’ hands. Instead of buyers and sellers going through a centralized service, OpenBazaar connects them directly. Because there is no one in the middle of the transactions, there are no fees, no one can censor transactions, and you only reveal the personal information that you choose.
This project is open source, which means the code is publicly available for people to review or audit, as well as contribute code to make it better.
- Creates an online store for users to sells goods for Bitcoin
- Connects these stores directly to each other on a global network
- Users can browse individual stores and search for products across the whole network
- A buyer directly connects and purchases the good from the merchant using Bitcoin
- Bitcoin payments can be made via escrow to protect merchants and buyers during trade
- An online marketplace that is:
- Scalable to millions of stores
- Free of intermediaries and their fees
- Cannot be censored
- Frictionless trade
- Hosting an online store
- Easy to deploy
- Install and run
- Fees
- Eliminates fees related to listing on a platform
- Significantly reduces payment fees via Bitcoin (i.e. fractions of a cent)
- Our vision is to make trade free.
- Our mission is to shift global trade onto a decentralised platform, OpenBazaar.
- Our values are:
- Privacy
- Users should full control their data
- Users should have freedom to reveal as much personal identifiable information as they want, when they want
- Security
- Crytographic tamper-proof agreements to: 1) minimise potential disputes, and 2) fast-track dispute resolution
- Encryption, encryption, encryption
- Markets
- Free and open markets
- Creating open and competitive markets for services in OpenBazaar that cannot be perfectly solved with technology
- Bitcoin
- Bitcoin is the only transactional currency of OpenBazaar
- Privacy