TL;DR: Popular decentralized online marketplace OpenBazaar and its parent company OB1 announced a restructuring plan in the hopes it will “give both the company and the OpenBazaar network the best chance of surviving and thriving in the future.”

OpenBazaar Parent OB1 Downsizing

“One of our co-founders, Sam, will be shifting to a new role outside of OB1 to focus on the success of this transition,” the notice revealed. “Furthermore, we have reduced the size of the team to focus on marketplace growth and revenue targets in this next phase.” OpenBazaar is a popular online marketplace designed as a halfway point between above-ground retailers and underground vendors, championing cryptocurrencies as the principal medium of exchange.

It has roots in the work of radical Bitcoin pioneers such as Amir Taaki and early open-source, decentralized projects such as Dark Market back in 2014. By 2016, the project was forked and eventually rebranded OpenBazaar, and it has been humming along ever since to greater and lesser success. Its parent company, OB1, believed “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 Medium post recalled.

Successes include their proprietary mobile application, Haven, which OB1 claims more than 120,000 users have installed. “However,” they continued, “it’s been an uphill challenge of turning OB1 into a profitable business.” This means an inevitable restructuring which appears to signal pivoting more toward the likes of Haven and “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 explained.

The company will continue to maintain seed, gateway, and API wallet servers, hoping to survive on “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,” they insisted. “Ultimately we hoped that achieving the goal of growing OpenBazaar organically and dramatically would not require a reshaping of the business, but it is time to move into a new phase.”

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