Topic: Whatever happened to decentralized marketplaces? (Read 429 times)

I'm talking about the Particl Marketplace which can be found here: https://particl.io/marketplace

A nice project with lots of potential. Unfortunately, the PART cryptocurrency isn't doing well on the market (price-wise). Struggling to reach a new ATH for quite some time. Demand is at its lowest. While the concept of a decentralized and censorship-resistant marketplace is great, I don't think it will ever compete with the likes of centralized alternatives such as eBay and Amazon. It will remain a niche, for those who're interested in trying out something new (particularly crypto and tech enthusiasts). People want convenience, so they will choose what's easier for them. Believe me, decentralized marketplaces are somewhat complex. Especially when they use a native cryptocurrency for handling network interactions (fees). Particl is also a privacy-oriented Blockchain, so expect government opposition in the long run.



Ethereum fees can be killer, will demotivate people from using it.
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Yeah. High fees on the ETH blockchain makes decentralized marketplaces unfeasible. But there's always the choice of running smart contracts on Layer-2 networks, or even standard L1 networks with higher transaction capacity (like Solana). The possibilities are endless. It's just that developers are afraid from the government. They don't want to make a truly-decentralized marketplace that would gather governments' attention. Otherwise, they could be penalized in the long run. The Silk Road seizure put an end to this industry. At least we know Blockchain works for e-commerce.

Because, you have to pay taxes and there is an owner. For example ebay has an owner, which can ban you, or just make you not seen, shadowban you, or they can force you to drop your prices, amazon is known to just copy very good selling products, make it themselves, sell it for that price, and ban the original owner of it from the stores, it's been done a million times already and you just accept that when you start a shop on amazon basically, or just sell your stuff.

Decentralized has none of that, we are talking about no owners or nothing, we are talking about making something quite strong and very powerful which is going to be just having nobody with full powers who can do whatever they please, lack of this "CEO" or whatever, is the reason why this is so different.

Which Parcl are we talking about? Mind giving link? I know of one which is about speculating on real estate prices, not a decentralized marketplace.


Ethereum fees can be killer, will demotivate people from using it.

In what way is "the internet" itself not a decentralised marketplace?

Anyone can fire up a shop, tell search engine spiders about it, advertise it far and wide.

If you argue that shops might get lost among the plethora of other types of site on "the internet" doesn't that simply speak to the vastness of this amazing decentralised marketplace itself, that it is a marketplace not merely of physical things, nor even those plus digitally virtualised things, but even pure ideas and ideation?

Sure the inventory of "products" available is vast, but if we account I2P and Tor etc as part of "the internet" we can evade such potential centralisations as "it all depends on DNS servers!"

So in what way is "the internet" not itself a decentralised marketplace?

-MarkM-

Even if intentions are good, that doesn't mean someone won't use it for bad things. Decentralization is a double-edged sword. Unlike centralized marketplaces, you can't enforce regulatory action on decentralized alternatives. I guess that's why the general public is afraid of going all in decentralized marketplaces. It's more convenient and safer to use a centralized marketplace (eBay, Amazon) that's regulatory-compliant.

Expect decentralized alternatives to remain a niche for as long as they live. At least we have a choice. Who knows what surprises we'll find in the future?

Exactly, crypto is more valuable at marketplace right now despite the fact that it has a volatile movement when bear market rule over.
Patience can be tested when every trader encounter the unpredictable market value, because only prediction is our key to handle emotions when crucial situation within market challenges.
Same with my hardships of holding erc20 coins that never recover since 2018 up to now, I just hope so that it will wake up one day.

Wise decisions will results in gigantic profits. The value of market is based on the seasons available, either bear or bull season. We have cheaper stocks in marketplace but it doesn't give guaranteed they will pump, we would become very precise to acknowledge how we can be humbling the things to get enrolled with. The marketplace is widen for every trader and top whales to come and engaged in crypto activities. That's probably understandable by most of these traders.

Decentralization of cryptocurrency has been taking time to become massive adoption and as time keeps on changing traders only value it because of market behavior. We can't see it's impact to normal daily consumption, so people would use it for online payments or to purchase basic commodities.
Maybe in times of small cheaper btc, people would have the options to use btc for daily consumption but these days I believed it's not wise idea using btc for some unworthy expense.

Op that part of the bitcoin to buy and sell things online is no more visible and it has removed from the bitcoiners and the only thing that exists now is the investment aspect of it and everyone is going into investment and not to buy things and even the people that accept bitcoin in their stores are just few in the cities and for the community level none. And eBay and Amazon are already centralized marketplaces so nothing that happens there would be as decentralized again. And yes as you said, it has been long that decentralized system in the cryptocurrency has been fading away because of their high cost of transaction and low price rate for selling.

Once the decentralized exchanges have review their rates then they will bounce back again and people will be using them like their counterparts.

They are useful, so I won't say that they are fading but it's just that they are not heavily promoted and then there are more projects under the meme coins because they are more easier to create. They are always in the trend because there is always a meme that are created in the internet.

This is why we think the focus is mostly on them but trust me it isn't because most of them are nothing but only just a money grab. Silk Road is a kind of black market and it's different from the two decentralized marketplaces you mentioned there whose intentions are only clean/good. So I don't think that was one of the cause of what you think their "fade away".

Exactly. Developers must stay anonymous if they really want to protect decentralization + censorship-resistance. The problem is that most investors won't trust a project without publicly-known developers. Especially VCs and institutional investors. They'll believe it's a scam.

It's this reason why most crypto projects reveal the true identities of their creator. This is bad because it makes it easier for governments to prosecute developers when they find something they don't like (like what happened with the Tornado.Cash mixer). We have Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin, Cardano's Charles Hoskinson, Polkadot's Gavin Wood, etc. Only a small portion of crypto projects were developed by an anonymous person (or a group of people). Bitcoin's founder is unknown, but most developers from the Bitcoin Core project are known to the public. I guess we'll never be able to experience true censorship-resistance.

As I've stated before, decentralized marketplaces will remain a niche to those who actually care about their privacy or want to circumvent government restrictions. The majority will keep using centralized marketplaces (eBay, Amazon) out of convenience. At least, we have a choice.

Its still kinda happening but only with some nfts product but not in some sort of byproduct or real world stuff. Decentralized is quite broad that some businessman afraid to venture (non crypto related) but for the sake of crypto we can say its fully integrated as we fan see with a lot of decentralized nft marketplace.

Before I could spot some platform that trying to win or make this sucessful but they are gone now maybe due to non demand on this particular space or probably they still prefer the centralized private company.

If the price isn't cheaper than Amazon or eBay, and the site don't have good amount money to advertise their sites, no one will find the marketplaces and didn't even interested to use it.

There's, they can use smart contract.

The buyer need to confirm if he received the right product, then the funds will be automatically transferred to the seller. In case if the seller send a fake product, the funds that still locked can be retrieved to the buyer.

I think their platform is also the main cause of why people are being pushed away because of some security concerns, they're always been targeted by hackers. It's not a joke when a platform has been hacked with millions of dollars in crypto that has been stolen by the hackers. And with the confidence of many despite being optimistic about the decentralization matters including these marketplaces, if there's a security concern, no one would like to get involved with that if the eyes of the hackers are all over them.

It has practical difficulties to implement in the large scale and that's probably why it hasn't took off as expected and we know the attention keep shifting towards the trend changes so everyone forget about it. Companies may still trying to balance the decentralised system in the marketplace but it's still a long way to go.

It's such a sad state tht it's been a long time since we forgot about the use cases or even what the project has to offer as people are falling for hype and just considering where it's listed and how it's performing without looking at what the coin has to offer on a longer run. People have lost it completely and soon they will even forget why crypto was introduced and what's the actual reason why crypto and Bitcoin came in existence. I think best market will the period when they will understand all these things.

While the ideas that we've first heard and thought about decentralized marketplaces were so good. Applying them to the real world doesn't seem to fit the convenience that we all want. As some are still existing, we don't know if the actual use case of them will be patronized by most people on this market. As what we can see, this market is more of the trading of assets(cryptos) than of the use cases. We're too optimistic about usecases before but we don't know where they're heading now.

After what SEC write to Uniswap founder about their protocols and their offense, I think I now understand why some of the founders of platforms that are decentralized always goes anonymous  and don't want to be known by the public, this is some of the reason I thought so too. The regulations are quite not friendly again, now imagine if someone is out there trying to develop something much better than Uniswap using the exchange as a prototype or as a sample for future design since it's open source.

To be honest, we can't have decentralization as we want, when government smells some little things they don't like or seeing that a place is becoming bigger beyond their control, they will put that place in other with their tight regulations and also makes sure the are been press charge. It's even like SEC loves places that involves money and yet you wouldn't see where the money they collected goes to, all they understand is sue and sue but can't build anything better for people.

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.

let's make it more simple. People buy goods from centralized market and they were making money from crypto market. Is there a need for decentralized market in this case? It was a crap, people can make any transaction in the centralized market and it's even faster than decentralized market.
Im still questioning myself. Why do we need it now? People are making it simply now. Decentralized market is just making it even more complicated and it was totally contradicted with what people need these days. No doubt that if dex market is slowly vanished.

I don't think we are ready and the technology far enough for such market to have success. The current centralized marketplace provides much more benefits, discounts and safe place to trade and return. An open and fee marketplace would be overwhelmed by fake products, sellers and reviews. There would be no safe way of exchanging or returning products. The centralized market do make it easy for the suppliers and customers while decentralized market may mean suppliers need to be tech friendly to get listed. A good supplier would rather focus on decreasing cost of production and maintaining the quality rather than worrying about being listed.

That's the problem. Projects with a promising vision often fail due to lack of community support. The crypto industry these days is focused on hype instead of utility. I guess decentralized marketplaces will remain a niche for the tech/privacy inclined. In countries where authoritarianism restricts freedom, decentralized marketplaces does wonders. From what I've seen, most of the decentralized marketplaces have their own software/network protocol. I haven't seen a marketplace based on smart contracts yet. Would you imagine developers doing something like this? If they launch a decentralized marketplace on the Ethereum blockchain, it will be truly-unstoppable.

Of course, governments will sanction it (especially the US government). But that won't be the end of everything. The same way Tornado.Cash survived (despite the sanctions), the same way will happen with a decentralized marketplace based on smart contracts. I sure hope we don't see a Silk Road 4.0 in the future.

It will be difficult for such system to reach some countries because, there are some countries who don't allow decentralized currency for their exchange of goods and services and for your products to sell very well you can make the two payments system available for your customers to use fiat and decentralized currency to buy and sell all those products.

 Those that are not use to Amazon will not even bother to know if the app is a good one because, many people have experienced so many negatives things from some new app that made them to loss their money to scammers.

Syscoin still alive. that's cool. BitBay used to be popular in the forum and they boast their decentralized marketplace too but now i can see their coin is not in any market anymore. i still can see the marketplace is alive though only the barter and p2p that has products on it.

there's never something like this with a huge community using the marketplace. if there is a community that might make a decentralized marketplace work, it is probably doge community.

Good-old Syscoin. Never thought it had a decentralized marketplace of its own. I guess the team didn't advertise the feature so much. With tokens and NFTs gaining traction, it's hard to believe single-purpose Blockchains will rise all the way to glory (except Bitcoin, and Dogecoin). I'm talking about chains without smart contract features. These days it's all about token-based "meme" coins and NFTs. People won't care about decentralized marketplaces if it doesn't make them money in the short term. They're interested in getting rich quick. Not in the tech itself.

I sure hope existing decentralized marketplaces don't go away due to low popularity. We need as many alternatives to centralized marketplaces as possible. In countries where authoritarianism limits freedom, decentralized marketplaces' censorship-resistance does wonders. Not everyone can get access to eBay or Amazon, though. The future is filled with uncertainty, so we can only hope for the best.

Syscoin was originally a decentralized marketplace and had a CLI implementation called Blockmarket but it just wouldn't scale. They have changed and bolted on to their tech so much since then that it's a mess that's trying to push itself as a Bitcoin L2 now.

Maybe the industry is shifting into memecoins but I doubt it’s shifting into NFTs. NFT had its season and it’s gone.

I think the reason why it seems so is because there’s no much promotion for it. Imagine if there was a hype saying that cryptocurrencies were great for buying at online stores, we will see a lot of movements wherein people would even purchase just to join the trend. But what’s rather trending is how you can make profit from cryptocurrencies by hoarding them.

Convenience goes above all else. As long as people are able to buy/sell items without hassles, nothing else matters. Decentralization is only a subject of interest to those who're concerned about government censorship/suppression. In countries where freedom is limited (usually in authoritarian countries), decentralized alternatives to eBay and Amazon does wonders.

It was surprising for me to read that OpenBazaar closed its servers 3 years ago. Wasn't it based on P2P tech? If not, then OpenBazaar isn't as decentralized as I've once thought it would be. With investors shifting their focus away from utilitarian projects, it's hard to imagine decentralized marketplaces will take off anytime soon. At least, the idea is there. The future can't be predicted, so lets hope for the best.

I don't really know what the decentralised E-Commerce means! There has to be a seller who would source the product from someone and sell it through the marketplace. It's not always possible that the manufacturer itself sells the product through such marketplaces. So not sure how would you remove the middle man from this game!

Also e-commerce cannot happen in anonymity. The receiver will have to inform necessary details in order to receive the product. I don't think that decentralized market places can exist.

I work for a E-commerce/quick commerce giant and trust me there is no way we can decentralise ecommerce or marketplace as it can't run without involvement of third part be it from supply chain end or logistics end or last mile we need third party to increase the reach else the cost involved in fulfillment of one order will be more than the actual selling price itself hence I would say it's a bad idea.

Decentralized market is not possible People can easily take services to themselves from apps like amazon to buy and sell products but decentralized market is not controlled by anyone. Creating a decentralized marketplace would be a huge problem. More than a decade after bitcoin was created, there is no reason for us to be buying and selling digital currencies through a centralized operator. Decentralized exchanges offer all the tools and features found in centralized platforms but without the need for an intermediary or guardian.

Perhaps it’s because they know that when it’s decentralized, it’s not as user-friendly as exchanges. I think they need to find ways to simplify the user experience and we know that it’s not yet accessible to a broader audience due to adoption. And the major issue is addressing regulatory concerns. If decentralization doesn’t work out with regulators, then frameworks that promote innovation without compromising safety can’t be established. So, regulations have a big impact on the growth and adoption of decentralized marketplaces. Regulatory clarity is essential for these marketplaces to operate effectively. The lack of clear regulations could lead to uncertainty and risk, deterring some users and investors.

It seems Parcl is operational and continuing its services, unlike OpenBazaar which announced the closure of its servers in January 2021.

If you are referring to a decentralized marketplace on a blockchain then Opensea is one of the biggest examples. I do not think it will be possible to create a decentralized marketplace like eBay or Amazon. Blockchain can only help the cryptocurrency industry and cannot replace the traditional industries. Although e-commerce giants can use private blockchain to track shipments I do not think there is a need to replace it completely. The biggest issue would be the adoption of such a marketplace when you can buy products from these companies by buying their coupon in a coupon marketplace like Bitrefill.

How is a decentralized marketplace possible? I mean I know it’s possible if the product your are buying is in the hands of just another person but I don’t think we can buy directly from a factory or wherever a product is being sold. Some products are manufactured and aren’t really interested in the merchandise aspect making it necessary for third parties to come and handle that side of business.

Besides it might be impossible considering apps like amazon requires full contact details when they are delivering straight to your house.

i tried opening the openbazaar, the page is just openbazaar 3.0 - openbazaar 3.0 - coming soon i once had this installed on my laptop. seem not getting enough support.

transaction fee is probably another factor that made it not very possible.  nothing forces people to use a decentralized marketplace i guess and the convenience of using fiat on e-commerce sites is getting easier too.  and then scammers will be populating the platform.

It's definitely a factor, but not really. It's simply the fact that usage has always been really small, and people are simply just using the likes of eBay instead. Truth be told, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are mostly held as investments today, rather than for payments.

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?