#279 Brian Hoffman & Washington Sanchez: OpenBazaar – Growing a Permissionless Marketplace

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought you by cosmos cosmos is building the intent of of blockchains an ecosystem where thousands of blockchains can interoperate creating the foundation for a new token economy if you have an idea for a DAP visit cosmos network slashed epicenter to learn more and to get in touch with the cosmos team hi welcome to epicenter my name is Sebastian and my name is Sonny Agarwal hey Sonny how are you recovering from ECC last week

I'm getting there you know the Swiss Alps are definitely wind oh definitely help okay good so your your interest so at the moment I am into chillin at the moment and you know just a good great time in Paris last week with ECC and then I was judging at each Paris so that went also really well saw some cool projects come out of there so yeah yeah it was it was good I mean I was really sick like I went on vacation and then I got this really big stomach bug 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 global you know

generally about HTC this year just in general ECC is probably my favorite conference discuss I don't know it's just something about the vibe at ECC both years that I've been Chive been two years in a row now both the years was just always like you know it just had this great community feel to it it felt it just didn't feel less formal or uptight as like certain other conferences and you know an example of it like you know I remember last year's Rick Dudley he went up and gave a talk titled things I don't like about aetherium and he just stood there for 30 minutes and ranted about like everything he dislikes about aetherium and it's

like you just couldn't have that kind of content at something like Devcon for example right it's a very different feel they're much more community oriented and uh every year at HCC both years there's always been like governance drama which is always uh you know makes it much more exciting and fun the hallway conversations become a lot more fun that way yeah I was there I wasn't there last year I went to the one two years ago which I guess wasn't ECC it was kind of the precursor so the ECC but it did it did feel like it felt like a big meetup really to me it's right and I one of the talks I did go to was about the etherium one point X roadmap which is something

we've covered recently with Alexei and and it was some so the the venue is actually really quite nice the venue is the khatamun Paris which is this really nice it's like this Higher Education Center so it's the old buildings and and so that these big amphitheater is kind of like university style and a few theaters and they the the the 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 the the poor girl who had to go around because they're live streaming everything and the poor girl who had the mic looks like basically is just riding all over the place trying to get the mic to people so that everybody who was watching the ice

cream could see so yeah it really does really have like say this community feel and yeah I hope it continues and so we obviously had our own little personal meetup there as well so we despite my my sickness we had a small meet up at a bar close by like maybe 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 Tazo speed up or some other Meetup you chose to come to our little meetup and also we were competing with like some big football game like your painful game this was happening was I had no idea so thank you to those who came it's great to see

everybody and yeah excited to your next Meetup at the next event where we will go to and and you had a cosmos SDK workshop which I attended which was also really good I 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 early unfortunately but um but yeah it it was really encouraging to see that all this is finally coming to coming to fruition then it cosmos is apparently gonna be

launching soon so happy right hopefully tomorrow huh yeah and you know 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 such late I'm going to Berlin next I'll be at the zk summit which are hosted which is hosted by you know a good friends at the zero knowledge podcast and so their hosts I'm gonna be running a scalability or breakout session their role will be just be chatting about you know know 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 know 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 or well we have a repeat guests and another guests our guests are Brian Hoffman and Washington Sanchez of open Bazaar and we did an episode on rapid 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 a decentralized marketplace and where people can buy and sell goods

kind of like eBay or Etsy and use crypto to to do the payment and what's really interesting about this project is that it started in 2015 you know just as Hysterium was starting I don't even think the crowd sale had occurred already had it maybe it'd be ahead 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 let's make Bitcoin a payment mechanism and people were talking about you know

merchants adoption and when you'd go to your favorite bar you try to encourage the bartender to like start taking Bitcoin and that conversation has changed a lot over the years and that that narrative is not really what's driving Bitcoin anymore but open Bazaar has really tried to stay true to the vision as this this trade marketplace that sort of champions privacy and an open and so like openness in terms of what you could sell there so it's really great to see this project still exists 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 I think open bars are is you know you could actually consider it one of like the earliest apps you know it is sort of adapt if you think about it and I you know I'm just like you know I've had open Bazaar on my computer for a while I 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 this is 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 do I

think a lot of you know it 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 do centralized 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 take up takes a lot of cool technologies and puts them together into a seamless user experience which was really cool to me yeah and it's 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 Venice but the data itself and the peer-to-peer aspect of the app itself doesn't use a blockchain which i think is is important because you know it shows that you don't need a blockchain for everything that's decentralized so you can also use certainly these Piter Piter libraries or you can use something like ipfs for data so yeah so without further ado here's a conversation with brian hoffmann and washington sanchez of open Bazaar so we're here with our guest today brian hoffmann and washington sanchez of obi-wan and open Bazaar and today we're gonna be talking about open Bazaar 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's February 15 2015 and back then open Bazaar was just starting or at least maybe has 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 will 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 is 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 OB one like while that was occurring because we we founded OB one 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 for government clients and I stumbled across

Bitcoin and was always looking for an interesting project to work on when I came across a dark market which is what open Bazaar spun out of and I kind of just led to me 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 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 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 and saying that you guys said the crowd so you guys raised

you guys actually raised money from yeah yeah sorry I should have corrected that but um yeah we did we have not done a crowd sale at all we when we were you know running open Bazaar it was it was kind of hectic in crazy hours and we wanted to to fund it through some natural crowd sale process but at that time you know I SEOs were not even a thing I think the most anybody had raised through crowdfunding was was dark wallet which I think only raised like $50,000 and so we ended up seeking traditional venture capital and and so we raised our first round with andreessen 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 I had raised over I think over a million dollars on counterparty or no they hadn't raised a million I don't know this is all trying to race yeah they were trying to raise some ridiculous a man like 20 million or some some huge amount at the time which seemed huge at the time but now it was like ever shadowed by you know which a typical SEO used to raise more brilliant so Washington Webb 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 will 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 gonna 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 bitcoins 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 I all of a sudden I sort of my emails something called dark market that Amir chocky was working working on and you know that was just a hackathon and they didn't do any work on it after its end 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 him and then I got sucked in just coming up with the ideas writing articles and here we are so many years later so let's go back then to that that our gence Tory so the open Bazaar was a project that

originated at a hackathon I think in Toronto Emira taki was working on it's called dark market and I was listening to the the previous episode and and and was reminded of that of a story but let's let's maybe go back there and and talk about how that idea originated and how it became open Bazaar yeah I remember that was actually a very uh interesting hackathon because amir taki started dart market at that hackathon he placed first place and then Ethan Buckman and Vlad Zamfir this is like when they been those who actually first got into blockchain and they actually came in second place at that hackathon so very eventful hackathon that 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 the team that a mirror led at in Toronto for that hackathon actually consisted of a bunch of the devs from air bits at the time which is now edge wallet which is another project and company that's been around for a very long time yeah I mean basically like I I believe that the you know I've I've talked to the guys from air bits 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 a you know you know like why if it was 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 and use crypto and build this in a way that there is nobody running it or that you know that it's all 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 we're 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 David anything that there Washington yeah I mean it was it was quite a short

hackathon but extremely impactful I know there was a very very strong response in the in the Bitcoin community to its efforts I think everybody understood the idea of yet of what this could accomplish if it was if it was created but yeah I mean from from what was created in that hackathon to you know what we started with and what open Bazaar has become today it's been quite quite a significant technical journey sir 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 did you like hear about it afterwards and at what point did you realize that the dark

wallet team it 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 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 you know 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 DAP so to speak it didn't hadn't even been kind of in coined the phrase and so you know

then then they then I 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 pull requests of their code and and 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 and he wrote me back and said look I'll be honest with you we're not we're not gonna do anything with this you know if you want to fork it and just go go to town I'll link your repo in 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 alright fine so at that point I was like if I'm gonna fork it I I don't want it like if they're not associated with it I don't feel it's genuine to call it dark market still it like because they had the dark brandy and 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 recounted open Bazaar it forked it and then they linked us in the original repo and I think it's still there if I believe I believe if you go to their their github repo for dark market it just links to us and and then I went on

Reddit and I put a post and I said you know I'm gonna be forking this isn't if anybody wants to work on it with me you know come along and I think the first comment was like [ __ ] you we don't you know you're a poseur and I was like alright great I guess I'm not gonna 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 we're contributing really good ideas and Washington was actually one of the best early contributors not not from a code perspective but he would 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 like doing more contract based transactions that had state and you know it was more involved and and 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 that 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 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 dad to scale grow and evolve over time the Kosmos sdk is a user-friendly modular framework which allows you to customize or adapt to best suit your needs it's powered by tenorman core an

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not be aware what exactly is open Bazaar like what is the goal here like you know I think maybe many people have heard this like tagline or like decentralized marketplace but like what does that mean and like maybe maybe a good way to do it is maybe you could like explain like they use walk through a user story and like how a user would be using open bazaar and yeah sure so just centralized marketplace what does that even mean I mean a marketplace itself 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 dopin 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 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 a hosting and everything at the edge but the core protocol is free you don't pay to transact on the Internet and 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 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 stood the test of time like open Bazaar and also have stayed true to the vision I mean obviously there are companies as we started back then that are still around but open Bazaar 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 is 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 if like what has happened since then in these four years like what are some major milestones as a major achievements that that that have come yeah I mean the stuff that's happened since then could probably spend many podcasts but you know I mean I think not only has our

work changed and an organization change but you know the the whole crypto ecosystem has changed dramatically I mean you have to think like when open Bazaar came out like the etherium hadn't even done I believe their their presale and and you know think about how much has changed us since aetherium 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 gonna try and solidify this team we're not we don't we're gonna 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 block stream 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 you come come from development

background so you know I understood that you know this 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 so we decided to redo the the product and we started rebuilding it from scratch so we kind of had this like hacked version of dark market code and we've tried to morph it into something good but we realized that you just had to scrap most of it so we rewrote the whole product through to 2015 and the end of 20 or I guess the beginning of 2016 we released open was our one you know version one what we call version one which is that I guess kind of - 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 I 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 these 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 we're 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 created like 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'd stumbled across a ipfs which

was just getting out of the gate and that they were doing so much of what we were doing but like 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 worked 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 know they 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 why should open Buzard 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 beta beta at the end of 2016 and so that's that software version that we've had since you know that we currently run and 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 20 K and and all that you

know we we started to come across the whole fee crisis which was like Segway to X 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 trait 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 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 and stickers and books you know things that were like sub $50 and the fees were almost getting into the same price as the products so our users were getting very frustrated they were they were completing when in support tickets all this stuff and 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 itself what would he look like and so we 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 eaten right now we only support a handful but there the flood but the flexibility is there for us to expand as needed into others to accommodate different types of approaches so if you are more of a privacy focused person you can use man Z cash you know if you're just Bitcoin Bitcoin if you want Bitcoin cash whatever so that that's that's kind of how we changed as a organization through that time period and and now we've got a whole bunch of other things going on as well but um yeah that's kind of there's

quick of a history lesson on open was Oreos I can give you right now give questions yeah so you know I know currently you guys support the four coins you support right now from what I saw was Bitcoin Bitcoin cash like coin and z cash how is the how have users been you know reacting to the actual idea of you know using Bitcoin and like in 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 it changes in price it's like kind of you know it made it hard and so how what was the UX like around that last year

then also any plans to like support like you know more like stable point like mechanisms like die and whatnot I'll take the first part and maybe Washington you could talk about the the other part so that's cool the volatility 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 and using open Bazaar 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 then since then you know obviously interest is 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 kinda it's like you can't you damned if you do you're damned if you don't in a lot of ways and then all that washing talk about the 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 I'm not aware of is just how significantly the mentality to spending cryptocurrency has changed in

in just a few years I mean before everybody in the Bitcoin space was saying yeah I mean bitcoins gonna take of the world is gonna be the major payment system we're gonna use to buy our things accelerators research and now because of the fear on up and the you know absolute core decision of not increasing the block size not making it friendly for payments at the base layer the entire narrative to justify that decision has completely changed now it's like Brian said it's a store of value you're not supposed to pay for it yeah you should use Bitcoin to pay for things if you use if anybody who tells you to spend your Bitcoin is an enemy of

Bitcoin you know you have these kinds of extremists coming out there saying it's a nonsense and I mean this this is the kind of thing that we've had to ride you know and and adjust to but I mean look there are other 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 was Bitcoin and now it's what very close to 50 percent 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 that's one of the major obstacles we've had to face particularly in the last couple of 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 died in particular maked Allen and died as a stable coin has been you know quite significant in the etherion community and something that we've been working very hard on these past several months is integrating etherium into open Bazaar so not only can you buy and sell things in eath but you can buy and sell things

in any EFC 20 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 UX of open Bazaar works is why are there only a certain number of like supported coins like you know let's so let's say I go and find a you know I search open Bazaar 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 merchants that hey I want to pay you in grin or dogecoin right like what why do I have to use one of the four supported

currencies can't like you know I just send him a dogecoin address and you know yeah he'll he'll give me a dogecoin address I'll pay him the dojo and he'll send me the sticker why what what what does it mean to support a currency in open bazaar yeah sure so what you're describing is very similar to our crypto trading feature so if you if you you can create a listing within open Bazaar marketplace to sell crypto and you can actually list first over 2000 coins like all the ones from coin market cat right like when we obviously don't support we don't have that wallet you know Pumas are 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 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 open Bazaar to them so it's kind of like is this similar to what you're talking about and yeah that can be done I mean that's what's happening there why do we not do that for the for the primary purchases well you know what what's what's going on with an open Bazaar as 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 ranana miss you're not going to trust that person so when so in order to get around that what we do is we pay into a multi multi sig open Bazaar 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 in to the escrow they deliver the dogecoin that you buy and then when you're happy you release the funds out of that to of three multi-sig wallet to

the merchants and then there's this inherent trust there and if there's a problem now you have a third party to step in and and and do a dispute resolution process if needed so so that's why we do that and and what we mean by supporting the coin is we have to build that multi-sig wallet like Etha theorem for instance doesn't even have native multi-sig support so we have we had to build the smart contract to do multi-sig for open Bazaar and that's that's um we integrated and you know and we have different wallet interface requirements for the app itself so you know that 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 open Bazaar 2.0 one of

the things we were very proud of was you know using in a Bitcoin SPV client in the background as the wallet but then when we moved 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 I mean well then what do you do when you have a theory like it it just becomes ridiculous and then the the problem escalates when you try to port open Bazaar over to web or to mobile so you know changing the the way that the wallet works so it becomes an API based wallet where it's fetching information about the blockchain by an API rather than using you know a like 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 escrows 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 does the buyer the seller and some third moderator who where does the third moderator come in who decides it and like is it is there a public listing of like trusted moderators or how does this work the the moderator role can be fulfilled by any node on the network so if you want to join up in bazaar you just want to do two-speed 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 and anybody can join ob1 the company has a list of what we call verified moderators these are people who we know moderators on the network they've you know 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 stay

very clearly what your fees 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 open Bazaar and they don't really know you know which moderators should we trust here which ones are the good guys that are not gonna 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 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 as risk which was a research project based out of Greece University a university in Greece and we 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 in like oh be one blessing certain moderators is being verified so to speak I mean that's 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 technologies so that could

be searched that could be the dispute process any place where there's like too heavily we're too heavily reliant on centralized actors that 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 yeah well III 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 is it 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 aetherium dap and most of them kind of have this same kind of stack which is that you have the blockchain and all the code is result 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 meta masks or whatever right like if through the web 3 in our case it's a little bit different right like we're more like a BitTorrent peer so so the logic that drives open Bazaar 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 Lib p2p at the networking layer which allows us to do peer-to-peer networking and and every computer you know every device connects to the open Bazaar network independently and and then on top of that IP FS which is like the data storage layer which talks on top of lid p2p 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 so way you're not chained what are you even doing on this podcast no I'm sorry we're

not a book 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 opera turns and all this stuff I remember very early on we went into the Bitcoin devs or Bitcoin Wizards IRC chat and we were as some 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 [ __ ] idiots you got to get out of here like and we wanted to boot us out of the IRC chat and they're like you're gonna 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 in the 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 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 in code 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 the open Bazaar 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 and the application folder I realized so I uh so I up ended up it just before and like went back into it and it's quite nice

and it looks kind of like eBay and you can search and you can filter and so from what what it looks like is that there's there's a an open Bazaar kind of I don't want secured ate it but somewhat filtered search engine because all of the stuff that you see here in the open is our app and that provided search page that's not all of what's on open Bazaar I mean there might be other listings on other marketplaces or 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 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 - is this you know constant battle of pragmatism versus ideology you know early on when we started open Bazaar 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 even crypto enthusiasts not not just mainstream casual users it just was a very bad UX and so one of the 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 parties sort of like the web browser does right like 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 and people could have different approaches to the way that they curate or censor 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 you know how was your mom or dad ever gonna 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 like their view of the Internet is to Google Google is essentially sensors that right but they're but 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 US 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 help 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 the thing to really understand and and in many ways the dis understanding was was really well established before Bitcoin came along but Bitcoin comes along and we had this idea that the entire blockchain and all of the data all of the transactions

everybody has that data and it's replicated to however many thousands of times on everybody's nodes and now everybody thinks that this is the way you do peer-to-peer and this is how decentralized networks work where 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 so when I want to like okay say if I were downloading and illegal movie hypothetically I would go and I would I would find that data of my mic my application was downloaded by a BitTorrent and then I would seed that data to anybody else on the network who wanted it and in in exactly the same way

this is what happens on open Bazaar 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 you know more people are seeding that to other peers on the network so it has this very beneficial response to scaling as opposed to you know crumbling when there's more demand it actually gets stronger more resilient as there's more

demand so as a result of that architecture that requires able to crawl the network and index what's on the network in order to comprehend and to sort 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 out information for yourself you're just going to need to resort to a third party such engine to to find where those 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 of 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 consciously crawl the entire network but could you do something like you know you keep everything on the peer-to-peer network but then you throw the ipfs hashes on to 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 TC arse for like token curated registries for like finding the best market plate marked merchants for a certain product or category and stuff like that yeah 100% that that's that is the ideal way to do it and there it been

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 an open Bazaar exactly what you're describing so you can embed the hashes of the content that you know you you want to promote out there into the storage of some smart contracts and you know 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 like what what are some of the other things that you're trying to build here around this future

token yes so the the token itself is is not not in the mold of the your traditional ICU I mean we're not doing this you know raised two hundred million dollars and uh I see a thing like that it's it's very much a way of thinking you know okay if we did a token how would it add value to the network well you know we we went through so many iterations of how it took and where a token would make sense you know and many of the traditional ways that were people were you know suggesting to us which is like uh 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

and let if you got 10,000 s KU's 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 cost gas to 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 and and like wait two 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 aetherium or dye because it would require people to have money to spend to stake on to 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 we're going to be experimenting with that and we've also created smart contracts that reward people when they purchase listings on open Bazaar so I

mean we rewards points yeah exactly like a rewards points think I mean our our focus really has been on trying to make this token that we will be releasing have real utility particularly from from an ad space promoting content point of view and you know where we're up to mystically that that's gonna work out really well cool and so maybe I know another interesting topic especially you know given a lot of the origins of open Bazaar from Silk Road is like the you know or you know a spiritual successor maybe is like around privacy so I remember you know like we like we talked

about one of the things that you guys have done is added support for Z cash so one question is you know do you support like the actual proper Z cash shielded payments or right now is it only just the complete transparent ones we 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 C cash would then open Bazaar 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 like been having some detailed discussions with some of the developers over at Manero and you know to 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 right yeah cool and so what are like some of the other like no privacy centric things that are you know you guys may be working on in developing look 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 would what open reserve seems to do is you know it allowed the infrastructure to be decentralized but did it add in the privacy aspect of Silk Road kind of

started off with yeah I mean I think one of the the biggest things that you know one of the most unique things about open Bazaar 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 the sense that like ubers peer-to-peer you know it's peered is truly peer-to-peer if I'm gonna buy something from like let's say you are doing something he lists it you're selling something you lists it I'm not going through some Hubb where they're like monitoring what I'm doing and seeing me connect to that storefront and you know perch making purchases and things like that the privacy is me to you and I'm making my order directly to use 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 that 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 open was Arbor to get exploited somehow you know this data is spread across all these you know how many other 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 tor browser for instance and you fire up open Bazaar it'll be it'll detect that and say hey do you want to run all your stuff do 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 toward like natively within the app rather than a lot having to require other people to you know set it up outside of open Bazaar or even maybe incorporating I to P is an option since ipfs could support that you know that would be another improvement we could do and there's and 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 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 our chief privacy guy you know like and we're 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 we're like juggling that with user experience as well and so they're you know there are some trade-offs and compromises 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 open Bazaar 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 market places like you know online marketplaces and decentralized 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 scammy sellers get 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 you're one of your dcz 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 is thinking changed about like managing reputation within the open Bazaar marketplace well decentralize reputation

is a complete shambles basically yeah it's 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 he designed it's like the more financial incentive you create to gamin 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 now right at the start one 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 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 for different criteria but how

is that a civil resistant oh it's not really I mean the the the civil resistance is limited in in as far as I can't go in the network and just create thousands of ratings naively against you know every seller I can come across I 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 our rating a rating system isn't Brazilian 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 centralized or decentralized way and unfortunately once he's trying to solve it in a decentralized way it starts to add a lot of cost and a lot of UX burden onto uses that kind of undermines the 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 trust this risk which was done by Denise's zinthos 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 were at the paper not me but the the idea essentially was you know creating essentially payment channels with other people on the open Bazaar network and the the magnitude of the payment channel that you opened with other people in 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 that work came along and I think that the Lightning Network in many

ways improves upon that initial idea and could be superimposed onto the open Bazaar 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 you know ecosystem one was 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 crawled a network for that rating data

and then can wait and rank that rating data based on you know associated factors like you know the 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 Bazaar to real world identity and then you could basically rank their the overall rating that you calculate based on you know other third-party criteria so in in like search 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 from that 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 simple 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 twelve to fourteen thousand listings any given time available on the marketplace since we released our second version we've had about a hundred sixty thousand

people on a network and we get about 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 and peers were connecting to in order to like crawl their listings and and 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 light consistent you know lot 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 like we don't see a lot of people outside of that that network using the platform which is something we'd like to change with the mobile app and I think we think we have a good chance at improving that but for now it's you 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 it 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 crypto centric so a lot of the news and information that 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 get 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 like 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 gonna 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 it's called Haven and all that Washington explain a little bit more but you know this is definitely a game changer for us we're really targeting people beyond the crypto sphere this is like a product design to try and help us get out of that that that loop that you just described yeah I mean Haven in many ways really takes it take seven bazaar in the direction of you know what we saw when we first you know started this project you know I can speak for just for myself but when when

I when I saw her inside of thinking about up in Bazaar I didn't see open Bazaar as just a 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 if I'm Bazaar is really a platform for self-expression and self-determination in a way that it marries you know unsensible payments and an unsensible 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 you know social and chat and all these you know

did this we we can use open Bazaar to put together so many things that we can really create a another parallel economy to the see the legacy financial economy so Haven itself is really designed and inspired by WeChat and in 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 it's not 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 so that the chat isn't end encrypted it's got the multi currency wallet it will have a theory em you'll have access to payments and all the other Yossi 20 tokens stable coins lightning Network will be in there at some point so you know this and we'll the the other through the other major feature that we're bringing into the app is is the social network is a decentralized social network built on ipfs and the idea is yeah okay that the primary purpose of the social network is obviously to promote things that you want to sell and 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 the core experience which is all of open

Bazaar and I think the the one technical aspect if I can geek out for a second is that we have all of the open Bazaar server code the the actual node itself running on your mobile device it's not like remoting into some infrastructure provisions somewhere no it's you know 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 Z cash well this will be it you take it to 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 I think 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 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 if there's all kinds of transactions occurring there what's the incentive for them you know beyond so the privacy aspect of course what's the incentive to use something like Haven how is this gonna 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 trends action feasor and a listening freezer 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 rising your fees for this and the other the other incentive I think is the risk for deep platforming is eliminated because you know you can't be deep platform type and bazaar 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 is not to be underestimated especially you know in

recent years where we've seen you know abuses of 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 a little bit more affluent they're gonna bump up the price all right there so you know all of these things don't happen on it the bazaar this is true and I 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 some lines they're crossing some lines with regards to use you know either users privacy and you know I 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 I it feels like you're you're your customer base or at least a merchants are not typically like merchants that you'd find Amazon they're more like you know artists if I'm looking at so the the listings on open Bazaar today you get one guy who makes like this beautiful wood and artwork you know that it's more like the the typeset folks that you would 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 you know this big Gaffa type company that are exploiting people and following us on the internet and selling the data to others etc so uh on that point at like maybe you respond they're on them on the privacy side I think this is true I think like people want to have that but that's the 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 you elicit or maybe that don't appeal to the masses or to everyone so ya know I mean I think those those are those are two good points I think to kind of refute that argument that those things are needed you know in terms of the the Etsy thing you know I mean I you know it could be a reality where a platform like open Bazaar is some somewhere people go for more serious purchases and toilet paper and paper towels is all done on Amazon and 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 open Bazaar it will become you know

and maybe it's more like you know sensitive things that they decide to purchase through open Bazaar 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 DuckDuckGo did recently that looked at the last five years of their growth and the massive amount of increase in adoption of DuckDuckGo 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 is a truly global marketplace and secondly you're talking about exposure across the planet I mean go to Amazon you're not buy 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 open Bazaar has the ability to destroy those barriers I mean you download the app in 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 a 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 open Bazaar you know using crypto and 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 in a computer Center people had to come to the

computer center and be trained to use it etc etc 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 the you know to Americans or whatever and there's no restriction sir 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 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's the use case that really takes it this thing in catapults it into mainstream adoption and maybe you know these 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 well 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 I think it's 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 we've been in this for over four years now is not

something that you know we wake up the next morning we're like today's the day you know I 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 with our competitors as possible and hope people start to see that the the you know 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 so is 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 tend 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 it's more like inviting them to spread their foot print on to now a decentralized marketplace and get a whole bunch of interests and focused action from an ecosystem that is eager to make another economy in real-world goods and services using crypto so I

think that that that that's one thing we're looking forward to yeah and and just one more point on the deep platform you know you kind of made it sound like there's a fringe thing right like the D platform you know it only affects like Milo yarn appleís and you know these 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 deep 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 you know that's a huge amount of

audience that you potentially lose out on so it's it's kind of a double-edged sword you may you may have a situation where people you know you let people onto your platform that a lot don't agree with but they had you can't deny that they have huge and massive audiences that that make make them over and become users well I look forward to seeing Alex Jones selling tinfoil hats all of these are no 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 the business model for a parent company ob1 it's a work in progress I mean really in reality we're 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 and have ownership over you know a portion of it and and try to derive value for people for users you know and drink 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 etsion 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 merchants store you know in case your device fails or it 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 own 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 for coming

on it was great to have had open Bazaar on again it's it's not often that we we have we do repeat shows about about topics but but what we do it's because the Bing and all they've been in long long enough for you know sufficient things to have happened so congratulations for having stuck around this long to be on a person or 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 podcast and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch them listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps me to find the show and we're always happy to read them but thanks so much and we look forward to being back [Music] [Music]