When OpenBazaar launched in 2014, it promised to be the world’s first peer-to-peer online bitcoin marketplace that no government or company could control—a kind of Bittorrent of online trade that would let anyone sell anything directly to anyone else. Now, OpenBazaar will finally add the last ingredient to enable that anarchic dream: anonymity.

In May, OpenBazaar’s developers plan to launch OpenBazaar 2, which revamps the peer-to-peer communication protocol that allows users to make purchases and list items for sale online without hosting any data on a central server. The new version will also integrate the anonymity software Tor, designed to allow anyone to browse the market’s network anonymously or list items for sale from an untraceable location.

The result, OpenBazaar’s founder Brian Hoffman hopes, will be a renewed interest from those seeking private, uncensorable online trade. But Hoffman admits the move could also cement the last building block necessary to make his creation a haven for black-market commerce. It might even turn the OpenBazaar network into a decentralized, harder-to-control upgrade to dark web markets like the Silk Road, which have served as online trading posts for contraband like drugs, guns and stolen data. “There’s no way to prevent any type of activity on the network,” says Hoffman. “You’re putting the power back into the hands of the people rather than the central controllers of the market to decide what’s right and wrong.”

In fact, a prototype of OpenBazaar 2 already includes the ability to switch to a “Tor mode,” Hoffman says. But that unfinished version of the software for now only allows browsing, not purchases, and requires controlling the app from the command line. When the new version officially launches in May, however, it will incorporate that “Tor mode” option with OpenBazaar’s slick desktop interface. Anyone will be able to switch it on to bounce their traffic through volunteer computers around the world, obscuring their identity. And the Tor setting will also make visible any sellers who choose to offer their goods only over Tor, to prevent anyone snooping on the network’s traffic from tracing them.

Blind Eye

Hoffman says that the feature will appeal to OpenBazaar’s users, who forsake more mainstream and polished e-commerce sites like eBay and Amazon for OpenBazaar’s laissez-faire, libertarian alternative. “Hands-down, privacy and anonymity have been our number one most-requested feature from day one,” says Hoffman.

OpenBazaar has always had an ambivalent stance towards the kind of illegal online trade it might enable. The peer-to-peer bitcoin market software was initially conceived and coded under the name DarkMarket by the staunch anarchist Bitcoin programmer Amir Taaki, working with programmers from the Bitcoin startup Airbitz. At the time, Taaki described Dark Market as an answer to the FBI’s takedown of the Silk Road: a decentralized market with no central server to seize. Dark web market users have also sought a more decentralized system to prevent so-called “exit scams,” in which the administrator of a market suddenly shuts down the marketplace and steals whatever currency its participants have stored in the site’s wallets. “Like a hydra, those of us in the community that push for individual empowerment are in an arms race to equip the people with the tools needed for the next generation of digital black markets,” Taaki wrote in a statement introducing the project.

But after DarkMarket’s creators abandoned their prototype, Hoffman and a group of fellow coders rewrote much of its code, rebranded it as a startup called OpenBazaar, and toned down its cryptoanarchist mission. They’ve tried to disassociate their company from Silk Road and other dark web drug markets: In a blog post on OpenBazaar’s developer forum in 2014, OpenBazaar operations lead Sam Patterson suggested the company should describe itself as offering “stuff that people wouldn’t disagree with but is technically illegal to sell because of stupid laws,” like unpasteurized milk, radar detectors, and fireworks.

Open Season

OpenBazaar has, at times, offered plenty of that gray market contraband. It has hosted cigarettes and Cuban cigars, for instance, North Korean and Nazi memorabilia, as well as Viagra and Russian antibiotics. (To be fair, most of those items or ones like them can also be found floating around eBay, too.) But sellers—perhaps due to the fear of being identified and prosecuted—have offered virtually none of the hardcore illegal drugs and other serious contraband that fuels the dark web’s $200 to 300 million a year in illicit sales. The software has nonetheless been downloaded more than 400,000 times, Hoffman says, and his startup has received $4 million in investment from firms including Union Square Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz.

By adding anonymity features to OpenBazaar, Hoffman insists he’s not courting the dark web’s black market vendors and customers. But he admits that anonymity will inevitably lead to more illegal sales. And OpenBazaar’s architecture means that—by design—neither he nor anyone else can decide what’s bought or sold on its market. “We’ve been very encouraged by what we’ve seen: Some people have sold illegal stuff but it hasn’t proliferated,” Hoffman says. “That will probably change when we roll out anonymity and as the market grows.”

Hoffman nonetheless defends the need to allow free trade to occur online beyond the control of any central authority, even if it does attract criminals. “This goes beyond drugs or guns or whatever,” says Hoffman. “We’re not building something intended to allow bad things to happen … But the problem with liberty is you’re putting the power in people’s hands, and people are bad and good. You have to rely on people to do what’s right.”

• bitcoin
• dark web
• silk road