OpenBazaar, a decentralized Bitcoin marketplace, is inching closer to open beta release and will be holding an exhibit at the d10e conference in Amsterdam, February 17-19, Bitcoinist reported.



“This year, the entire OB1 team will be attending the d10e conference in Amsterdam this February in order to present OpenBazaar to the wider decentralization movement”, OpenBazaar said in a blog post. “We will be a speaker as well as offering an exhibit at the event. We hope to meet as many Bitcoiners and OpenBazaar community members as possible and we’re excited to start pushing for adoption of the platform!”



On 19th February, they will also be holding their own event in which they will showcase their standalone app.



OpenBazaar is a platform for people who want to engage in trade directly with each other - a peer to peer network that isn't controlled by any company or organization. Instead of visiting a website, users need to download and install a program on their computer that directly connects them to other people looking to buy and sell goods and services. The "terms and conditions" of the trade are up to the buyer and seller individually.



Also, as there is no company or organization running OpenBazaar, there's no one that charges fees for listing the products and no one to register an account with. There are no extra fees to conduct trade and Bitcoin is the only supported payment method. Bitcoin is used because of its unique benefits over other payment methods.



Tyson O’Ham of Bitcoinist explains OpenBazaar’s functionality. He says:



“Peer discovery, account management, and monetary transactions are all handled by the application itself. Every communication in the network is encrypted using automatic key management. The encryption toolchain also manages the trustless escrow system and payment confirmation. In theory, all you need to sell you products globally would be the OpenBazaar app. The decentralized system eliminates hosting costs and brokerage fees common to services like Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and others.”



Last year, OpenBazaar raised US$1 million in seed funding with the help of Andreesen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and angel investor William Mougayar, CoinTelegraph reported.