Openbazaar Raises $5M from Investors Including Bitmain

On Tuesday, March 13, OB1, the company building the cryptocurrency-centric marketplace Openbazaar, has announced it has raised $5 million USD in a recent series A funding round. According to the startup, Omers Ventures and Bitmain Technologies were the lead investors in the funding round for the e-commerce marketplace.
Openbazaar is an open source project that has built a platform that facilitates cryptocurrency infused e-commerce transactions. OB1 has launched the Openbazaar platform with its first release back in April of 2016. Since then the protocol has added many additions like a marketplace wallet, Tor integration, and enabling purchases with bitcoin cash and zcash. Over the past few years, over $4 million in venture capital has been injected into the project. Now, this week OB1 reveals it has raised another $5 million from prior investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and the Digital Currency Group. Moreover, this series funding was led by Omers Ventures and the mining giant Bitmain Technologies.

OB1’s CEO Brian Hoffman says the team is pleased to partner with Omers and Bitmain and hopes the two large firms will help bolster “the future of free trade on the Internet worldwide.” Hoffman explains during the announcement:
Trading Expansion and an Openbazaar Mobile Platform
The company says it plans to continue expanding Openbazaar in order to give users more flexibility to buy and sell goods in a decentralized manner. This year the OB1 development team plans to release a mobile version of Openbazaar and offer new ways to trade in a peer-to-peer fashion.

“Such as making requests and buying and selling cryptocurrencies,” explains the company. “OB1 is also expanding the services it offers to users on OpenBazaar, such as the Verified Moderators program, released this week.”

The funding news follows the development teams recent multi-currency integration and the increase of 25,000 Openbazaar nodes. Alongside the recent announcement of the Openbazaar token (OBT) which will be based on the ethereum blockchain and aims to process smart contracts within the marketplace environment.