OpenBazaar announced that it received $1 million in seed funding from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and angel investor William Mougayar to develop the OpenBazaar protocol and client.

OpenBazaar is an open-source project to create a decentralized network for peer-to-peer (P2P) commerce online – using bitcoin – that has no fees and cannot be censored. It can be seen as a distributed, decentralized version of eBay powered by P2P technologies such as BitTorrent and Bitcoin.

"OpenBazaar is a different approach to online commerce," states the OpenBazaar website. "It puts the power back in the users' hands. Instead of buyers and sellers going through a centralized service, OpenBazaar connects them directly. Because there is no one in the middle of the transactions, there are no fees, no one can censor transactions, and you only reveal the personal information that you choose."