When we forked the Dark Market codebase in early 2014 and turned it into OpenBazaar, we never imagined that so many people around the world would contribute ideas and code, install our software, and run their crypto-based eCommerce businesses on a decentralised marketplace.

In 2015, we founded OB1 assuming it would be possible to scale the marketplace up and capture revenue, not by forcing merchants or buyers to pay mandatory rent-seeking fees but by keeping the protocol open and free and create services and software on top of that network. The mission has been complex and difficult and after five years we’ve built a great community, a working decentralised marketplace, with over 120,000 people installing Haven onto their mobile devices. However, it’s been an uphill challenge of turning OB1 into a profitable business.

This last week, we have made some deep and difficult decisions at OB1 that we feel give both the company and the OpenBazaar network the best chance of surviving and thriving in the future. One of our co-founders, Sam, will be shifting to a new role outside of OB1 to focus on the success of this transition. Furthermore, we have reduced the size of the team to focus on marketplace growth and revenue targets in this next phase. We deeply thank everyone who has worked with us up to this point for their contributions. If you’re a company in the crypto-space in search of talented developers, please reach out to us so we can connect you.

The rest of the OB1 team will be working hard to grow the existing network of merchants and marketplace through Haven and other endeavors. Haven development will absolutely continue, with some exciting improvements lined up in the next few weeks.

Because we are at a fairly stable place protocol-wise, we will be shifting some of the responsibilities for the development & design of the protocol, as well as the reference desktop application, to the open-source community after the integration of Ethereum/ERC-20 tokens as a payment option into OpenBazaar.

OB1 maintains several pieces of important infrastructure to support OpenBazaar including seed servers, a gateway server, and API wallet servers. While we will continue to maintain and develop this infrastructure, and it will be subsidized for a period of time by the donations the community has graciously provided. Over the years we have used minimal amounts of those donations to support OpenBazaar causes and take the responsibility to use it wisely very seriously.