New version of P2P marketplace OpenBazaar enables crypto trading

Decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace OpenBazaar announced today the release of version 2.2.0, the most significant new feature is the ability to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Users can choose from 44 different cryptocurrencies with more to be added over time. Payment must be settled in whichever coin vendors have chosen for their OpenBazaar store, either Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Zcash.

OpenBazaar is entirely P2P and is not an exchange. The new feature doesn’t include an order book with the ability to choose a target price for buying or selling. The feature only allows users to trade cryptocurrencies directly with each other at market prices. It benefits from OpenBazaar’s main advantages; users trading cryptocurrencies on the platform will not need to pay any fees and they are not forced to reveal any identifying information.

The OpenBazaar team said:

“We’ve released this new feature with the goal of listening to the community about how they believe cryptocurrency trading on OpenBazaar can be improved. We plan to rapidly iterate as we receive feedback from users.”

This new version is considered a major release, with buying and selling cryptocurrencies as the biggest update. The update also includes opt-in analytics, and many optimizations and bug fixes, with more details to be found in the release notes below:

New Features

– The ability to buy and sell cryptocurrencies was added. The currencies can be sold at market rates.
– An opt-in analytics package was added. Users are able to choose to share non-identifying data with the development team. This will facilitate identifying bugs and improve the app. Users can start or stop sharing data at any time.

Improvements

– Norweigan, Polish, and Ukranian translations reached the 80% translated requirement and were added as options for the client.
– When viewing sales, unfunded orders will now be hidden by default, since you cannot take action on those orders, and they clutter up the list of orders. Users can still choose to view those orders.
– Listing card image loads will now cancel when the image card is no longer on the screen. This primarily improves the experience when changing pages in the search results or navigating away from a page of search results that hasn’t finished loading.
– Verified moderators are now lazy-loaded. This will speed up startup, and notify the user if the list of verified moderators changes while they are looking at information that will be affected by that change.
– Verified moderators are loaded from a Tor endpoint if the user is in Tor mode.

Bug Fixes

– Blockdozer changed their URL for viewing BCH transactions, the URL used when viewing details of transactions has been updated.
– An issue where the no valid moderators error would show an error at the same time as the no verified moderators message, and with the wrong formatting, was corrected.
– A problem where invalid mods would never stop loading was fixed.
– Error messages meant for only the purchase flow no longer appear in the settings/store tab.
– Some layout issues with moderator cards were corrected.
– In the settings/store tab, if a moderator assigned to your store has become invalid, now the only option is to de-select them.
– An unused memo parameter was removed from the purchase call.
– A minor layout issue was corrected in the transactions list.
– The bug where pages stats are changed to zero in the page tabs on the user page when the page settings are updated was fixed.
– A layout issue with verified moderators was fixed.
– Store pages will now open if one of the listings in them has an unrecognized currency value.