[BETA] Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify: one marketplace, BTC in and BTC out.

Last week there was a thread here about a platform that puts Facebook Marketplace, Amazon, Airbnb and Cash App in one place, priced in sats. I read all of it, replies included. That thread pulled some genuinely useful suggestions. One person said straight out that with no escrow it will end in scams, and there were a couple of other points we had not thought about ourselves. We have been at this for years, and after reading it we figured it is better to come here and ask the same questions than to keep arguing with ourselves in private. So this post is a request for advice.
Who we are. Part of our team came out of the OpenBazaar community. OpenBazaar was one of the first projects that actually tried to use bitcoin as electronic cash instead of something you buy and hold. In late 2021 OB1 walked away from it, we picked up the code and the idea, and we have been building ever since. This is not a side project for us.
The shortest version of what we are trying to be is the Amazon of crypto. Let me be clear that we are not trying to compete with Amazon. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify and Vinted are all doing fine and none of them care about us. I mean the opposite. Inside crypto, none of these roles exist yet. There is no Amazon of bitcoin, no eBay, no Etsy, no Shopify, no Vinted. You might hold a pile of coins, but if you want to buy a used camera, sell the jacket you never wear, or run your own small shop without renting a page from someone else, there is nowhere to go. That is the gap. What we want to build is one marketplace with a second hand side, storefronts the seller actually controls, digital goods, and the boring categories people really buy in, home, accessories, travel, all settled in bitcoin. Whether we get there is a different question. Today it is around 6,600 listings from a few dozen shops, so I am not going to pretend we are Amazon. We are not even a good flea market yet.
Who I think this is for. Cross border sellers and small wholesalers, artists, people flipping stuff they already own, digital goods, small independent shops, and anyone who holds bitcoin and would like to spend it on something other than a hardware wallet.
The pain is boring and real. If you sell across a border today, your options are fiat rails that take days and can be reversed out from under you, or a crypto payment that works fine until it does not, because there was no real platform underneath holding both sides of the deal together. Plenty of coins, nowhere to spend them. Long term we want electronic cash to circulate like cash instead of being something you hold and brag about.
The part that matters more than any feature list, because features are easy to copy.
1. The store belongs to the seller, not to us. Store identity, policies, data and order state stay with the store. Move to another node tomorrow and the store moves with you. We cannot take it away, and I would rather say that myself than have you guess.
2. Anyone can run a node. Ours, your own, or pay someone to host it for you. Same commerce rules either way. Self host and congratulations, you now have your own IT department.
3. No KYC anywhere. You can also check out as a guest without an account and recover the order later.
4. The terms are inspectable. Order state and payment terms are out in the open, not a black box we quietly change when it suits us.
5. An open API and an agent layer. A shop can wire in its own tools and automate part of its own workflow without handing over authority over the money.
6. Arbitrators are independent. They set their own fee and their own languages, and they never touch shipping or the money.
7. No category restrictions. Physical and digital both. Shipping zones and rates are set by the seller, not by us.
What is actually running today, live, not on a roadmap.
Seller side. A store dashboard with listings, an order center, your own store payment settings, shipping zones and rates. Discount codes and a seller referral commission setup, because people keep asking. Analytics, which mostly tells us how few people show up. An AI workbench where you photograph an item and it writes the listing, about 60 seconds from photo to listed. I built that after spending three hours typing one listing by hand, so at least it solved my own problem. Storefront customisation with an AI assistant for branding, which honestly I am not sure anyone needs. It looks great in a pitch deck. Recovery phrase backup, because if you lose access we cannot help you, so we make you back it up at setup and then nag you about it.
Buyer side. Search, filters, cart, messages, dark mode, the usual. Money sits in escrow until you confirm or until the protection window runs out, 45 days for physical goods. If the seller never ships, the order cancels itself and the money goes back. One click to raise a problem, then a week for the two sides to talk, then an independent arbitrator decides within 7 days. Our arbitrator directory currently has exactly one person in it. He seems nice. That is the entire department. After an order completes you still have 7 days to raise something.
Then the part our own team argues about. The self hosted nodes above, and the open API with the agent layer. Half of us think that is the entire point of the project. The other half thinks we are building a product for twelve people. I genuinely do not know which half is right.
One thing I would rather say myself. Our GitHub is behind. The running product has been ahead of the public repo for a while. Judge what is on the site, not what is in the commit history.
Questions I would like real answers to.
1. Of all of this, what would you actually use, and what would you never touch?
2. What should we delete? My own candidates are the AI listing tool, the self hosted nodes, the agent API and the coupons. Some of it may just be us showing off.
3. Would you trust an arbitrator you picked off a public directory, or only someone you already know?
4. Does "the store belongs to the seller and can move to another node" matter to you at all, or is it a thing developers find romantic and normal sellers never think about? I want the honest answer, I can take it.
Three things I still do not have an answer for.
1. Physical goods. Buyer says the box had cardboard in it, seller has a tracking number, and somebody has to decide. We have arbitrators and it still keeps me up at night.
2. Merchants live in fiat. A shop taking bitcoin still pays rent and suppliers in local currency. If you run a shop, how do you handle that?
3. Would you rather trade somewhere that takes bitcoin only, or bitcoin plus stablecoins? Honest answer, not the ideological one.
We are not here to fight anyone building the same thing. Same road. The problem is not competition, it is that almost nobody buys anything with bitcoin. If you are working on something similar, say so, we would rather compare notes. If you want to help build it, we are happy to have you.
The plan for the rest of this year is boring. Get to know the rest of the crypto crowd, then go find the people who have the problem and no solution for it. Longer term, the point is to make crypto something people use without thinking about it.
Criticism welcome. If something above is stupid, say it in the thread and I will answer.
Entrance:https://app.mobazha.org/