Distributed peer-to-peer Bitcoin e-commerce platform OpenBazaar has opened for business after one month of testing.

Founded in 2014 as a fork of the DarkMarket project, OpenBazaar provides a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) e-commerce marketplace powered by Bitcoin payments that utilizes P2P networking, Ricardian contracts, decentralized reputation, and multi signature escrow for Bitcoin payments.

As it is purely a P2P based market, there is no middleman involved so buyers and sellers engage in trade directly with each other, don’t pay any fees to use the network, and there are no terms and conditions to sign; OpenBazaar escribes this permissionless trade as there also no central authorities that act as gatekeepers and restrict trade.

While it may sound risky, one of the key features is built-in escrow so when a transaction occurs the Bitcoin is sent to a multisig address and a message is sent to the seller that the money has been received; the seller then ships the product and when the buyer receives it the seller can then use their signature to unlock the money.

In the event something goes wrong at the buyer’s end ae third party becomes involved (a trusted moderator) who then decides if the Bitcoins can be released.

“Trade was meant to be free. This idea inspired us to spend the last two years building OpenBazaar,” Project leader Brian Hoffman said in a media release. “Starting today, anyone in the world with access to an Internet connection can use Bitcoin and OpenBazaar to exchange goods and services freely. We can’t wait to see how people will use this tool.”

Promising

While it’s early days so far, OpenBazaar seems promising given that it is offering a fee-free marketplace that it literally cannot control itself; you could even say it’s a libertarian wet dream.

During the testing period, there were some 25,000 downloads from 126 countries, with users posting more than 3,000 listings to test out the software in preparation for the public release, and decent spread for a service that is still not widely known about.

The only risk going forward is that eventually (if they haven’t already) people will start selling illegal items on the service, but by its very P2P nature, there is nothing the developers can do to prevent this and potentially limited options for authorities as well.

Prior to launch OpenBazaar had raised a single $1 million seed round from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

If you’re interested in testing OpenBazaar out you can download the client here with support available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Image credit: OpenBazaar