OpenBazaar is certainly at the top of many people’s lists of cryptocurrency-based marketplaces. The OpenBazaar protocol is appealing to a lot of people since it allows anyone in the world to buy or sell any good or service in exchange for Bitcoin. The possibilities are endless. One downside, though, is that OpenBazaar only supports Bitcoin right now. That situation will change very soon, by the looks of things.
OpenBazaar Developers and Altcoin Integration
Ever since the Openbazaar platform was released, cryptocurrency users have been incredibly excited about what the protocol had to offer. Being able to buy or sell any product or service in exchange for Bitcoin has a lot of value to a lot of users around the world. With most merchants hesitating to fully adopt Bitcoin payments, different solutions are needed. OpenBazaar certainly checks a lot of the right boxes and it has a ton of functionality.
During the initial stages of OpenBazaar, there were some issues that needed to be addressed. For one, there was no convenient way to search for goods and services. Later on, the DuoSearch tool was introduced to alleviate this issue, and it has received a lot of praise over the past few months. OpenBazaar’s developers have been working on integrating their own search feature as well, which has made the whole project more convenient for users.
There has also been a growing demand for altcoin support on OpenBazaar. Considering how this platform is designed to act as a decentralized protocol for marketplace purposes, there should not be a limit on the range of coins users can utilize to make or receive payments. Integrating altcoins into Openbazaar is not necessarily all that easy, but the developers are working hard at it. It is a bit unclear which coins are on their radar right now, but Bitcoin Cash is one of the proposed solutions for the time being.
It would be quite interesting to see OpenBazaar embrace many altcoins. There has never been any indication the developers would not look beyond Bitcoin when it came to dealing with payments. This makes a lot of sense, as Bitcoin is not the perfect currency some people would like to think it is. However, given the uncertainty regarding which altcoins will be integrated into the platform moving forward, it is not impossible someone would “fork” this source code to include specific currency support in the future.
Indeed, that is one of the main selling points of OpenBazaar. Although the project’s source code can be downloaded from GitHub with relative ease, there is nothing preventing other developers from making their own versions of the software. When it comes to integrating support for alternative currencies, this can be an option well worth exploring. Any “forked” versions of OpenBazaar may eventually have features ported to the main development branch over time, depending on how successful the implementation is.
It is good to see the OpenBazaar team acknowledge their project could benefit from integrating support for various other cryptocurrencies. Although the main focus will always be Bitcoin, there are plenty of other currencies that could be valuable additions to this protocol in the future. There is no plan to drop Bitcoin support altogether, but the developers do not seem satisfied with the way things stand right now. That is not entirely surprising, but it could have major consequences for this decentralized marketplace project.
