Back in time

Who remembers OpenBazaar? OpenBazaar was a decentralized marketplace launched in 2016. You could pay with bitcoins on it. OpenBazaar tried to replace the service of big internet shops, i.e. the business that Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress does. At the same time, it wanted to replace payment services like VISA or Paypal. The seller could offer his goods on the platform and if the buyer was interested, he could communicate directly with the seller. The payment was made through a multi-signature bitcoin account and with the assistance of a moderator. The advantage was that users did not have to provide KYC/AML information.

In 2021, the service went out of business as users were not interested in using the service. People weren’t interested in using OpenBazaar because they didn’t want to pay with bitcoins, they didn’t mind providing KYC/AML information, the project wasn’t competitive, and the economic model wasn’t sustainable.

The future is in tokenization

The failure of OpenBazaar pointed out several facts. A functioning economy cannot be built on top of Bitcoin, and a new service cannot compete with the current strong players in the market just because it uses cryptocurrencies. Fortunately, technology development has continued to move forward and adoption is growing. The ideals of decentralization live on, things are just going in a different direction.

The biggest advantage of OpenBazaar was the ability to not provide KYC/AML information to third parties. Cardano is able to enable this through decentralized ID (DID). This will be implemented through the Atala PRISM project, which will be integrated into the new Lace wallet. If companies adopt the DID standard and start using it, they will not need to know the identity of their customers. Businesses don’t have to worry and protect user data from being hacked, and they will still be able to interact with their clients. If they need to get a delivery address, only the carrier of the goods will see it. Smart contracts can perform the same function that a moderator did in OpenBazaar, making the service more reliable and cheaper. Payments will be peer-to-peer.

Thanks to blockchain, new business models will emerge in which tokens will play an important role. Cardano works with tokens in the same way as native ADA coins, making it a suitable platform for tokenization.

New business models

The business of IT giants like Meta and Twitter is built on users creating content. Companies find out private information about users so they can insert targeted advertising into the content. People are slowly realizing this and they don’t like this model. That’s why many people block advertising. Services often force you to turn off blocking on their site.