OpenBazaar Developers Reveal Roadmap And Upcoming Features

It has been hinted at for several weeks now, but the OpenBazaar team has finally revealed their development roadmap. Several new features will be coming, although some of them will take a year – or longer-  to be implemented. Additionally, the team has also introduced some ongoing improvements to make the ecosystem more versatile and mature.

OpenBazaar Roadmap and Improvements

Creating a decentralized Bitcoin marketplace is not an easy task, and the work of OpenBazaar developers is never finished either. Significant changes will be coming to the Moderation system, including reputation for moderators and a dedicated Moderator page. Moreover, vendors and buyers on the platform will be able to change moderators in the future if they desire to do so.

Additionally, the listing flexibility needs some minor overhaul, including the addition of shipping rules and costs, coupons, and tax rules. But that is not all, as product variations – such as colour and size -will be introduced over time as well. The OpenBazaar reputation system will be seeing some changes as well, although there are still the early days for a robust reputation system.

Perhaps the biggest changes will be coming to the privacy – or lack thereof – presented by OpenBazaar. Tor support is absent in OpenBazaar 1.0, simply because it is not compatible with the rUDP transport layer used on top of Twisted for p2p network connections. The backend of this platform will be upgraded to IPFS, which will also lead to the eventual integration of Tor.

On the topic of the OpenBazaar development roadmap, there is a very long list of things planned for the next year and more. Webhooks are on the priority list, which allows for the introduction of third-party services such as mobile notifications. Additionally, the developers are also working on automated delivery of digital goods as soon as the payment has been made, a feature many users have requested.

The search functionality will be undergoing some changes as well, as listings need to be indexed properly. Unfortunately, the search function will be a centralized solution, as results will be fetched from API endpoints. However, users will be able to change the API provider if a particular endpoint goes down.

Other proposed changes range from introducing a full-fledged Bitcoin wallet solution, launching the mobile application, and adding Advanced Messaging. None of these features will be coming soon, though, as they will take at least six months to come to fruition. There are a lot of things happening behind the scenes of OpenBazaar, and exciting prospects are on the horizon.

Source; Medium

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