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.