OpenBazaar Escapes Bankruptcy Thanks To Donations: Report

OpenBazaar escapes bankruptcy thanks to the donations of the crypto community but one single donation has provided the marketplace with three months of funding as we are reading more in today’s cryptonews.

OpenBazaar recently announced plans to shut down the crypto-based marketplace but asked the community for donations to try and stay afloat. Now, OpenBazaar escapes bankruptcy and will operate until 2021 thanks to the donations made. The company is however seeking more donations. Right after the announcement, the company got one donation which will allow it to continue operating for one year.

BREAKING NEWS!

An anonymous donor has agreed to cover the costs to run OpenBazaar infrastructure through at least the end of the year. pic.twitter.com/VwSz9g27sa

— OpenBazaar (@openbazaar) September 27, 2020

OpenBazaar is a decentralized Amazon competitor that allows individuals to purchase and sell goods using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It was founded back in 2014 and was considered as a highly promising  BTC application. However, the platform failed to attract users in huge amounts and then the parent company of the project OB1 tried to shift the focus to a mobile marketplace app called Haven in 2019 but this app failed to gain users as well:

“Unfortunately, we simply haven’t achieved the level of user growth and adoption required to build a sustainable business off serving OpenBazaar/Haven users.”

So far Ethereum users have donated 70% of the coins coming into the OpenBazaar project. Followed by Bitcoin Cash and Zcash. pic.twitter.com/EAnDza9sdj

— OpenBazaar (@openbazaar) September 29, 2020

The company was saved from bankruptcy with one donation. OB1 didn’t reveal the size of the donation but based on the block explorer records, it has received about $12,000 worth of crypto over the past two months. The donated coins include Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Zcash. Though the parent company raised enough to cover the costs for the next three months, it is still asking for donations:

 “2021 will come soon enough. Please consider donating so that we can continue supporting free trade.”

Statistics suggested that OpenBazaar handles more than $6000 in sales per month. The fees from those sales are not enough to fund the developers and node operators that support the platform. It is not clear whether this marketplace will survive in 2021. OB1 believes that the next phase of the protocol will unlock explosive user adoption but the critics argue that the company should not seek any more funding for a service that the users are not interested in. The project also has a lot of competition on the market from other decentralized marketplaces such as Origin Protocol and PArticl as well as the darknet marketplaces.