The retail platform for the trade of articles that operates with cryptocurrencies, OpenBazaar, reported that it is currently facing financing problems that threaten its commercial operations and requests support from members of its community.
According to information published in a statement issued by the team, OpenBazaar indicated that it has assumed the operating costs of the support services it currently uses to date, among which are the seed nodes and APIs for the use of wallets, and exchanges of cryptocurrencies, which will stop working due to the economic problems that the company is currently facing.
In addition to the above services, the OpenBazaar team reported that the situation also makes it unfeasible to keep its mobile device application, Haven, in the iOS and Android application stores, so they will no longer be available from On October 1 of this year, and those who keep them downloaded may not be able to use all their operating properties.
Therefore, OpenBazaar members are asking Haven users to withdraw funds from the app’s wallet as soon as possible, as funds may be blocked after October 1. In turn, OpenBazaar indicates to users that it will soon be publishing information in which they will offer more details about the measures to be taken, and where it will put detailed instructions so that people make the due closure of their accounts by withdrawing the capital stored in their wallets.
Financing problems
Regarding financing problems, the team indicated that since 2014 OpenBazaar has been trying to materialize its vision for the creation of a fully decentralized P2P trading platform for articles, for which they carried out different calls and campaigns in which they managed to raise money from reputed investors.
However, the company was unable to reach the level of growth they need to guarantee the sustainability of its operations, as it was unable to reach the number of users necessary for this type of business to gain much popularity. This makes it difficult for the team to finance the operational costs of running the platform today.
Requesting community support
In light of the abovementioned problems, OpenBazaar sustained its operations with the help of donations made by community members. However, they indicate that they are already reaching their limits and that they have not had much success finding other mechanisms to finance operations.
In the coming days, they will publish explainers on how to release funds from nodes. They will also be open-sourcing our search engine and Blackbook indexer code for those that may want to run the infrastructure privately.
When they launched OpenBazaar back in 2014, they wanted to bring the full power of decentralized marketplaces to a global audience and were lucky enough to raise money from world-class investors to found OB1, and throughout the time they worked tirelessly on the vision of free trade.
Unfortunately, they have not achieved the level of user growth and adoption required to build a sustainable business off serving OpenBazaar/Haven users. As a result, OB1 cannot sustain funding the ongoing infrastructure costs.
Over the past several months, they also relied on OpenBazaar’s donation funds to support these infrastructure costs, but those funds will be deleted shortly. At OB1, They have desperately tried to secure more funding to not only maintain OpenBazaar’s support costs but execute the next phase of the protocol that OpenBaazar believes can unlock explosive user adoption. Sadly, everything went unsuccessful, leaving no choice but to discontinue these supporting services.
They stated: “We would like to apologize for the short notice, which is the result of last-minute funding plans falling-through. We will do everything in our power to try and extend the window so that users can safely withdraw their funds from their OpenBazaar and Haven wallets”.
By: Jenson Nuñez.
