OpenBazaar announced today that the peer-to-peer marketplace powered by an escrow system has received $1 million in seed funding to keep the momentum rolling.

This funding round includes funding from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and angel investor William Mougayar. The OpenBazaar team says that the money will be used “to develop the OpenBazaar protocol and client, and build the first business on top of the OpenBazaar network.”

In the announcement blog post, the OpenBazaar team notes that in spite of vocal support from the Bitcoin community, progress has been slow. The infusion of $1 million will allow the developers and team to spend full time working on the various elements of OpenBazaar to get it ready for prime time and gain the traction it needs to become as large as life.

Launched initially in 2014, OpenBazaar provides a decentralized peer-to-peer ecommerce marketplace powered by bitcoin payments. The technologies at play in OpenBazaar include peer-to-peer networking, Ricardian contracts, decentralized reputation, and multisignature escrow for bitcoin payments.

OpenBazaar reached 2.0 in September 2014 when the project launched its fully open source and extensible software for MacOS, Windows, and Linux with a GitHub repository.

The marketplace exists and functions on every node that runs the software, a network constructed by the participants in the marketplace. Unlike a static web page that requires a central server, OpenBazaar is decentralized and exists as long as clients run the software and are interested in trading on the network.

OpenBazaar will remain open source

Although this seed round adds the intersection with traditional corporate sources, the OpenBazaar team wanted to make it clear that the project would remain open source and MIT licensed.

To facilitate future growth of OpenBazaar the team has taken this seed funding round as an opportunity to build the first business on the OpenBazaar network named OB1.

“As a global software community, we’ve intentionally created OpenBazaar so that there are no fees required to use the network” the OpenBazaar team wrote in the announcement, “and there is no central authority controlling trade, taking a cut, or monitoring data. As a result, companies such as OB1 cannot act as a central authority on the network. OB1 will aid decentralized commerce by offering services such as dispute resolution, store hosting, and more.”

The team also believes that the participation of Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz with OB1 will give OpenBazaar the leverage the project needs to get widespread adoption. Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz both have shown strong interest in decentralized economy projects. Andreessen Horowitz invested part of the $116 million into the mysterious IoT 21 Inc. bitcoin mining venture in March this year; and has previously joined with other investors to provide $25m to Coinbase, Inc. in 2013.

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