Imagine a webstore where products and services are listed directly on the blockchain, with verified transfers, reputations, and decentralized moderation by the community. If you have crypto, you can buy directly from sellers. If you are a seller, you can take your offerings to the crypto audience.

Now, imagine expanding this marketplace into your own direction. Like blockchain, Hive Open Market provides an open protocol which people can then find their own varied and myriad use cases for. It can be customized and built upon, no permission needed.

Hive Open Market - an open protocol for a blockchain marketplace

The protocol provides the specifications of the marketplace. Here is a quick overview.

Products/services are published on-chain as regular posts. This allows adding pictures, videos and any other description, as well as having comments underneath. Frontends can display the product post in the usual way, with an additional section to show the product-specific information such as price, available quantity and so on. A Buy button can be shown directly in that section.

Buyers click the Buy button to make a specially-formatted transfer to purchase a specific product. Transfers and subscriptions (recurrent transfers) are on-chain and fully controlled by the buyer.

After making a purchase, buyers can leave a review. The review is linked to the purchase transfer and appears as a specially-formatted comment under the product post.

Sellers list their products/services by publishing a specially-formatted post. All product posts appear on the seller account’s individual webstore. Tags help categorize the product post so it is findable on larger aggregated webstores. Products considered by stakeholders as useful/beneficial have the chance to be upvoted and thus stand out. This is one pathway for sellers to become noticed. Another pathway is for sellers to have on-chain activity beyond only the marketplace, for example by creating connections and becoming followed. To this end, sellers can use on-chain posting and interaction for their marketing activities.

The trustworthiness of sellers and reviewers can be partially evaluated by looking at their on-chain history. This includes their social activity, financial activity, reputation, stake, L2 activity, and so on.

For sellers one doesn’t know and trust, on-chain escrow transfers can be utilized. In this case, there is an escrow agent who has the authority to release or to return funds, but can’t misappropriate funds. This provides an opportunity for highly trusted and connected individuals to offer their services as an escrow agent.

Moderation happens by stakeholders upvoting or downvoting product posts. This is an established way which has been operating for several years in regards to regular content posts. Products/services that stakeholders sufficiently downvote become hidden by default or can be completely removed from frontends. Decentralized lists provide further and additional mechanisms for preventing interactions with posts or accounts that are on a list.

Integration with the Hive ecosystem and other ecosystems

Since it uses native Hive operations such as posts, transfers, escrow transfers, upvotes/downvotes, and since it uses established flows and practices, the protocol readily integrates with other parts of the Hive ecosystem that also use native processes.

One example of this is on-chain communities. A community has its own moderation and can decide which products to allow. Communities can have their own webstore page. Additional use cases include sellers running their own community, topical communities with pre-vetted or curated products, and so on.

Integration with other ecosystems becomes easier as well. One way of doing this is through bridges. This enables the buyer to pay in their preferred cryptocurrency and the seller to receive the payment in their preferred cryptocurrency (depending on what the bridge provides). This can appeal to audiences that are looking for more use cases for their cryptocurrency.

Benefits

The buyer and seller benefit from no fees and from the decentralization experience (true account ownership, no lock-in or unfavourable terms set by a single entity). This comes at the cost of learning how to operate in the blockchain space.

The Hive ecosystem benefits from demonstrating its advantages and unique possibilities as a space to build on, as well as from providing new use cases for the HBD stablecoin. Exchanging HBD between accounts in the economy without having to sell it externally becomes more feasible. It also gives a new use case for burning HIVE/HBD for post promotion (e.g. to make one’s product come on top in a product category), and provides opportunities for the introduction of other sinks. For developing the marketplace, no costs are planned at the moment and it is suggested we take it a step at a time and carefully consider how to go about potential future development, if any.

Other ecosystems benefit from new use cases for their cryptocurrency. (Since this is an open protocol, frontends using it can be branded in any desired way.) Costs for this are the development of useful bridges, and the conversion fees when using them.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is live

To give a concrete experience of such an on-chain marketplace, an MVP was created and can already be used. It includes only a few, bare minimum functionalities:

Listing a product/service (API endpoint)
Making a one-time purchase (API endpoint)
Subscribing to a service (recurrent transfer) (API endpoint)

Reviews, escrow and so on are not yet implemented, so there are no guarantees whatsoever that you will receive anything you pay for. So it is at the stage of simply testing out and playing around.

The PeakD frontend has made a first simple integration. Here is an example webstore page of a seller:

IMPORTANT:

At this time, if you test the marketplace, we suggest purchasing only from accounts that you completely trust to return your money if you don’t receive what you expected. And for products for which you don’t mind your purchase being visible on-chain.

Source code repositories: https://gitlab.com/hive-open-market

Your feedback is appreciated

The intention was to get something quick out and let the community play with it. Do you see potential in having an on-chain marketplace? What would you like to see from it? Please share your thoughts.

There are many aspects and potential developments that are left out of this initial intro post. One big subject is how to preserve privacy. Such topics can be discussed if there is interest in the concept.

Technical spec

A product is a regular post/comment with a json_metadata field such as the following:

{
  "content_type": "product",
  "version": 0.1,
  "currency": "HIVE:HBD",
  "price": 25,
  "subscription": 1,
  "subscription_recurrence": 730,
  "status": 1,
  "tags": ["hosting", "linux", "managed"]
}

Where:
content_type specifies the type of content on the blockchain. To keep the system simpler, both products and services have the content_type “product”.
version refers to the protocol version.
currency specifies which currency the price is in, using the format CHAIN:TICKER.
price shows the price in the above currency.
subscription specifies whether this will be a one-time or a subscription (recurring) payment.
subscription_recurrence specifies the frequency of the recurring payment in hours. For example, 730 means that a recurring payment will be executed every 730 hours (approximately one month).
status shows the status of the product/service. 1 = active, 2 = inactive, 3 = out of stock.

A purchase is a regular transfer or recurrent_transfer with a memo field such as the following:

{
  "product": "author/permlink", 
  "quantity": 1,
  "custom": {"test": "This is a test"}
}

Fields:
product (str): the author and permlink of the product post.
quantity (int): how many units of the product are being paid for.
custom (str | json): any arbitrary text or JSON value. Optional.

Hi, Hive account@borislavzlatanov and Hive account@peakd (Hive account@jarvie], there are still some major bugs.
What if I don´t want that a new item is a first layer post on peakd? Would be better if it is a comment.
If I update the price, a new item is generated 😟.
And how to delete / unlist an item or a duplication from the store?

Hi Hive account@stayoutoftherz , it looks like you created two separate blockchain posts (two separate permlinks):

To update an existing blockchain post or comment, you have to specify the same permlink and then the chain will update the post with that permlink.

You can remove the duplicate store product by changing its status field in the json_metadata. Submit the post with the full json_metadata but change that field so it's "status": 2, i.e. inactive (as per the protocol documentation in this post). Similarly, make the price field to what you want.

It also works with comments. You can publish either a post or a comment and it will pick it up as a product, as long as the json_metadata is right.

It's a bit of a hassle currently since there is no UI support to make this easier, but hopefully it's coming soon.

Oh, my bad, I didn't see that there is now a UI page for listing a product. So yes, there might be some bugs still. If you want to not wait for them to be fixed, you can follow the instructions from my above comment to manually edit the products yourself.

No clue how to change the status field in the json_metadata. How to access that?

If you don't know, then probably better to wait for the UI bugs to be fixed and do it from there.

Nice one dere 🤝👍

Decentralized moderation says, hopefully it won't be like DHF which is supposed to be decentralized but more seems like it serves to bleed the Hive project dry extracting value from it, those decentralized moderators should watch that those projects that take out money should meet deadlines, but nothing, instead there is a kind of favoritism voting among a small circle of beneficiaries, large events funded by DHF that only seem to serve only for a few little ones to gather to reinforce their biases, their bubble, outside that little circle nothing or very few know that those events happened, and that's only taking into account the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem, and outside that ecosystem even worse it's like something non-existent, and yet they do that tremendous spending of the DHF treasury, and all that in times of relative crisis in the crypto world. So in this decentralized market within hive that it mentions, and putting a "decentralized moderation by the community", it seems more like a simple title that simply again a few will decide on the moderation over what is published, they won't listen to the community, not because in something the words "decentralized by the community" mean that it will be so.

Moderacion descentralizada dice, ojala no sea como DHF que se supone es descentralizado pero mas parece que sirve para desangrar el proyecto de Hive extrayedo valor de el, esos moderadores descentralizados deberian vigilar que esos proyectos que sacan plata deberian cumplir con tiempos, pero nada, en cambio hay una especie de votacion de faburitismo entre un pequeño circulo de beneficiarios, eventos grandes financiados por DHF que solo parecen servir solo para que unos cuantitos se reunan a reforsar sus sesgos, su burbuja, fuera de ese circulito nada o muy pocos saben que hubo esos eventos, y eso solo tomando en cuenta el ecosistema Bitcoin y crypto, y fuera de ese ecosistema peor todavia es como algo inexistente,y sin embargo se hace esa tremenda gastadera de la tesoreria DHF,y todo eso en tiempos de relativa crisis en el mundo cripto. Entonces en este mercado descentralizado dentro de hive que menciona, y poner una "moderacion descentralizada por la comunidad",parece mas un simple titulo que simplemente de nuevo unos cuantos descidiran sobre la moderacion sobre lo que se publica, no escucharan a la comunidad, no porque en algo este las palabras "descentralizada por la comunidad" significa que vaya a serlo

I also think the DHF has very substantial problems and could work far better if stakeholders do a bit of a push. By decentralized moderation by the community, it was not meant to use the DHF as a model for how to moderate this marketplace but rather to use the idea of upvoting and downvoting of posts. It has its issues too, but overall it seems to me to work well enough to catch highly problematic products. In other words, instead of having a single entity that decides which products will be prohibited, the community as a whole can downvote product posts and when there is sufficient downvoting, a given product post won't be shown. Does it make sense?

[...] we suggest purchasing only from accounts that you completely trust [...]

No offence, but what's the point of web3 if it still relies on trust?
How do you plan to fix this going forward?

It was mentioned in the post that only a bare minimum first version was released, don't know if you saw that. This first version is for testing purposes more than anything and it needs such a disclaimer.

It is planned to add features like escrow, reviews and so on, which will add protective layers for the buyer and alleviate the need to trust the seller.

I'm not super familiar with escrow operations. Do these give you all that is needed to build trustless platform on Hive? If I understand it correctly it still requires 3rd party agent for arbitrage.
AFAIK you'd normally build such a platform using smart contracts, but Hive doesn't have them.

The escrow operation uses a 3rd-party agent but the agent doesn't hold and can't steal the funds. The blockchain itself holds the funds and the agent can release the payment or issue a refund. You can read more here.

So instead of the smart contract holding the funds, with the built-in escrow the chain itself takes care of it.

I looked at the post by Hive account@paolobeneforti and the image does not show up. I checked in beta peakd too and you only get the image on the list of posts. Apart from that I think it's a great idea.

!BEER

I just tried to list one of my artworks on the Peakd shop. @paolobeneforti/windy-watercolor-on-paper

Do you see the "Buy" button active?

Yes, on your own Store page: @paolobeneforti/shop

Thx Boris. The "Buy" button seems inactive though. I guess it's a bug of the beta version. Great feature, anyway

Should be working now. :)

Fantastic! I can't wait to use it to sell my illustrations! ❤️

Looking forward to seeing them. :)

This looks awesome, hoping it goes into live production!

Thanks for the feedback, it really helps. Hopefully it will soon be live in production, and on multiple frontends.

Would you be interested in buying or selling things via such a marketplace?

Interested.. sure why not! :)
These days the amount of scamming going on within Ebay is painful, my world is crying out for a new 'clean' buy/sell site. Doesnt matter that some regions may be under represented at the start, if the platform is solid and reliable it will grow!

This is something we have been working on as well. Specs looks promising... Here is what extra things we are looking for, wonder if you guys consider implementing?!

Utilizing Hive escrow operations for HIVE/HBD tokens is must
Utilizing multi-chain tokens directly via multisig. Hive accounts can hold other crypto directly now with our new approach on Ecency signup. So ability to use those would be great use case and show casing true spirit of web3. CHAIN:TICKER does help, I guess multisig could be somehow built separately by UI/platform or as separate package.
For disputes, internal group chat is necessary so each trade can have buyer, seller and platform/arbitrator. For chats, sub-comments could be utilized with encryption but when disputes happen, it should be 3 way encryption. So only 3 accounts could read messages.

Great to hear! :) Yes, very much agreed on all points you mentioned. All of these features are needed. So maybe we can discuss which feature to add next. But maybe even before that it is good to let people use the bare-minimum MVP so there is some real-world usage and we can see how people's experience is and this will tell us how to proceed next. What do you think?

Btw, just like with polls, there is a backend which anyone can run.

Would be very happy to somehow collectively brainstorm and gather input on how to develop this and proceed with a feature when the specs seem right.

Where do I find that PeakD page?

Edit: Found it on beta peakd :)

Yeah, to be released on the main PeakD site.