Hello, I really like this project but have some questions:
1. You have listed many job positions but it is still hard to distinguish, at least for me, how many active coders are working on this project?
2. Any plans to market the product to a broader audience if so when we can expect that (don't see this on the road map)?
3. What do you think about your competition and why do you think your solution will win? I am mainly asking about ZCoin which already got a lot of recognition and has decentralized marked on their road map but feel free to also comment briefly on any other projects.
4. Is this project fully open source?
Yes it's open source. However on the Python Markets/Halo client we change variable names to prevent easy cloning. Our decentralized markets exist. Other projects only have it on their roadmap as you have said. Also our markets are the best because we don't use arbitration. Arbitration on an anonymous crypto is a bad idea. They don't have vested interest and their judgement will be a coin toss causing loss for users, they can also collude and steal escrows or escrow their own deals by luck, and crypto is non-reversible.
Thus we have the tried and tested double deposit escrow AKA unbreakable contracts where both parties place a deposit of some size and both lose if one of them tries to cheat the deal. It's a "Halo handshake" like a self insured escrow. This is a huge feature because it can really benefit any industry (what industry doesn't benefit from an unbreakable contract)
We do market this however we are still building the team. Right now there is a lot of people helping to improve our marketing.
We have a bounty list and most of them are for marketing. However I'm the only coder who works on the core Markets Client (I started working on this 4 years ago in BitHalo). We have another coder who does JavaScript and some of the side projects like the poker site, the web wallet, the block explorer.
And then we have a couple volunteer coders who are doing things like the Bitmessage relay. And we also have one more coder who has worked on a new UI for QT and a dedicated Mac Wallet that isn't Wine.