Open Bazaar is a decentralized cryptocurrency project that everyone who is serious about cryptocurrency should know about.

Other projects have claimed they will make a decentralized marketplace application as part of their project, but nearly all have failed because it was not the solute purpose of their project and as such didn't get enough adoption for serious usage.

Open Bazaar on the other hand didn't set out to create a blokcchain, a token or a currency. Instead, they created an application that focused on being a peer to peer decentralized marketplace where one could sell items and buy items using various cryptocurrencies. 

Supported Coins on Open Bazaar

• Bitcoin
• Bitcoin Cash
• Ethereum
• Litecoin
• Zchash

After downloading the Open Bazaar Application as with all things decentralized the very first thing you should do is write down your seed phrase. This protects your wallets, your store and your purchase history.

Users get a wallet address for each of the five supported coins. These wallet addresses can be used as your main wallets and shared with others to receive any of these coins.

Although you could use these wallets outside as your main wallets for these coins, it would not be advisable as your open bazaar seed phrase can only be imported into the open bazaar application. It will not import to other wallets and no wallet keys are provided for the 5 open bazaar wallets.

The Open Bazaar Marketplace

The marketplace has a lot of features to help prevent fraud. Most notably are seller ratings and moderation.

Seller ratings are rating of the seller that come from buyers. From the buyer perspective this means sellers that have lots of reviews and a 4 or 5 star rating, the chances of the sale not ending in fraud is very good. If they have a 1 to 3 star rating you should read the reviews and determine for yourself if the seller is real and what the potential complaint or complaints were about. 

If a seller has absolutely no ratings, one may be at a greater risk of purchasing and facing fraud however new stores start with no reviews at all, so not having a rating may also just mean they are new and the risk is your to take.

Moderation is actually a form of peer to peer escrow mediation. In the event you have a problem with your product after purchasing or if someone tried to fraud you and deliver no product, if the listed was a moderated listing, you can appeal the purchase.

A seller has the option to list their store as moderator and choose a moderator or they can opt not to be moderated. Stores that are not moderated are at a high risk of being fraud especially if they have no buyer reviews. 

If the seller did opt to use moderation you will see a badge at the opt left of the item in the listings.

What happens when you purchase a moderated item is, you send funds to the moderator, they hold those funds until the product has been verified delivered by you. So as stated above if you receive a product and have problems with it, or don't receive a product you can appeal.

The moderator will hear the appeal and make a decision. Not all decisions are in favor of the buyer so buyers cannot try to cheat the system. For example if a buy claimed not to get the product and the seller showed a tracking number for the shipping which matched the buyers address, they may not win the appeal. 

These 2 options help prevent fraud however as is always the case with cryptocurrency, there is still a risk.

Illegal Listings

As a decentralized application, open bazaar is prone to having items that are illegal, though legallity is also location specific. 

To handle this, the decentralized servers have settings and server owners can opt to allow or not allow some items to be found in the searches.

To find illegal items one has to either find a server that will list them in the search, or go through the connections of various users until they find what they are looking for.

Creating a Store

Anyone can create a store, anyone can add products to their store and there are absolutely no fee's to do so.

The process is fairly straight forward. You simply fill out details of a form, add your image for the product, decide if the product will have a coupon for marketing purposes and thats pretty much it. 

Each person has a unique store address that can be given to others, but that address only works in the app, not outside of it from within a web browser. 

Open Bazaar Decentralized OTC Exchange

Open Bazaar also doubles as a decentralized exchange. 

If you are going to exchange through open bazaar it works exchange as selling does however for safety it is only receommended to use OB1 verified moderators (this is the official moderators of the developers). 

If you use any other moderator or if you use unmoderated exchanges there is a strong chance you will get scammed. 

Transactions are usually relatively slow compared to standard exchange or even other decentralized exchanges as these are over the counter (otc) trades.

Downside of Open Bazaar

The only real downside is you can not create multiple stores and you can not install the application more than one time on the same device.

However for those technically inclined, this downside can be overcome by using virtual servers on their computer and run a separate instance in the virtual server.

Conclusion

These types of applications are required for the future of cryptocurrency. They give cryptocurrency a purpose and allow for it to truly be used as a form of digital cash. 

Everyone in cryptocurrency should be checking OpenBazaar for birthday presents, for digital products, and in my opinion people should check here first before making purchases with the major centralized online marketplaces.

It helps support cryptocurrency as well as those in cryptocurrency/ It supports people like you who are reading this article.

Hopefully with more adoption we can see things like furniture stores, computer stores, and retail items listed. At the moment the stores are mostly filled with used items, hand made items and digital goods.