I've once heard about decentralized alternatives to eBay and Amazon where you can buy/sell items online without middleman. OpenBazaar and Parcl are among several alternatives aiming to transform e-commerce. While they've gathered a lot of attention within their early days, it seems the concept of a "decentralized marketplace" is fading away as the industry shifts into "meme" coins and NFTs.
Are tightening regulations one of the reasons why decentralized marketplaces aren't taking off? Considering what happened to Silk Road in the past (although not truly-decentralized), it's likely such projects will remain a "niche" forever. Too bad because this had the potential to radically change e-commerce for the better.
Thoughts?
My thoughts is that those decentralized marketplaces are very difficult for them to actually exist and keep themselves online in the long term. Because decentralization in those decentralized apps is very difficult for administrators to keep.
For example, consider someone started to list some of their products in the marketplace and turns out those articles are illegal or against the laws of the country of one of the parties involved (the seller or the purchaser), in those cases the staff of the platform is supposed to be able to use their private cryptographic set of keys to delist those illegal items off the marketplace; but if they actually have that capability, then it means the marketplace was never decentralized in the first place. Right?
Now, let us talk about the opposite case, assuming those in charge of the platform actually kept it all as decentralized as possible and people can list whatever they want and they won't get banned or delisted, then it would be just matter of time before the platform will get in the spotlight of law enforcement agencies and get taken down.
At least, that is what I think it is actually going on with these kind of markets.