The open-source decentralized marketplace project Openbazaar started from an idea first conceived at the Bitcoin Hackathon in Toronto in April 2014. The first version of Openbazaar was released on April 4, 2016, and news.Bitcoin.com was one of the first to review the platform the following day.
The marketplace that ran for five years uses cryptocurrencies for payments, a peer-to-peer solution for exchanges, an escrow system, and Ricardian contracts.
On Friday, the development team and OB1’s CEO Brian Hoffman announced the project might be closing up shop soon, unless OB1 can raise funds.
“In 2014 Openbazaar started and today we’re announcing that it is now time to perhaps close this chapter,” Hoffman wrote on September 25. “Unless the community comes together to help. I’m extremely proud of what we accomplished over the years and the principles of what we stood for will remain,” the OB1 founder added.
In the company blog post, the firm said that it did not achieve the level of adoption and user growth it had hoped for when the project was invoked. “As a result, OB1 cannot sustain funding the ongoing infrastructure costs,” the blog post noted. Additionally, OB1 detailed that the company has been relying on donation funds but the money is running low.
“At OB1, we have desperately tried to secure more funding to not only maintain Openbazaar’s support costs but execute the next phase of the protocol that we believe can unlock explosive user adoption,” the company added. “Sadly, we have been unsuccessful and have no choice but to discontinue these supporting services.”
The farewell announcement highlights that during the next week or so, the team will be publishing explainers on how to release funds from Openbazaar nodes. Haven app users are being told to “immediately remove funds from their wallet.”
Further, OB1 said the development team plans to open source the Openbazaar search engine and Blockbook indexer code. This way, those who want to leverage Openbazaar privately can do so with these tools.
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