Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Brian Hoffman & Washington Sanchez: OpenBazaar – Growing a Permissionless Marketplace

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

In the early days of Bitcoin, much of the community’s focus was around payment and getting merchants to adopt cryptocurrencies. Although the technology and narratives have evolved, some projects continue to embrace that original vision of peer-to-peer business, where merchants and their customers interact directly, and if they so wish, anonymously. We’re joined by Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez of OpenBazaar. Since we last interviewed Brian in 2015, the project has grown to become a mature decentralized marketplace where people come together to buy and sell products and services anonymously with crypto. Its polished interface and reputation system gives users a similar experience to that of using eBay, but without fees or the risk of censorship. Topics covered in this episode: Brian and Washington’s respective backgrounds The origins of OpenBazaar as the Dark Market project The history and evolution of OpenBazaar since their last appearance on episode 67 How OpenBazaar managed to survive all these years and how the vision has evolved over time Who uses the platform and to what ends How it compares to traditional dark markets like The Silk Road OpenBazaar’s position on deplatforming and how it responds to pressure to censor content How OpenBazaar works under the hood as a collection of decentralized technologies The company’s business model and future plans Episode links: OpenBazaar website Dark Market project on GitHub Episode 67 of Epicenter with Brian Hoffman Trust is Risk Brian Hoffman, Twitter Washington Sanchez, Twitter Thank you to our sponsors for their support: Join the most interoperable ecosystem of connected blockchains. Learn more at cosmos.network/epicenter. This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/279

This is Epicenter, Episode 279 with guests Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez. This episode of Epicenter is brought you by Cosmos. Cosmos is building the internet of blockchains, an ecosystem where thousands of blockchains can interoperate, creating the foundation for a new token economy. If you have an idea for ADAP, visit cosmos.network slash epicenter to learn more and to get in touch with the Cosmos team. Hi, welcome to the epicenter. My name is Sebessi Wichu. And my name is Sonny Agarwal. Hey Sunny, how are you recovering from ETC last week?

I'm getting there. You know, the Swiss Alps are definitely in my window, definitely help. Okay, good. So you're in Switzerland at the moment? I am in Switzerland at the moment and, you know, just had a good, great time in Paris last week with ETHC. And then I was judging at ETH Paris. So that went also really well. saw some cool projects come out of there. So yeah. Yeah, it was good. I mean, I was really sick.

Like, I went on vacation and then I got this really bad stomach plug. So I didn't see many of the talks, unfortunately. You know, there were a lot of people there. And so what were your impressions, like, generally, about ETC this year? Just in general, actually, ETC is probably my favorite conference, just because, I don't know, it's just something about the vibe at ETC, both years that I've been, so I've been two years in a row now, both years was just always like, you know, it just had this great community feel to it.

It just didn't feel as formal or uptight as like certain other conferences. And, you know, an example of it, like, you know, I remember last year, Rick Dudley went up and gave a talk titled Things I Don't Like About Ethereum. And he just stood there for 30 minutes and ranted about like everything he's dislikes about Ethereum. And it's like you just couldn't have that kind of content at something like DevCon, for example. Right. It's like a very different feel there, much more community oriented. And every year at ECC, both years, there's always been like governance drama, which is always, you know, makes it much more exciting and fun.

The hallway conversations become a lot more fun that way. way. Yeah, I was there. I wasn't there last year. I went to the one two years ago, which I guess wasn't ETC. It was kind of the precursor to the ETC, but it did feel like, it felt like a big meetup, really, to me. And one of the talks I did go to was about the Ethereum 1.X roadmap, which is something we've covered recently with Alexei. And it was in, so the venue is actually quite nice. The venue is the Knam in Paris, which is this really nice. It's like this higher education center. So it's the old buildings and so these big amphitheaters, kind of like university style amphitheaters. And the speaker at some point, I mean, I don't want to say he lost control

of the room, but the discussion was just like happening in the room and people were on the sidelines. And then the poor girl who had to go around because they were live streaming everything. And the poor girl who had the mic, it was like basically just running all over the place trying to get the mic to people so that everybody who was watching the live screen could see. So yeah, it really does really have like you say this community feel. And yeah, I hope it continues. And so we obviously had our own little personal meetup there as well. Yeah.

So despite my sickness, we had a small meetup at a bar close by, like maybe 20. 20 people came. We were competing against lots of other events. So to those who came, thank you. You are true epicenter fans. You didn't go to like the Tezos meetup or some other meetup. You chose to come to our little meetup. And also we were competing with like some big football game,

like European football game, which was happening, which I had no idea. So thank you to those who came. It was great to see everybody. And yeah, excited to do our next meetup at the next event where we will go to. And you had a Cosmos SDK workshop, which I attended, which was also really good. Hope you learned something. I did learn something. I learned that I don't know how to code go and that I should probably learn a bit more go.

But I had to leave a little bit earlier, unfortunately. But yeah, it was really encouraging to see that all this is finally coming. Coming to fruition, then that Cosmos is apparently going to be launching soon. So happy and excited. Hopefully tomorrow. Yeah. And I'll actually also be, you know, I'll be in Europe actually for, you know, the rest of the month until April 1st. So I'm going from here from Switzerland.

I'm going to Berlin next. I'll be at the ZK Summit, which is hosted by, you know, our good friends at the Zero Knowledge podcast. And so they're host, I'm going to be running a scalability. breakout session there. We'll just be chatting about, you know, no different things and, you know, the cutting edge research and scalability. So if anyone's in Berlin on March 22nd, you should come by to that. And then after that, I'll be in Barcelona for a week.

And so if anyone is in Barcelona and just wants to hang out and meet up, I'm just spending a week there. So I'd love to meet up with anyone. Feel free to DM me on Twitter. Cool. So today we have a repeat guest, which doesn't happen often. But today our guest is, well, we have a repeat guest and another guest. Our guests are Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez of OpenBazaar.

And we did an episode on Open Bazaar in February of 2015 on episode 67. So if you want to listen to that one, you can. But so yeah, Open Bazaar is this open marketplace, decentralized marketplace. decentralized marketplace and where people can buy and sell goods, kind of like eBay or Etsy, and use crypto to do the payment. And what's really interesting about this project is that it started in 2015. Just as Ethereum was starting, I don't even think the crowd sale had occurred already. Had it? Maybe it had.

But anyway, it's just at the beginning. And a lot of the infrastructure that we have now and that we kind of take for granted didn't exist back then. And the conversation at the time was very much centered around, you know, let's make Bitcoin a payment mechanism. And people were talking about merchant adoption. And when you'd go to your favorite bar, you'd try to encourage the bartender to start taking Bitcoin. And that conversation has changed a lot of. over the years and that that narrative is not really what's driving bitcoin anymore but open bazaar has really stayed true to the division as this this trade marketplace that sort of champions privacy and

an open as like openness in terms of what you can sell there so it's really great to see this project um still exist and seems to be doing well and growing and they have plans now to build a mobile app etc So it was really interesting conversation. What did you think about it? Right. Like, you know, I think OpenBazaar is, you know, you could actually consider it one of like the earliest steps, you know, it is sort of a DAP if you think about it.

And I, you know, I've just like, you know, I've had OpenBazaar on my computer for a while. I use it like once or twice to actually buy like some like, you know, Bitcoin graphics or something. Like a desk, I think it was a desktop wallpaper or something that I really liked. Then it was like two or three years ago now. But, you know, if you just like open up the app, it's like, you know, it's, it looks nice. Like the UI is sleek. It like seems usable. And that's just something you don't really see much in the UI, Ux of the DAP ecosystem right now.

And so, you know, I think a lot of, you know, part of it is just the age, right? You know, like you mentioned, four or five years old now. And so it just had a lot of time to iterate and like see what works, see what doesn't. And it's really cool because it's like literally like an entire decentralized marketplace. built completely on decentralized infrastructure. It uses cryptocurrencies for payments, IPFS, and uses, you know, it has Tor integration for privacy. So, you know, it's all sorts of really cool, fully, it takes a lot of cool technologies and puts them together into a seamless user experience, which is really cool to me. Yeah. And it's, it's not a blockchain. Like, it doesn't have an

underlying blockchain other than just the payments that you use Bitcoin or some cryptocurrency for But the data itself and the peer-to-peer aspect of the app itself doesn't use a blockchain, which I think is important because, you know, it shows that you don't need a blockchain for everything that's decentralized. You can also use these peer-to-peer libraries or you can use something like IPFS for data. So, yeah, so without further ado, here's a conversation with Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez of OpenBazaar. So we're here with our guests today.

Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez of Obi-1 and OpenBazaar. And today we're going to be talking about OpenBazaar and the evolution of that project since we last had Brian on over four years ago. So thanks so much for joining us today, guys. Thank you for having us. Yeah, it's wonderful. So, Brian, last time you were on was episode 67, which is, yeah, over four years ago. I was listening to it earlier.

It was February 15, 2015, 2015. And back then, Open Bazaar was just starting or at least maybe had launched, but wasn't quite like a production version yet. Certainly you guys had not done your crowd sale at that point. So why don't you maybe we'll start with you. Please introduce yourself for our news listeners, those who maybe haven't heard that episode, and tell us how you got involved in crypto. Sure. So my name's Brian Hoffman, obviously, and I got into crypto probably early 2012. I think the last time we did the podcast was, I think we were actually in negotiations to get our funding for OB1, like while that was occurring. Because we founded OB1 just a couple months after that or a month after that podcast.

But yeah, I mean, I got into the space early on just interested in. it because I came from a PKI background doing like secure messaging and encrypted stuff for government clients and stumbled across Bitcoin and was always looking for an interesting project to work on when it came across dark market, which is what OpenBazaar spun out of. And it kind of just led to me and ended up taking over the project. And so, you know, that was my first opportunity to actually get heavily involved in actually building stuff within Bitcoin. You know, as we all know, being a core dev is a pretty high bar, a barrier to entry. So, you know, that wasn't really an option at the time.

So I was really fortunate to come across this and be able to work on this for the last four and a half years. I'm sorry, was I mistaken in saying that you guys said the crowd said, you guys raised, you guys actually raised money from, Yeah, yeah, sorry, I should have corrected that. But yeah, we have not done a crowd sale at all. When we were, you know, running Open Bazaar, it was kind of hectic and crazy hours. And we wanted to fund it through some natural crowd sale process. But at that time, you know, ICOs were not even a thing. I think the most that anybody had raised through crowdfunding was dark wallet,

which I think only raised like $50,000. And so we ended up seeking traditional venture capital. And so we raised our first round with Andresen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures in early 2015. I think Swarm had raised quite a bit. I don't know if Swarm had raised already by then or not. I think they have. I feel like they had, and they had raised over, I think over a million dollars on counterparty. Oh, no, they hadn't raised a million.

I don't know. This is all boring. Yeah, they were trying to raise some ridiculous amount, like 20 million or some huge amount at the time, which seemed huge at the time. but now it was like evershadowed by, you know, which a typical SEO used to raise. Four billion. So Washington, turning out to you, how did you get involved in blockchain and crypto? I heard about Bitcoin. I mean, I vaguely recall hearing about Bitcoin either sometime in 2010 or maybe even earlier.

And I kind of thought, oh, that's cool, but I don't know whether it was. work and and then I you know I kept on seeing it pop up here and there and and I went back and I you know read the white paper and had my you know the amazing moment where I was like this is amazing it's going to change everything and so I just followed it on you know and just really cheered the project on when it came to Open Bazaar leading up to it I was already very much thinking about the idea of a marketplace that would match Bitcoin's, you know, fundamental design being decentralized and open and how, you know, this is really a complementary piece of infrastructure that needs to exist. And then, you know, all of a sudden I saw in my emails something

called Dark Market that Amir Taki was working on. And, you know, that was just a hackathon. And they didn't do any work on it afterwards and then on Reddit I saw that some dude called Brian Hoffman was working on something called Open Bazaar and I kind of followed it in passing and and then I got sucked in just coming up with ideas writing articles and here we are so many years later so let's go back then to that to that origin story so the Open Bazaar was a project that originated at a hackathon I think in Toronto Mirataki was working on It was called Dark Market.

And I was listening to the previous episode and was reminded of that story. But let's maybe go back there and talk about how that idea originated and how it became OpenBazaar. Yeah, I remember that was actually a very interesting hackathon because Amir Taki started Dark Market at that hackathon. He placed first place. And then Ethan Buckman and Vlad Zamphir, this is like when those two actually first got into blockchain. and they actually came in second place at that hackathon. So very eventful hackathon that that day in Toronto brought a lot of people into the space. Yeah.

And a lot of people don't know too that the team that Amir led in Toronto for that hackathon actually consisted of a bunch of the devs from AirBits at the time, which is now EdgeWallet, which is another project and company that's been around for a very long time. Yeah, I mean, basically, like, I believe that the, you know, I've, I've talked to the guys from AirBets and stuff. I haven't talked to Amir directly about that experience. But evidently, when they were at the hackathon, they were trying to come up with an idea. And Amir had been tossing around the idea of an unstoppable Silk Road for a while because Ross had just been apprehended a couple months prior to that in late 2013. And I think that was still very salient in everybody's minds, you know, like why, if it was used,

using Bitcoin, like how did it get shut down? It was all centralized. You know, how could we take, you know, the technology behind things like BitTorrent and use crypto and build this in a way that there is nobody running it or that, you know, it's, you know, it can't be shut down or censored. And so that was the impetus for, for dark market. I think the problem, though, is that at that time, they were heavily invested in dark wallet and really were just trying to raise more capital to continue working on that. And so they didn't really have the bandwidth or the organization to to build out dark market into a real product, which is where we came in. So do you have anything to add there, Washington?

Yeah, I mean, it was quite a short hackathon, but extremely impactful. I know there was a very, very strong response in the Bitcoin community to its efforts. I think everybody understood the idea of what this could accomplish if it was created. But yeah, I mean, from what was created in that hackathon to, you know, what we started with and what Open Bazaar has become today has been quite a significant technical journey. So Brian, how did you like kind of pick up the dark market project from that? Like so were you at the hackathon and you heard about it there? Or did you like hear about it afterwards? And at what point did you realize that the Dark Wallet team, it's not their primary focus?

and so what inspired you to like step up and take over this project essentially? Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, I was kind of looking for something that I could get in on. And, you know, like many others, I saw the coverage of them winning the award and I saw the video of them showing the product off. And I thought it was super fascinating. I mean, not just the idea of, you know, creating a Silk Road, so to speak, but just the idea that this was actually something beyond a wallet. But up until that time, most of the things that people were doing with Bitcoin were just wallets. It wasn't any kind of like real daps, so to speak. It hadn't even been kind of coined the phrase.

And so, you know, then they found out they released the GitHub. They released the source code for that hackathon project on GitHub and said, you know, here it is. And so I started like submitting some poll requests to their code. And then I emailed Amir directly because I didn't get any response from them on GitHub. And I was like, hey, I'm really serious about contributing to this project. You know, let me know where I can help. And he wrote me back and said, look, I'll be honest with you, we're not going to do anything with this. You know, if you want to fork it and just go go to town, I'll link your repo in our GitHub page.

And, you know, I've had a cut. He's like, I have had a couple other people interested in doing so, but we don't want to manage this thing. And I was like, all right, fine. So at that point, I was like, if I'm going to fork it, I want to, I want to, I don't want to like if they're not associated with it I don't feel it's genuine to call it dark market still like because they had the dark branding they had dark wallet and dark market and I was like okay let's just do a clean slate the idea is that this is a truly open marketplace not just for illicit goods you know obviously dark implies it's a black market we want it to be open to everyone and so I rec coined it open bizarre it forked it and then they linked us in the original repo and I think it's still there. I believe if you go to their GitHub repo for Dark Market, it just links to us. And then I went on Reddit and I put a post and I said, you know, I'm going to be forking this.

If anybody wants to work on it with me, you know, come along. And I think the first comment was like, fuck you. We don't, you know, you're a poser. And I was like, all right, great. I guess I'm not going to get any help. But slowly and surely, I started getting more and more people contributing patches because they were going to the dark market repository and getting linked over to mine and they just started following it and joining it and you know there's actually i mean i'd have to go back and look exactly

all the people but there's actually been some really great and and somewhat prominent developers that worked on it early on that contributed there's a couple people that went to block stream and and stuff like that that were contributing really good ideas and was actually one of the best early contributors, not from a code perspective, but he had come with a bunch of already thought out ideas of how we could improve the marketplace. I mean, originally, it was a very basic, you know, escrow type marketplace idea, but he brought along these ideas of like doing more contract-based transactions that had state and, you know, it was more involved and, and several other, like, really interesting ideas about where we could take Open Bazaar that made it much more than

just a simple hackathon project. So, you know, those early contributions were massive in terms of getting brand awareness and interest in what we were doing. I mean, it's a project that quickly escalated within like three weeks. I think, you know, I had spoken to Wired Magazine and Forbes and all these people were calling me. It was, it was kind of crazy. This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by Cosmos, the internet of blockchains. Cosmos is live and we couldn't be more excited to see so many projects already building on it. Blockchain technologies are evolving fast, and development shouldn't be one-size-fits-all. As a DAP developer, you need the tools that will allow your DAP to scale, grow, and evolve over time.

The Cosmos SDK is a user-friendly, modular framework which allows you to customize your DAP to best suit your needs. It's powered by tenement core, an advanced implementation of the BFT proof-of-state protocol. Cosmos takes care of networking and consensus and allows you to focus on building your application in your language of children. choice. Ethereum smart contracts will be supported soon, and the SDK makes it simple for you to connect to other blockchains in the Cosmos network. If you have an idea for a DAP, and we'd like to learn more about the Cosmos SDK, or if you'd like to connect your existing DAP to Cosmos, visit cosmos.network slash Epicenter. For Epicenter listeners, the Cosmos team will reach out to answer your questions and help you get started. We'd like to thank Cosmos for those supportive Epicenter.

So before we go, you know, any further into talking about, like, you know, maybe the first thing we should do is, you know, some people might not be aware. Like, what exactly is open bizarre? Like, what is the goal here? Like, you know, I think maybe many people have heard this, like, tagline of, like, decentralized marketplace. But, like, what does that mean? And, like, maybe a good way to do it is maybe you could, like, explain, like, walk through a user story and, like, how a user would be using open bizarre. and yeah sure so a decentralized marketplace what does that even mean a marketplace is kind of centralized right it's it's a grouping of merchants and buyers it's a way to

connect people to do transactions right I mean you have to think to the idea of the name open bazaar like a bazaar is a marketplace where it's like vendors come from wherever you go in there you're interacting with them closely there's negotiating and haggling, there's private conversations, it's not, it's a loosely organized group of vendors and buyers. And, you know, that was kind of the idea behind Open Bazaar, which was, you know, can we take peer to peer technology in crypto and open this completely global marketplace that doesn't, you know, there's no facilitator, it's just a protocol that everybody knows how to speak with each other and do this same kind of concept on a much grander scale and do it absolutely

free. Like, not just free is in terms of, you know, doing what you want, but also the cost is not there because everyone shares their part of the infrastructure. You know, you're not going through a bunch of centralized servers and some huge data center managed by a company. You're just connecting directly with the people you want to do business with. And so that was the idea. You know, it's like you don't pay for the internet, right? Like, you pay for hosting and everything at the edge, but the core protocol is free. You don't pay to transact on the internet. And this, This would be like a commerce layer on top of that, a free trade protocol because, you know, we have the technology to build something to supplant Amazon and Etsy and eBay who are basically just rent seekers. They're just, you know, slurping up your information and taking a cut for matchmaking.

We don't need that anymore. We have these consensus protocols and things that allow us to do that without people intervening. So it's I mean you can expand upon it forever and ever and ever But the core idea is really just free trade over the internet So since since you were last on the podcast I mean it's it's been it's been four years and I want to point out that There's not many projects out there that have sort of stood the test of time Like Open Bazaar and also have stayed true to the vision

I mean obviously there are companies that were started back then that are still around. But OpenBazaar is one of these open projects that has continued to exist to grow, I guess, presumably, and hasn't really changed its vision or even its sort of technical underlining, even though, you know, one could argue that there are all kinds of technologies today that, you know, could perhaps achieve the same thing or better. But I would like you to walk us through the history and the timeline of like what has happened since then in these four years like what are some major milestones and some major achievements that that have come yeah i mean the stuff that's happened since then could probably span many podcasts um but you know i mean i think

not only has our work changed and our organization changed but you know the the whole crypto ecosystem system has changed dramatically. I mean, you have to think, like, when OpenBazaar came out, like Ethereum hadn't even done, I believe, their pre-sale and, you know, think about how much has changed just since Ethereum came on the scene. But, you know, 2004, so 2004, we started the project. I mean, it was just an open source side project that we were working on on nights and weekends and whenever we had spare time, you know, by the end of that, you know, in early 2015, when we did the podcast with you guys, it was starting to morph into, you know,

more of a business or like we were hoping to build this company around it so that we could do it full time. So we secured funding, you know, in early 2015. And at that point, you know, we raised about a million dollars from that. And so then it became like, okay, so we're going to try and solidify this team. We're not, we don't, we're going to have this loose group of contributors

through GitHub, but like now we want to form a company around this that's going to support it, sort of like Blockstream does for Bitcoin. And so, you know, we started picking out our best contributors and bringing them on board and building out the company team. And then we realized like, okay, now we have the time, the money, the team to really do this much more, in a much more mature way. And it come from development background. So, you know, I understood that, you know, these, these contributors that go in and out

and it's not a consistent way to build a really great product to scale. So we decided to redo the product and we started rebuilding it from scratch. So we kind of had this like hacked version of dark market code and we tried to morph it into something good, but we realized we just had to scrap most of it. So we rewrote the whole product through to 2015. And in the end of 20 or I guess the beginning of 2016 we released Open Wizard 1, you know, version 1, what we call version 1, which is I guess kind of two. But anyway, that was it was the first complete version.

or that we felt was like as close to the vision as possible. And when we released that, you know, we had truly decentralized search. You know, it was the first complete product. It had, you know, dispute resolution so people could like, you know, do use escrow services to like, you know, figure out if they had problems and things like that and create more trust. And but, you know, one of the things that we learned quickly is that, you know, the technology is really nascent. Like, even though we were one of the most mature products in the,

space like a lot of people got frustrated because it's very difficult and cumbersome to do simple things on you know things that were very simple on the internet through a web browser were very difficult to do with bitcoin and the desktop application which is already a huge hurdle for users and the search was really really bad i mean you can think of it you know we have all these computers all over the world you know computers and slow connections in africa you know they have data on their computers and now your search engine has to go out to all those guys and get and create a very fast experience, you know, for when you're searching bicycles, and you have to compete with Google, who is like a very centralized, optimized index of all that stuff.

It just the disparity between the experience we were providing and what people could get on centralized services was just too great. And so 2016, we were looking around for some alternatives to what we had built, and we stumbled up across IPFS, which was just getting out of the gates. And that, they were doing so much of what we were doing, but they were dedicated to just focusing on the networking piece of it. And so we went back to the drawing board, and we rewrote all of it over again on top of IPFS. And that was probably one of our best decisions ever,

because it opened up the doors to do so much more with the way that Open Bazaar work. in terms of user experience. We were able to now, you know, one of the huge things that people complained about in our first version was that if you were a store, you had to keep your computer running all the time. You had to have the app running 24-7 in order to take orders. And that was a really bad experience. IPFS, for instance, allowed us to introduce offline orders. So, you know, Bitcoin doesn't require you to be online to send payments to people.

watch it open bazaard uh required to be online to take sales and so that was a huge benefit of moving to ipfs for instance and there were a lot more than that but so 2.0 came out in late 2016 i guess i think we were bait at the end of 2016 and so that's the software version that we've had since uh you know that we currently run and uh you know we've been working on improving that and you know it through 2017 and late 2017 when we had the huge bull run up to 20k and and all that, you know, we, we started to come across the whole fee crisis, which was like Segwit 2X and all that drama. And that was a major milestone for Open Bazaar as a project because, you know, fundamentally we're

not a Bitcoin project. We weren't a Bitcoin project. We were a free trade project. We just happened to use Bitcoin as our payment mechanism. And so even though we were really well known in the space, You know, we wanted to do commerce. We wanted to do payments. We wanted to do, you know, this peer-to-peer communication.

All these things that we thought Bitcoin could do really early on. And that's even Satoshi thought about early on. It was starting to morph into this whole store value kind of conversation and narrative at that time. And so the fees were going really up. And, you know, all we did was allow people to use Bitcoin, no other payment mechanisms. And people were selling T-shirts. stickers and books, you know, things that were like sub $50 and the fees were almost getting to the same price as the products. So our users were getting very frustrated. They were complaining

us, when it support tickets, all this stuff. And so we realized we had very quickly we had to do something about that. And so we changed our thinking and said, look, what if we were a marketplace that was agnostic to payment mechanisms? Let's just not be so married to Bitcoin. It's itself, what do we look like? And so we had to design what we call the multi-wallet, which is allowing us to accept and use multiple different coins and plug in more as we go. And so we became more of a neutral in terms of which coins we support platform. And right now we only support a handful, but the flexibility is there for us to expand as needed into others to accommodate different types of approaches. So if you're more of a privacy-focused,

person, you can use Zcash, you know, if you're just Bitcoin, Bitcoin, if you want Bitcoin cash, whatever. So that's kind of how we change as a organization through that time period. And now we've got a whole bunch of other things going on as well. But yeah, that's kind of, as quick of a history lesson on Open Vazaro as I can give you right now. If you have questions. Yeah. So, you know, I know currently you guys support, you know, the four coins you support right now from what I saw was Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Lykecoin, and Zcash. How has the, how have users been, you know, reacting to the actual idea of, you know, using Bitcoin and like cryptocurrencies for payments, like, you know, especially given like the high

volatility of last year. So one of the things that happened was last year was the fees made it harder for people to spend Bitcoin. But then also, you know, you, you, the changes in price, it's like kind of, you know, it made hard and so how what was the ux like around that last year and then also um any plans to like support like you know more like stable coin like mechanisms like die and whatnot um i'll take the first part and maybe watching you could talk about the the other part sure that's cool um the volatility uh yeah i think that's a huge double-edged sword one you know that run-up in crypto created massive interest in

Bitcoin and all the other coins. And so we got a massive influx of people interested in using OpenBazaar and like learning about it and stuff. But at the same time, it was very unusable for certain use cases because of the cost of the fees. And so, you know, it was it was kind of, it was a pro and a con. And since then, you know, obviously interest has waned a lot more in terms of, you know, that hysteria. And so we have less, you know, we have less traffic, as do all the exchanges and everything else in terms of interest in just the products, but it's a much more focused and usable technology. So it's like you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't in a lot of ways.

And then all that Washington talk about the coin stuff, I mean, or if you want to add to that. Yeah, I mean, I think something that, especially people who've just joined this crazy circus in the past two years, are not aware of is just how significantly the mentality to spending cryptocurrency has changed in just a few years. I mean, before everybody in the Bitcoin space was saying, yeah, I mean, Bitcoin's going to take over the world. It's going to be the major payment system. We're going to use it to buy our things. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And now, because of the fee run up and the, you know, absolute core decision of not increasing the block size, is not making it friendly for payments at the base layer, the entire narrative to justify that decision has completely changed. Now, like Brian said, it's a store of value. You're not supposed to pay for it. You know, use Bitcoin to pay for things. If you use, if anybody who tells you to spend your Bitcoin as an enemy of Bitcoin, you know, you have these kinds of extremists coming out there saying,

that's a nonsense. And, I mean, this is the kind of thing that we've had to ride, you know, and adjust to. But I mean, look, there are the cryptocurrencies, and it's a very different world just in a few years. I mean, when we got started, it was Bitcoin, and that was over 90% of the market was Bitcoin. And now it's, what, very close to 50%,

just a little bit over 50%. And you have other cryptocurrencies where they're very much focused on using crypto for payments to buy things, to sell things for real economic utility, not as a gateway to get rich in a few years by huddling. So, I mean, that's one of the major obstacles we've had to face, particularly in the last couple of the years. But to your point about stable coins and as an answer to the volatility,

that's obviously something that's been huge. I mean, the emergence of dye in particular, make a down and die, a stable coin has been, you know, quite significant in the Ethereum community. And something that we've been working very hard on these past several months is integrating Ethereum into Open Bazaar. So not only can you buy and sell things in ETH, but you can buy and sell things in any EARC20 token and especially the stable coins. So we've been working very hard on that and, you know, that should be coming out, hopefully soon.

A larger question maybe around like how the U.S. of OpenBazaar works is why are there only a certain number of like supported coins? Like you know, let's say I go and find a, you know, I search OpenBazaar for, you know, stickers and I find a sticker I want to buy. And, you know, why can't I make an agreement with that merchant that, hey, I want to pay you in Grin or Dogecoin, right? Like, why do I have to use one of the four supported currencies can't like you know i just send him a doge coin address and you know he'll give me a doge coin address i'll pay him the doge coin and he'll send me the sticker why what what what does it mean to support a currency in open bazaar yeah sure so um what you're

describing is very similar to our crypto trading feature so um if you if you you can create a listing within OpenBazaar marketplace to sell crypto. And you can actually list for sale over 2,000 coins, like all the ones from coin market cap, right? Like we obviously don't support, we don't have that wallet in OpenBazaar. We only have four coins like you said. But how do we do that?

Well, we kind of do what you're saying. Like when people, they'll pay Bitcoin, one of the four coins out of their wallet to that listing, the other person will send them Dogecoin to their address. And then they'll release the funds out of OpenBurton. Bazaar to them. So it's kind of like, it's similar to what you're talking about. And yeah, that can be done. I mean, that's what's what's happening there. Why do we not do that for the for the primary purchases? Well, you know, what's what's going on within open bazaar is we use multi-sig escrow accounts to do to create trust for that payment. So in that scenario that I

mentioned to you that wouldn't that wouldn't work if I'd I mean, you'd have to put a lot of trust in that person to deliver the the product or coin. If I just paid you. Bitcoin and said, okay, now send me Dogecoin to this address. There's no assurance that you'll ever do that. I mean, you could, and you can't be anonymous. You're not going to trust that person. So in, so in order to get around that, what we do is we pay into a multi, uh, multi sig open bizarre wallet that's owned by the merchant, the buyer and then a moderator, which is like, if there's a problem, that person will step in. It's a two of three multi-sig wallet that's created by open bazaar. And then, you know, that allows us to create a mechanism with an open

bazaar so that you send it into the escrow, they deliver the doge coin that you bought, and then when you're happy, you release the funds out of that two of three multisig wallet to the merchant, and then there's this inherent trust there. And if there's a problem, now you have a third party to step in and do a dispute resolution process if needed. So that's why we do that. And what we mean by supporting the coin is we have to build that multi-sig wallet. Like Ethereum, for instance, doesn't even have native multisig support. So we had to build the smart contract to do multi-sig for OpenBazaar. And that's something we integrated.

And we have different wallet interface requirements for the app itself. So that's what I mean by building a wallet. And that takes work. That takes some time. And even the wallet itself has been a bit of a technical journey. I mean, when we moved to OpenBazaar 2.0, one of the things we were very proud of was using a Bitcoin SPV client. in the background as the wallet. But then when we move to the multi-currency paradigm,

then it was just not feasible to use multiple coins running multiple SPV nodes in the background, especially if we're going to be adding more coins. And then what do you do when you have Ethereum? Like it just becomes ridiculous. And then the problem escalates when you try to port open Bazaar over to web or to mobile. So, you know, changing the way that the wallet works

so that it becomes an API-based wallet where it's fetching information about the blockchain by an API rather than using, you know, a light client for one of those coins, was not only technical work that we had to do, but also putting up the infrastructure to support that that's scalable. So speaking of these escrowes that we were talking about, how do we like, how do you choose the moderator for like, you know, so you said there's a two of three multi-sig, and so, you know, it's the buyer, the seller, and some third moderator. Where does this third moderator come in? Who decides it? And like, is there a public listing of like trusted moderators? Or how does this work?

The moderator role can be fulfilled by any node on the network. So if you want to join Open Bazaar and you just want to do dispute resolution, you can set yourself up as a moderator. You can say, well, these are the fees when I take on a dispute resolution. You could even put a little description. This is how I'm going to do my dispute resolution. then it's up to buyers and sellers to choose you and to include you in their transactions. And that process is completely open and anybody can join. Obi-1, the company has a list of what we call verified moderators. These are people who we know are moderators on the network.

They've voluntarily publicly associated their identities to something that's verifiable, So they have to have key-based profiles. We say, all right, we need you to state very clearly what your fees are, what your dispute resolution policy is. A whole bunch of criteria. And if they meet that criteria, then we add them to our verified moderator list. And that's really just a guide for people who are just joining OpenBazaar. And they don't really know, you know, which moderators should we trust here, which ones are the good guys that are not going to screw me or, you know, who are really good at dispute resolution. And so that's what we try to help out.

Yeah, I mean, it's important to note that it's still pretty early days in terms of like decentralized trust, right? I mean, we've spent a lot of time thinking and working through ways to improve that mechanism. And we get a lot of suggestions from the community. In fact, we funded an effort called Trust is Risk, which is a research project based out of Greece, a university in Greece. and we helped fund that project so that they could look at ways of using web of trust in order to create trust graphs and make better decisions without having to rely on someone like OB-1 blessing certain moderators as being verified, so to speak. I mean, that's ideally where we'd like to head.

We want to start, you know, our approach is like, okay, decentralize everything we can and then slowly start to decentralize the pieces that we haven't been able to or like as we discover. new technology. So that could be search, that could be the dispute process, any place where there's like too heavily, we're too heavily reliant on centralized actors, those are ripe for us to disrupt. And that's what we're always working towards. So let's let's maybe dive into some of the technical aspects a little bit. So we mentioned IPFS already and some of the underlying structure there. So can you describe the tech stack? I think,

to a lot of people listening to the show will be familiar with smart contracts and maybe the way other applications and daps were built on this on this maybe like a dow principle or some kind of a structure similar to a dow but but open bazaar isn't really built this way let's let's dive into that yeah so you know i mean when you hear the word dap you usually just assume ethereum DAP and most of them kind of have this same kind of stack, which is that you have the blockchain and all the code and data is residing in the blockchain. And then you have this thin client DAP layer, which is just a bunch of interface code really that interacts with the blockchain through Metamask or whatever, right, like through the Web3. In our case, it's a little

bit different, right? Like we're more like a BitTorrent peer. So the lot of that drives OpenBazaar does not reside in a blockchain. We really only use blockchain for the payment mechanism in the escrow scenario. And so for us, our tech stack looks more like we use LibP2P at the networking layer, which allows us to do peer-to-peer networking. And every device connects to the OpenBazaar network independently. And then on top of that IPFS, which is like the data storage layer, which talks on top of LibP2P. So this allows us to store data into the network. So we're not storing it in a

blockchain. We're storing it in a peer-to-peer network and it gets distributed across all those peers. Wait, you're not a blockchain? What are you even doing on this podcast? I know. I'm sorry. We're not a blockchain. We'll leave now. Yeah, but no, I mean, the whole idea behind this is like, we early on, you know, when we were building Open Bazaar, we're like, okay, how do we do Bitcoin scripting or like how do we use op returns and all this? stuff. I remember very early on we went into the Bitcoin devs or Bitcoin Wizards IRC chat. And one of our guys was asking questions about how we could store data in the blockchain on Bitcoin blockchain. And I think it was like Greg Maxwell was like, you guys are fucking

idiots. You got to get out of here like and wanted to boot us out of the IRC chat. And they're like, you're going to spam the blockchain. And that was just like, we went down a really dark path there for a little bit. So so very early on we realized like, okay, data is not going into blockchain. How do we? get around that and IPFS was like a perfect marriage of solving that problem so we keep all of the non payment data out of that into the IPFS network which is great so we have you know that's the data layer and then you know then we have the application code which is a desktop app in its current form but you know we reuse that logic and code uh within our upcoming mobile app and we're hoping to

port that to the web as well and all that is open And that is what, you know, allows you to understand like, how do I create a listing? How do I buy it? How do I dispute it? You know, all these different things. And then obviously there's the wallet component, which is kind of to the side. And that's where we have the multi-wallet that can do many different coins and payments. And you pull that in for your transactions as needed.

So that's where the blockchain fits in. So that's why I say we're not really like a Bitcoin project, so to speak. We're more of a free trade project that happens to use crypto to enable that. interesting so when one opens the open bizarre app and i encourage you guys you know listeners to to download it and try it out i actually it's been on my it's been on my mac for years like it just was there in the application folder i realized um so i opened it up so i opened it up uh just before and like went back into it and you know it's quite nice and it looks kind of like ebay and you can search and you can filter. And so from what it looks like is that there's there's a

an open bazaar kind of, I don't want to say curated, but somewhat filtered search engine because all of the stuff that you see here in the open bazaar app on that's provided search page, that's not all of what's on open bazaar. I mean, there might be other listings on other marketplaces or maybe perhaps even not even on marketplaces people might be even just sharing open bazaar endpoints on social media or you know forums or this sort of thing but there's a there's a there's a set of listings that you guys feature in your search engine can you explain how that works and why you do this yeah sure um i think washington will have some ideas on this as well but i think this is a prime example of, you know, what has served us to last so long, too, is this, you know,

constant battle of pragmatism versus ideology. You know, early on when we started open bizarre, everything had to be completely decentralized and we fought every little, you know, effort to try and centralize anything. And we produced a search experience within the app that was just abysmal because just the technology doesn't really exist to do that efficiently. and in a way that could be adopted by even crypto enthusiasts, not just mainstream casual users. It just was a very bad UX. And so one of the compromises that we made

when we moved to 2.0 and IPFS was that we would make the search more federated. So in that respect, what we did was we said, okay, we can't stop people from putting these products and services on the platform, but we'll make the search controlled by third part, parties, sort of like the web browser does, right? Like Mozilla Firefox doesn't have a search engine. They let you use Google or Yahoo or whatever your choice is. So that was the approach we adopt.

So we said, we'll open source all the search code and we'll just let people create their own search engines. And if they want to filter out guns and drugs on one and make it safe for users, fine. If they want to add in a verified moderator scheme to help people find trusted merchants, do that fine. But people could have different approaches to the way that they curate. or sensor or whatever or control search results.

The network itself is unstoppable, but the view that you have of the network is your choice. Because when you think about it, how is your mom or dad ever going to use this if the first thing they see when they open up the app is drugs and guns? They just don't care about that, right? Their view of the internet is through Google.

Google essentially censors that, right? But you should have the freedom to explore beyond that if you want to. So that's the approach we've taken. So when you open the app and use OB1 search, you know, we follow, U.S. federal guidelines, you know, in terms of like what we can show there. And, you know, so we don't, you won't find heroin or cocaine or you shouldn't. We hope you don't. But, you know, if you choose,

if you choose to seek that out, there's other ways of getting to that data. So that's kind of the idea behind that. Yeah, I mean, the thing to really understand and in many ways, the, this understanding was, was really well established before Bitcoin came along. But Bitcoin comes along and we have to idea that the entire blockchain and all of the data, all of the transactions, everybody has that data and it's replicated however many thousands of times on everybody's notes. And now everybody thinks that this is the way you do peer to peer and this is how decentralized networks work. Whereas the reality is that BitTorrent has proved for many, many, many, many years before Bitcoin came along that, you know, people opt in to host the data that they are interested in. And so when I want to like, okay, say if I were downloading an illegal movie hypothetically, I would go and I would find that data.

My application would download it via BitTorrent and then I would cede that data to anybody else on the network who wanted it. And in exactly the same way, this is what happens on OpenBazaar. Your application on your computer doesn't have the entire marketplace because that's just gigabytes and gigabytes of data that you don't need. But when you go and you fetch data from the network, you become part of the swarm that's seeding that information to other people on the network. And so as data on the network becomes more popular,

becomes more redundant faster because more people are seeding that to other peers on the network. So it has this very beneficial response to scaling, as opposed to crumbling when there's more demand, actually gets stronger and more resilient. There's more demand. So as a result of that architecture, that requires people to crawl the network

and index what's on the network in order to comprehend and to surf through, you know, okay, I want to find listings that are T-shirts. So, you know, unless you go and you build a crawler to find that information for yourself, you're just going to need to resort to a third-party search engine to find where there's listings are on the network and then fetch them. So isn't this something where like, you know, maybe some sort of middle ground between

putting all data on a blockchain versus all data in the peer-to-peer network can be found? So, you know, instead, because when you put all the data on the peer-to-peer network, like you said, now we have this issue where we have to constantly crawl the entire network. But couldn't you do something like, you know, you keep everything on the peer-to-peer network, but then you throw the IPFS hashes onto a blockchain so that way they're easier you know you use the blockchain as indexing while obviously all the real data is off the blockchain and you know you can even then you know start to get fancy with it like you can start doing like tcr's for like uh token curated registries for like uh finding the best marketplace merchant for a certain product or category and stuff

like that yeah 100 percent that that's that is the idea way to do you do it. And they're not mutually exclusive. You can have the centralized third-party search engines that crawl it in a very traditional way like we do. We're also in some of the token efforts that we're going to be doing in OpenBazaar exactly what you're describing. So you can embed the hashes of the content that you want to promote out there into the storage of some smart contracts in a way to make certain listings outshine others on the network. And so, yeah, all of those are valid approaches. Uh-huh.

So you mentioned this future token listing. Can you maybe go a little bit more into this? And what are some of the other things that you're trying to build here around this future token? Yeah, so the token itself is not in the mold of your traditional ICO. I mean, we're not doing this to, you know, raise $200 million in a ICU thing like that. It's very much our way of thinking, you know, okay, if we did a token, how would it out value to the network? Well, you know, we went through so many iterations of how a token, where a token would make sense, you know. And many of the traditional ways that people were, you know, suggesting to us, which is like, oh, you know, you have to spend some tokens to create a listing that was immediately rejected because that immediately places a barrier to entry on anybody who wants to create a listing.

If you've got 10,000 SKUs, what are you going to buy, however, 10,000 tokens just to create those listings? It's unnecessary, both from a technical perspective and also from a cost perspective, because that all costs gas to do. I mean, at the end of the day, the long story short was that what made the most sense to us was a scenario where you would spend some tokens and like weight to listings that. you wanted to advertise. So we've designed a couple of different smart contracts where you can take a listing and you want to promote it to other people on the network and clients would look at that smart contract at the storage and see which listings have the most tokens that are staked for that listing.

And that is built into an incentive mechanism that we're going to use because we're creating these tokens. We have the ability to just distribute them to early. adopters of Open Bazaar. So, I mean, this is one of the reasons why we're not doing this with straight Ethereum or die because it would require people to have money to spend, to stake onto listings, whereas we can just give it away and try and create an ecosystem where these incentives are operating by themselves.

So, yeah, we're going to be experimenting with that. And we've also created smart contracts that reward people when they purchase listings on OpenBazaar. So, I mean, we. Rewards points. Yeah, exactly. Like a rewards points thing. I mean, our focus really has been on trying to make this token that we will be releasing have real utility, particularly from an ad space promoting content point of view.

And, you know, we're optimistic that that's going to work out really well. Cool. And so maybe another interesting topic. especially, you know, given a lot of the origins of OpenBazaar from Silk Road is like the, or, you know, spiritual successor maybe is like around privacy. So I remember, you know, like we talked about, one of the things that you guys have done is added support for Zcash. So one question is, you know, do you support like the actual proper Zcash shielded payments? Or right now is it only just the complete transparent ones?

We actually don't support the shielded transactions yet. There's a couple technical reasons why. But yeah, that is definitely one limitation of using Zcash within OpenBazaar at the moment. I believe it's mostly centered around the fact that we use multi-sig transactions. Right. So it's a little bit more complicated. And we've actually been having some detailed discussions with some of the developers over at Monaro. and, you know, kind of walking through what that looks like for theirs as well, which is there's

definitely some UX challenges around how you create these kinds of ring signatures and shielded transactions, things like that. Like, it's not as straightforward as just doing a Bitcoin transaction. So, yeah. Cool. And so what are like some of the other, like, you know, privacy-centric things that, you know, you guys may be working on developing? Like, is there any plans for like tour integration?

So, you know, that's really what, you know, Silk Road, you know, had that whole like, you know, tour with like paying with bitcoins. You know, what, what OpenBazaar seemed to do is, you know, it allowed the infrastructure to be decentralized. But did it add in the privacy aspect that Silk Road kind of started off with? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the biggest things that, you know, one of the most unique things about OpenBazaar versus some of these other platforms in terms of privacy is just that. When you're doing transactions, it's completely peer to peer. And it's not peer to peer in a sense that like Uber's peer to peer to peer. You know, it's pure, it's truly peer to peer.

If I'm going to buy something from, like, let's say you are doing something illicit. You're selling something illicit. I'm not going through some central hub where they're like monitoring what I'm doing and seeing me connect to that storefront and, you know, making purchases and things like that. The privacy is, is me to you and I'm making my order directly to you. So that information is not sitting on some server where if they take down the owner, they find all your orders and bust you or whatever, you know, like it's completely private. And it doesn't even have to just be around illicit transactions, right?

Like most people just want to be private in general so that they're not at risk of getting exploited in some other way. I mean, if Amazon gets hacked tomorrow, you know, they have a database wide open of credit card information, purchase history, social, you know, social connections, anything that you were looking at or thinking about buying, all that stuff, right? It's just ripe for the taking, and it's all, it's everybody in one place. If OpenBazaar were to get exploited somehow, you know, this data is spread across all these, you know, how many ever peers that are on the network. And it's all encrypted into end. So privacy from that standpoint is already inherently built into the platform. Beyond that, we do allow people to connect through Tor.

So if you're running a Tor browser, for instance, and you fire up OpenBazaar, it'll detect that and say, hey, do you want to run all your stuff through Tor. Now, we haven't got a security audit yet, and it's not perfect. There could be issues with that, but, you know, it's something that we want to continue to improve, things like, you know, integrating tour, like, natively within the app rather than having to require other people to, you know, set it up outside of OpenBazaar, or even maybe incorporating I2P is an option since IPFS could support that. You know, that would be another improvement we could do. and then obviously doing the security audit, which we'd like to do at some point in the near future when the code is a little more stable. But yeah, I mean, I think privacy is top of mind

and we want to get much better at it. Sam, who's not on the call with us, is kind of like our chief privacy guy, you know, like he's shifting into a more serious role regarding addressing some of the things that we feel like we're not doing as well as we could. But, yeah, I mean, we're like, juggling that with user experience as well. And so there, you know, there are some tradeoffs and

compromises and we would try to make those as transparent as possible to our users. You know, one of the things that actually originally brought me to OpenBazaar was I was doing a lot of like, I had a lot of interest in like web of trust based stuff and reputation models. And so, you know, one of the things that a lot of these open marketplaces, like, you know, online marketplaces and the centralized ones like Amazon or eBay, one of the main things that they do is provide ratings for buyers and sellers and reputation so that like scammie sellers get like pushed off of the marketplace. And I so remember you guys have been like, you know, put out a few papers. I think you Washington had like, you know, one of your thesis or something was on one of these

topics. But like, you know, how do you, like, you know, how is your guys just thinking changed about like like managing reputation within the open bizarre marketplace? Well, decentralized reputation is a complete shambles, basically. It's an incredibly difficult topic that really hasn't improved in several years that we've been involved. And I mean, our approach has been to keep it simple. One thing from our research that we found is that the more complicated a reputation

system you design, it's like the more financial incentive you create to game it and then to scam people. It's ironically safer to be simpler. And so from that perspective, what we have at the moment in Open Bazaar is just basically a simple rating system that if you're a buyer and you have a successful purchase or a successful dispute resolution in your favor, then you're able to leave a rating against the seller. And right before any trade or right at the start, once funds are put into escrow, the seller gives the buyer a rating key that basically proves that the seller and the buyer interacted, that it's not sort of a naive rating, that it actually required both the buyer and the seller

to have interacted at some point in order for the buyer to make the rating. But when it comes to the rating, nothing fancy. It's, you know, just scores out of five for different criteria. But how is that a civil resistant? Oh, it's not, really. I mean, the civil resistance is limited in as far as I can't go on the network and just create thousands of ratings naively against, you know, every seller I can come across. actually have to go through the order process and actually put funds in escrow in order to obtain a rating key to generate a valid rating against the seller.

No, but isn't the concern that a seller would just give himself millions of fake ratings that are really high? Yeah, our rating system isn't resilient against that. And we don't claim that it is. And to be perfectly honest, we haven't seen a good solution to that problem. I mean, this problem you find on centralized marketplaces where, you know, sellers will create thousands of fake buyers and then buy stock from themselves and send the money around themselves.

And then they generate, you know, all of these fake ratings. That's not a problem that we think has been solved on either a centralized or decentralized way. And unfortunately, once you try and solve it in a decentralized way, it starts to add a lot of cost and a lot of UX burden onto users that kind of undermines your entire rating system. Now, having said that, there's been a lot of really interesting work done. One of the things that you mentioned was Trusters Risk, which was done by Dionysus Zindros. So it was an idea that he and I were discussing, and then he wrote, I think, his, like, he wrote a paper on that.

So he wrote the paper, not me. But the idea essentially was creating essentially payment channels with other people on the Open Bazaar network. And the magnitude of the payment channel that you open with other people on the network would reflect the level of trust that you have with other peers on the network. And this was something we discussed several years before the Lightning Network came along. And I think that the Lightning Network in many ways improves upon that initialized. idea and could be superimposed onto the OpenBazaar network to establish that kind of web of trust. But I think there's a lot more research to be done there.

And I think it's like one of the big unsolved challenges of this entire ecosystem. One last thought on that. The rating data itself is all open. So other people can find the rating data that buyers make against sellers that they've interacted with. And our thoughts there are, you know, you could have third parties or interest groups that, you know, crawl the network for that rating data and then can wait and rank that rating data based on, you know, associated factors like, you know, the buyer, was the buyer anonymous or did they choose to include their identity and, you know, how well connect is their

identity on Open Vizar to real world identity? And then you could basically rank the overall rating that you calculate based on, you know, other third-party criteria. So in like such, the approach was to make the rating system, the rating data nice and open so that other people can, you know, analyze that data and go from there. So coming back to the usage of the platform, can you give us a sense of how many people are using it, how many transactions and sales, are happening here and how it's grown over the last couple years? Yeah, sure. So in terms of transactions and sales, it's all private.

So we don't really have great numbers on that other than anecdotally from talking to some of our more contributing vendors and things like that. But I can tell you that, you know, generally we have around 12 to 14,000 listings at any given time available on the marketplace. Since we released our second version, we've had about 160,000 people on the network. And we see between 400 and 700 new nodes on the network every day. The way that we're able to see that data is that through our search engine and crawling the network, you know, we know which IPs and peers were connecting to in order to like crawl their listings and reviews.

So that's based on raw data that our nodes sees when it crawls the network every day. And so, you know, and in terms of usage, I mean, I would say we're still at a very, like, consistent, you know, kind of horizontal growth, just slightly above horizontal, you know, it's not like hockey stick growth or anything. And we tend to ebb and flow in correlation with the popularity of crypto across the mainstream. So, you know, when we get, you know, price spikes and everybody gets excited, we tend to get more traffic. And when it's down, we tend to be down. So I think that we haven't really been able to escape, get that escape velocity outside of just general crypto insight. And to us, that means that our users are mostly people within crypto space and people that are knowledgeable in that. We don't see a lot of people outside of that network using the platform,

which is something we'd like to change with the mobile app. And I think we have a good chance at improving that. But for now, it's, yeah, we're looking at like, we call them Crypto Curious. You know, it's like people that are just, they want to know more about crypto and how to use it in a day-to-day fashion. Because there really aren't a lot of ways to like, once you get Bitcoin, I mean, you can buy something from a website or whatever. But like, beyond that, what else, you know, are people using it for? other than kind of speculating and trading. And this is one of those good options.

Yeah, this is something I think we also see in other types of user facing products, like social networks that emerge from the crypto space often are very cryptocentric. So a lot of the news and information that that converges there is about crypto. I think Steam it to some extent has been able to pop. out of that a little bit, but a lot of the stuff there to me still feels very crypto-related. So I think that's a challenge. So you mentioned this mobile app, and this is what I want to come to next. It's called Haven. Can you talk more about that? What's the goal here? Yeah, this is Washington's baby, so I don't want to steal too much thunder from him, but we're

really, really excited about this. I mean, for years, we've realized that a desktop app is really not the modality that's going to explode into mainstream usage. Like it's just it just isn't. You know, no buyer wants to have to download a 100 megabyte desktop application in order to purchase a t-shirt. So we've known for a long time that we wanted to get away from that, get to the web, get to mobile, and we're on the cusp of releasing the mobile app, which is called Haven. And I'll let Washington explain a little bit more, but you know, this is definitely a game changer for us. We're really targeting people beyond the cryptosphere. This is like a product design. to try and help us get out of that that loop that you just described yeah i mean haven um

in many ways really takes it takes open bazaar in the direction of you know what we saw when we first you know started this project um you know i i can speak for just for myself but when when i when i saw and started thinking about open bazaar i didn't see open bazaar as just the protocol to buy and sell things. I thought that was exciting in and of itself, but really when I started thinking about it, it's like Open Bazaar is really a platform for self-expression and self-determination in a way that it marries, you know, uncensurable payments and an unsensurable marketplace. And then you can use that to, you know, express yourself to other people on this network that we're creating and and we can use the marketplace as the center of gravity to pull together multiple

strings um you know social and chat and all these you know this we can use open bazaar to put together so many things that we can really create a another parallel economy to the uh to the legacy financial economy so haven itself is really designed and inspired by Wii chat. And I suppose the shorthand description of Haven is calling it the crypto WeChat, except that it's not ridiculously monitored and controlled by the Chinese government. And not in that respect. Not in that respect, yeah.

So, yeah, but it's private. So as we discussed before, the marketplace interactions, the chat, end-to-end chat is all, sorry, the chat is inter-end encrypted. It's got the multi-currency wallet. It will have Ethereum. You'll have access to payments and all the other EOC20 tokens, stable coins. Lightning Network will be in there at some point. So, you know, this and the other major feature that we're bringing into the app is the social network.

It's a decentralized social network built on IPFS. And the idea is, yeah, okay, the primary purpose of the social network is obviously to promote things that you want to sell. create a brand and create a following, but really, it's a social network. I mean, on a decentralized network, it could really go anywhere. And of course, you've got the core experience, which is all of OpenBazaar. And I think the one technical aspect, if I can geek out for a second, is that we have all of the OpenBazaar server code, the actual node itself running on your mobile device. It's not like remoting into some infrastructure provision somewhere. No, it's your mobile device running an open bazaar node. So the potential here to have millions of people walking around running

open bazaar on their iOS device or Android device, connecting with each other directly, you know, chatting privately, doing trade, buying and selling things, speaking is just super exciting. So we can't wait to release it to the world. We really think that this is going to be the answer when people say, okay, so what do I do with my Bitcoin? What do I do with my life coin? What do I do with my Zcash? Well, this will be it. You take it to Haven and you go to town. So what's the plan here? I mean, so this is a, it sounds like a great idea, but as, as, as Brian mentioned earlier, like the goal is to get this into the hands of people outside the crypto space. And there's a whole ecosystem of people and sort of creators and artisans and people

who make crafts and, you know, clothing and all this kind of stuff that and that sell these products on platforms like Etsy and these are massively successful. I think Pinterest is now getting into this to some extent now. They have like a marketplace or they're thinking about it. And then, you know, eBay, obviously. These platforms are massively successful. There are millions of people here. people have businesses there. There's all kinds of transactions occurring there. What's the incentive for them, beyond the privacy aspect, of course, what's the incentive to use something like Haven?

How is this going to become successful, essentially, how you plan to do that? Well, I think in terms of incentive, there's obviously the financial incentive. There are no transaction fees. There are no listing fees. There are no platform fees at all. So you're not going to have an eBay. taking a 10% plus or minus 20 cut on every transaction that you make on the network. There's not the risk that the platform will suddenly turn around and say,

all right, we're going to start charging you fees for this, that, and the other. The other incentive, I think, is the risk for deplatforming is eliminated because, you know, you can't be de-platformed off OpenBazaar. Yeah, a search index might not pick you up, but it fundamentally doesn't remove you from the network. You can still be accessed. You can still be reached out to people, can still place orders with you.

And I think the privacy aspect is not to be underestimated, especially, you know, in recent years where we've seen, you know, abuses of privacy, of customers and people feeling that, you know, it's not okay that these large platforms have deep insights into what I buy and what I sell. and I mean we even heard recently that Amazon is charging different prices to different people based on their purchase history so they know if they're a little bit more affluent they're going to bump up the price

or if they're so you know all of these things don't happen on Open Bazaar this is true and I'm fully on board and I fully agree with with the fact that companies like Amazon are are transgressing you know are going beyond some lines they're crossing some lines with regards to their user's privacy and you know I personally try to use them as little as possible and I buy things locally as much as I can

and I've really reduced my dependency on Amazon a lot in this last year or so as sort of a personal goal but it feels like your your customer base or at least merchants are not typically like

merchants that you'd find Amazon. They're more like artists, if I'm looking at some of the listings on OpenBazaar today, you know, you've got one guy who makes like this beautiful wooden artwork. It's more like the types of folks that you'd find on Etsy or these other

marketplaces. And I don't think that these platforms, like no one's pointing the finger at Etsy saying like, oh, Etsy, you guys are this big GAFA type company that are exploiting people and following us on the internet and selling the data

to others, et cetera. So on that point, like maybe you respond there, on the privacy side, I think this is true. I think people want to have that. But that's a small fringe of people. On the deep platforming side argument, I don't think most people are concerned with this. I think the people who are concerned with this

are probably selling products that are questionable or maybe illicit or maybe that don't appeal to the masses or to everyone. So. Yeah. I mean, I think those are two good points. I think to kind of refute that argument that those things are needed. You know, in terms of the Etsy thing, you know, I mean, you know, it could be a reality where a platform like Open Bazaar is somewhere people go for more serious purchases.

And toilet paper and paper towels is all done on Amazon. then people don't care that you know that I bought toilet paper and toothpaste and toothbrushes. And like maybe that's not the type of platform that OpenBazaar will become. You know, and maybe it's more like, you know, sensitive things that they decide to purchase through OpenBazaar. But, you know, in terms of a small audience, privacy-minded audiences are not small. Like if you look, there was a study that I think Duck, Duck, Doe go did recently that looked at the last five years of their growth and the massive amount of increase in adoption of Duck, Duck, Duck Go, as a search, engine in terms of privacy because people are more and more freaked out and they're becoming more

technically illiterate and they're moving to these platforms you have brave browser that has over a million downloads now which I never would have thought of that a year ago I mean it just goes on and on and on and what is your marketplace alternative where do you go to do private shopping I mean you can go to independent websites but that doesn't provide the same kind of experience as a truly global marketplace and secondly you're talking about exposure across the the planet I mean go to Amazon you're not buying you're not buying stuff from people in South America. You're not buying stuff from people in Africa.

You're not buying stuff from people, all these different economies that could expand and grow if they just had the ability to have that, you know, reach, that global reach. You know, all these different Amazon platforms are all siloed into the, you know, Mercado Libre, and, you know, now you have Alibaba over and, you know, the East and all these different things. They're all separate. OpenBaza has the ability to destroy those barriers. I mean, you download the app and, you know, you know,

you know, Argentina, you could sell your products right off your Android phone directly to someone else. Now, logistically, maybe it's not there, you know, shipping and whatever, but it could start out as digital goods or services, cross-border services, it could be trading, you know, it could be all these different things. I mean, why is an artist not able to sell a PDF, you know, or a graphic service through OpenBazaar, you know, using crypto? And he's not paying any cross-border fees or transaction fees, any of that stuff. I mean, with the mobile app, that opens up a whole new possibility. We did a pilot in Argentina several months back, and it wasn't really great, but it was, you know, in terms of adoption, but it was very enlightening. I mean, they had to set up the desktop app in a

computer center. People had to come to the computer center and be trained to use it, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, imagine how that changes when they can just download it from the app store onto their Android device and just run it right there. I mean, it's just completely different. experience and they can start selling you know to Americans or whatever and there's no restrictions there now app store also there's there's a little bit of a you know we haven't gone through that battle yet but you know theoretically it is a game changer for us I don't dispute the fact that it's it's valuable and useful it's just I really want to see these applications take off and I'm still I'm still

myself looking at these and saying like what's what's the use case like where the use case that really takes this thing and catapults it into mainstream adoption. And maybe, you know, these markets like Argentina and like these places where cross-border payments are not so simple, maybe that's a good place for these things to emerge from. But yeah, we'll see. But when is the app coming up? We don't have a firm date yet, but we're getting towards the end of it. There's only a little bit left really to do before we get it out into testers' hands and

and start rolling it out. But yeah, I mean, I think it's great to have a healthy skepticism over this. I think we've been doing this long enough to know that this is not going to be an overnight thing, right? Like we've been in this for over four years now. It is not something that, you know, we wake up the next morning. We're like, today's the day. You know, I don't know.

You know, most like big successes, there was kind of one thing that kicked it off. And then it just kind of snowballed from there. And we don't know what that will be. I'm as curious as you. sound as to what that will be. I mean, the only thing we can do is try and get our user experience as close to parity with our competitors as possible

and hope people start to see that the, you know, the pros beyond it that you get from using cryptography and privacy-minded applications will override in the end. So it's definitely an uphill battle. And, you know, we're preparing for the worst in terms of that battle. So, yeah. I think the one thing that works to our advantage, though, is that sellers on these marketplaces

aren't afraid to try different platforms and to expand. I mean, I don't think it's a case where we turn to a seller who's on Etsy and say, you know, screw Etsy, you need to come over to us and shut down all of your stores. It's more like inviting them to spread their footprint onto now a decentralized marketplace place and get a whole bunch of interests and focused attention from an ecosystem that is eager to make another economy in real world goods and services using crypto. So I think that that's one thing we're looking forward to. Yeah.

And just one more point on the deep platforming, though. You kind of made it sound like there's a fringe thing, right? Like the deep platforming, oh, it only affects like Milo, Janopoulis and, you know, these A-holes that are probably don't deserve to be on these platforms at all anyway. But what you have to realize is that if this is a platform that they can come to and use as a so-called safe haven from those D platform risks, they have millions and millions and millions of followers that will listen to them and they will do and they will be influenced by that. And those people will come over and perhaps they're not the ones that are instigating all this. But that's a huge amount of audience that you potentially lose out on. So it's kind of a double-edged sword.

You may have a situation where you let people onto your platform that a lot don't agree with, but you can't deny that they have huge and massive audiences that may come over and become users. Well, I look forward to seeing Alex Jones selling tinfoil hats on a bizarre. He's weird, but he's entertaining, right? So yeah, just before we wrap up, so I didn't want to ask you this and forgot to ask during the shows, But what is the business model for the parent company, Obi-1? It's a work in progress. I mean, in reality, we're a decentralized company in centralized clothing.

And, you know, we have to figure out what is the right model. And right now we're approaching it from two angles. One is, you know, the token that we talked about that we plan to release in the future is something that we will consider as equity for our business as well and have ownership over, you know, a portion of it. and try to derive value for users, you know, and grow that organically. So, you know, the token is not a sale.

It will come out and it will have no value essentially. And we will hope to grow that over time and make that a valuable asset. And on and on the traditional side, we will be exploring, you know, normal things like Etsy and the others do, which is, you know, allow people to promote their listings and products and services to others,

for compensation and also providing value added services. Like for instance, you know, maybe you want someone need to give you secure backup for your merchant store, you know, in case your device fails or something, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like in-app purchases, things like that. Just traditional revenue streams. So we're trying to explore both of those. But the only, you know, one fact remains that neither of those succeed unless there's scale. So right now we're focused on building the platform and making sure that people can use it and

want to use it and that continues to grow. So kind of a no answer, but we're figuring it out is really what's going on. Okay, great. Well, thanks so much to both of you coming on. It was great to have Open Bazaar on again. It's not often that we do repeat shows about topics, but what we do is because they've been along long enough for sufficient things to have happened. So congratulations for having stuck around this long to be on Epicenter twice. Congratulations for not being dead. Okay, good. Well, we hope to see you in 2023.

Yeah, I hope we'll still be here in 2023. Okay, thanks, guys. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter.

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