OB1 CEO and OpenBazaar Project Lead Brian Hoffman and I (OB1/OpenBazaar Marketing and Community Manager, Jenn Cloud), were pleased to spend some time last week with the excellent crypto community in Toronto, Ontario.

Thanks to a great idea from our Series A leading investor, OMERS Ventures, we hosted an OpenBazaar meetup on Wednesday night at Art Square Gallery across from the Art Gallery of Ontario in the heart of downtown Toronto. We had almost 130 people register for the event and over 70 showed up and packed the space to standing room only!

Brian presented a brief history of OpenBazaar (did you know that the original codebase that was forked to become OpenBazaar was produced in Toronto?), shared the latest feature releases which are cryptocurrency trading and web browsing, and discussed future plans for the network. There was a great question and answer session at the end, people were very interested in the governance structures of the network and our upcoming token release, about which we know we’ve been quiet, but we will have more to share very soon.

Here’s a pro tip for when there is an OpenBazaar event near you: we gave out 3 deluxe swag bags to 3 attendees who had either bought or sold something on the marketplace so make sure you check it out for yourself!

Fab Toronto event w/ @brianchoffman @openbazaar & @wmougayar, diving into the case for #decentralized marketplaces

- Censorship resistant p2p network

- Marketplace & rules controlled by users

- Privacy & no middlemen

- Community driven innovation & network growth#crypto #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/7YhQIAI1D7 — Mags (@Crypto_Mags) June 7, 2018

Thanks to Mags for this great tweet! I had the opportunity to meet her and so many great, SMART people including but not at all limited to Ibrahim, Ana, Mike, Brad, John, OpenBazaar vendor Sanda and a couple from Brazil, Michael and Samara, who helped with the Portuguese translation of OpenBazaar. They even had a photo of the postcard I hand wrote and sent to them with their thank you t-shirts!

This event wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Lukas Royal and his team who located and secured an event space in record time near the OMERS office, set up the event on Meetup and established a Telegram group for community discussion. Special thanks also goes to one of our investors, William Mougayar, who shared this event with his network and created a spike of RSVPs. You all are wonderful and we thank you so much for your support and really making this event a success!

Are you interested in hosting an OpenBazaar event near you? Please get in touch!