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OpenBazaar marketplace says it’s set to ‘grow again from the ashes’

After shutting down in 2020 due to financial issues and poor user growth, the decentralized marketplace appears set to rise again.

The decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar appears set for a comeback after it was shut down over two years ago, according to a number of social media and GitHub updates.

A GitHub repository on the collaborative software development site shows progress as recent as April 12 on building a new version of the marketplace which was shut down in 2020.

Brian Hoffman, the former project lead at OpenBazaar and CEO of OB1 — the for-profit company which developed its software — tweeted on April 9 of the progress made on a “new” version of the marketplace saying it is “getting more interesting by the day.”

In the replies, Hoffman was asked how the marketplace would be different this timegiven that due to financial issues and poor user growth, OpenBazaar was forced to shut down.

Hoffman replied speaking of “freedom of exploration” and inferred that outside influence had contributed to its initial downfall.

The first hints that OpenBazaar would be launching a comeback came in a tweet from Hoffman on March 28, where he linked OpenBazaar’s GitHub page that showed he’d been working on a new version of the marketplace in the programming language Rust.

Just hours later OpenBazaar’s official account also posted a Tweet, which said “it is now time to grow again from the ashes,” and that “work has begun.”

Adding to the evidence that the marketplace appears likely to relaunch, the OpenBazaar website currently bears the message “openbazaar 3.0 – coming soon.”

Related: 5 programming languages to learn for AI development

After the exchange had shut down in 2020, Hoffman tweeted that a future iteration of OpenBazaar would require more independence from OB1, but provided no more information about how this might work.

OpenBazaar has been hailed as the decentralized eBay alternative and was first launched back in 2014. It allowed users to interact directly with each other to make transactions using Bitcoin (BTC).

The marketplace initially had the name “DarkMarket,” but changed it to OpenBazaar following community input in an attempt to improve its public image.

Cointelegraph contacted Hoffman and OpenBazaar for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Hodler’s Digest, April 2-8: BTC white paper hidden on macOS, Binance loses AUS license and DOGE news

OpenBazaar marketplace says it’s set to ‘grow again from the ashes’

After shutting down in 2020 due to financial issues and poor user growth, the decentralized marketplace appears set to rise again.

The decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar appears set for a comeback after it was shut down over two years ago, according to a number of social media and GitHub updates.

A GitHub repository on the collaborative software development site shows progress as recent as April 12 on building a new version of the marketplace, which was shut down in 2020.

Brian Hoffman, the former project lead at OpenBazaar and CEO of OB1 — the for-profit company that developed its software — tweeted on April 9 of the progress made on a “new” version of the marketplace, saying it is “getting more interesting by the day.”

In the replies, Hoffman was asked how the marketplace would be different this time, given that OpenBazaar was previously forced to shut down due to financial issues and poor user growth.

Hoffman replied speaking of “freedom of exploration” and inferred that outside influence had contributed to its initial downfall.

The first hints that OpenBazaar would be launching a comeback came in a tweet from Hoffman on March 28, where he linked OpenBazaar’s GitHub page that showed he’d been working on a new version of the marketplace using the programming language Rust.

Just hours later OpenBazaar’s official account also posted a tweet saying that “it is now time to grow again from the ashes,” and that “work has begun.”

Adding to the evidence that the marketplace appears likely to relaunch, the OpenBazaar website currently bears the message “openbazaar 3.0 – coming soon.”

Related: 5 programming languages to learn for AI development

After the exchange had shut down in 2020, Hoffman tweeted that a future iteration of OpenBazaar would require more independence from OB1, but provided no more information about how this might work.

Hailed as a decentralized eBay alternative, OpenBazaar was first launched back in 2014. It allowed users to interact directly with each other to make transactions using Bitcoin (BTC).

The marketplace initially had the name “DarkMarket,” but changed it to OpenBazaar following community input in an attempt to improve its public image.

Cointelegraph contacted Hoffman and OpenBazaar for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Hodler’s Digest, April 2-8: BTC white paper hidden on macOS, Binance loses AUS license and DOGE news

Bitcoin Ordinals community debates fix after inscription validation bug

Currently, over two-thirds of voters on a Twitter poll said the missed inscriptions should be added at a later date instead of there being a retroactive reshuffling.

A few solutions are being discussed to fix a code bug found in the Bitcoin (BTC)-native Ordinals protocol that has prevented over 1,200 inscriptions from being validated.

While nearly every member of the Ordinals community agrees that these inscription requests should be reincluded, the community is debating whether they should be added retroactively or not.

The bug came from the indexer function of the protocol only counting inscriptions that were in the first input of a transaction submitted up to and including version 0.5.1 of the protocol.

One prominent Ordinals member known on Twitter as “Leonidas.og” summarized the pros and cons of each solution in an April 10 tweet, coming a few days after the issue was first made public on April 5 by the GitHub user “veryordinally.”

The first solution involves selecting a block height to retroactively index the so-called “orphan” inscriptions from inscription number 420,285 onwards, which is roughly where the first orphan inscription was identified.

“This feels like the ‘purist’ solution because it means the ordinals protocol would correctly match the logical ordering on-chain,” Leonidas.og explained, despite acknowledging that the reshuffling “may cause other complications.”

The alternative is to not change inscription numbers that have already been validated and to pick a block height to add these orphan inscriptions in at some time in the future, Leonidas.og explained:

“This would not change any existing inscription numbers so the ~1,200 orphans would not be assigned inscription numbers officially in the protocol. It would be up to the market to value them as ‘misprints’ or not.”

Another Ordinals GitHub community member, “Yilak,” argued in favor of not changing up the order because only a fraction of inscription owners have been impacted.

Related: Bitcoin Ordinals daily inscriptions surge due to ‘BRC-20 tokens’

At the time of writing, 67.5% of 1,266 voters are in favor of not changing the inscription numbers, according to a Twitter poll created by Leonidas.og.

On April 8, the number of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions surpassed 1 million, according to data from the crypto analytics platform Dune. It came just days after daily new inscriptions hit a record of over 76,300 on April 4.

Ordinals are considered to be digital artifacts on the Bitcoin network, similar to nonfungible tokens. They can compromise of images, PDFs, video or audio formats.

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