Open Market or Ghost Town? The Curious Case of OpenBazaar

Abstract

OpenBazaar, a decentralized electronic commerce marketplace, has received significant attention since its development was first announced in early 2014. Using multiple daily crawls of the OpenBazaar network over approximately 14 months (June 25, 2018–September 3, 2019), we measure its evolution over time. We observed 6,651 unique participants overall, including 980 who used Tor at one point or another. More than half of all users (3,521) were only observed on a single day or less, and, on average, only approximately 80 users are simultaneously active on a given day. As a result, economic activity is, unsurprisingly, much smaller than on centralized anonymous marketplaces. Furthermore, while a majority of the 24,379 distinct items listed seem to be legal offerings, a majority of the measurable economic activity appears to be related to illicit products. We also discover that vendors are not always using prudent security practices, which makes a strong case for imposing secure defaults. We conclude that OpenBazaar, so far, has not gained much traction to usher in the new era of decentralized, private, and legitimate electronic commerce it was promising. This could be due to a lack of user demand for decentralized marketplaces, lack of integration of private features, or other factors, such as a higher learning curve for users compared to centralized alternatives.