Decentralized Marketplace OpenBazaar Planning Relaunch

• OpenBazaar’s demise was due to financial difficulties and low user growth in 2020.
• The OpenBazaar homepage now reads “openbazaar 3.0 – coming soon.”

After being taken down for more than two years, the decentralized crypto marketplace OpenBazaar looks to be making a return, as shown by a series of posts on social media and GitHub.  A new version of the marketplace, which was shut down in 2020, has been in development since at least April 12, as shown by a GitHub repository on the collaborative software development site.

OpenBazaar’s previous project lead and current CEO of OB1, the for-profit business responsible for its software, Brian Hoffman, tweeted on April 9 that work on a “new” version of the marketplace was “getting more interesting by the day.”

Version 3.0 on the Cards

Following OpenBazaar’s demise due to financial difficulties and low user growth, Hoffman was asked what would make this new marketplace successful.

In response, Hoffman brought up the concept of “freedom of exploration” and suggested that external factors had a role in the organization’s first failure. On March 28, Hoffman tweeted that he was working on a new version of the marketplace written in the computer language Rust, which was the first sign that OpenBazaar may be making a return.

About eight hours later, OpenBazaar’s official account also tweeted, “it is now time to grow again from the ashes,” and “work has begun.”

Further supporting the likelihood of a revamp, the OpenBazaar homepage now reads “openbazaar 3.0 – coming soon.” Hoffman tweeted in 2020, after the exchange had closed, that OpenBazaar 2.0 would need greater independence from OB1, but he gave no more details regarding how this may operate.

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