OpenBazaar may soon face some new competition in the coming months. A new upcoming crypto-based decentralized marketplace MaskNetwork, currently in testing phase will soon be going live next year. However, MaskNetwork is a bit different from OpenBazaar in its own ways.

MaskNetwork is a secure P2P distributed marketplace that allows its users to buy and sell goods using their own MaskCoin cryptocurrecy. MaskCoin transactions on MaskNetwork offers similar levels of protection as bitcoin to its users. According to a discussion on one of the crypto technology forums, the founder of MaskNetwork offered various details about the upcoming product. The person answered various questions regarding the platform, privacy and security issues etc. on the forum. Based out of Romania, development of the platform was announced earlier in July this year.

MaskNetwork, which has been under development all this while has recently launched the alpha version of the platform. The test release is aptly called the TestNet and it is being used by the cryptocurrency community to operate and test the various features currently integrated into the TestNet. Some of the features available on the alpha product includes multisignatures, integrated escrow system, transaction support, messaging etc.

MaskNetwork is built using modified POW on a complete fresh node. The network has about 1% of the MaskCoins premined and it is currently available for sale as well. The important differentiating factors between OpenBazaar and MaskNetwork are as follows.

MaskNetwork is a completely web based application. Users can directly access it from their browser. However, on OpenBazaar one has to download a desktop client to be able to conduct transactions over the platform.

Mask Network relies on its own MaskCoin for transactions over the platform while OpenBazaar supports bitcoin.

The MaskNetwork offers a great deal of control over the platform to its community. The node operators can exert some control over the content and they can choose to hide certain listings from their connections depending upon its legality in their country. However, the node operators can only hide a particular inappropriate listing and they can’t delete any of the listing. The escrow facility integrated into platform also helps in increasing the credibility of the shopping platform during its initial days at least.The platform is expected to be completely finished in the coming 2-3 months and the final version is expected to be made available by the end of June 2016.

More details on MaskNetwork AMA on ZapChain