Open Bazaar shutting down on October 1st 2020
Decentralized online marketplace, Open Bazaar will be shutting down on 1st of October 2020.
They will be closing down all of their supporting services, including the Haven app that is available on Android and iOS.
Open Bazaar was a great idea but their business model was flawed. Their only selling factor was that it was a decentralized ecommerce website which is great for non-regulated market and of course, no taxes. A good ecommerce portal requires network effect.
No one would buy from a website if they do not offer a product user needs and no seller would want to sell their product on a site if there are no customers to buy their goods. Facebook marketplace is a good example of this.
In other words, had Open Bazaar marketed their product to non-regulated markets, they would have been able to find a niche for themselves. There is a reason why Silk Road was king of non-regulated market and Amazon is king of regulated market. Unfortunately, Silk Road was a decentralized marketplace like Open Bazaar, which ultimately led to its demise.
Hopefully, someone can transform Open Bazaar into a community-run open source project. Here are github links of Open Bazaar v3.0 and multiwallet.
Their official announcement asks users to make donations to keep Open Bazaar’s operations afloat. Here are their crypto addresses.
BTC: 3JuykfZRbCepzkVLLseSaiufDJ5AC8ae8R
LTC: MTTEVR5pdAHJNmmFNzVjaQhGB9qLkHLk7m
ZEC: t1UEN9mf9hMccwTznqBoJFh2FERgyuMJ2oA
BCH: qq9favzja34zywrp222cwrx4fny9fe64pyaxl5dvar
ETH: 0x71A6e8B0580104dacA0633a9BA6F90181C6F40a5
Unless they raise $100,000 through donations, they will have no choice but to close their doors forever.
It’s also important to note that we will be open sourcing every possible thing we built so that anyone who wants to help make it survive or evolve to rely on other infrastructure components can.
— brian hoffman (@brianchoffman) September 25, 2020
We suggest Open Bazaar users to get their funds out of Open Bazaar’s wallet as-soon-as-possible until things return to normal.
Update – They have hinted about a good news. Stay tuned.
Good news coming!
Haters will be like… pic.twitter.com/vrTECmigsI
— OpenBazaar (@openbazaar) September 26, 2020