BitBay is a free, decentralized marketplace for buying and selling goods and services on the blockchain. You can connect directly with peers and transact without the need for a middleman like Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist. Transactions are secure and anonymous. They’re also guaranteed by escrow. The project aims to be the new standard for eCommerce, allowing individuals to trade one-to-one at scale. As a result, BitBay claims it will revolutionize global trade. It’s seemingly a great solution for other niche applications as well, where groups of people aren’t served by existing marketplaces. In the beginning, BitBay got off to a rocky start. In 2014, the original founders raised capital in bad faith and quickly abandoned the project after fundraising, leaving the lead developer holding the bag. It seemed like BitBay was finished, but the developer continued working on the project out of a sense of duty to the original investors, without access to the capital raised in the fundraising round. The BAY token is the transactional token in the marketplace. You use it to buy and sell, and it can also participate in freezes, escrow, bets, swaps, etc. The token itself operates like Bitcoin and is secured by the network. Although you can use BAY for transactions, you don’t have to. You do, however, have to use BAY if you’d like to take part in token staking. BAY’s price cratered after the original founders left and stayed low until March 2017 when it took off. It has been through several cycles of bull and bear runs, with a max price over 30 cents in January 2018 before retreating to its current value. BitBay supports all kinds of privacy and security measures. It’s easy to create a multisignature wallet for added security. There are integrations for Tor and other proxies that help anonymize your connection to the marketplace. An on-screen keyboard allows for password or key entry without using your keyboard and being susceptible to keylogging. Additionally, you can create images with your private key embedded, so that finding a stored key is more difficult for a hacker. The marketplace also has functionality for time locking contracts and swapping currencies. This enables all kinds of cross-chain transactions and financial implements. The time lock and other smart contract elements make it possible to create bets, escrow, futures and options trades, or any number of other financial transactions. The idea and implementation by BitBay, of a decentralized marketplace and trading platform is brilliant and shows further promise of expansion.The rocky beginning of the cryptocurrency and its subsequent comeback as a promising platform indicate that the developers are in it for the long haul and don’t plan on abandoning the platform after all these years.
DMarket is a decentralized game asset marketplace. The marketplace covers a wide variety of games and turns virtual items into real commodities that can be traded on the blockchain. The idea of tokenization is central to the blockchain where any item can be represented as a token on the blockchain. This creates an emerging economy around digital assets where they become real items. There are an estimated 2.3 billion gamers worldwide and ample opportunity to monetize digital assets. The gaming economy is estimated at $450 billion There are two types of assets available on DMarket. The first type is a virtual Steam item. This Steam item is an in-game asset this is available for a specific game. At the moment there is a horde of items available for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. There is also a DMarket Blockchain item that is an internal blockchain item that can be traded on the DMarket blockchain. Users can sell Steam items for US Dollars (USD) or DMarket items for USD or DMC, the internal DMarket cryptocurrency. Users can buy Steam items for USD or DMC or DMarket items for DMC. In order to sell Steam items on DMarket, users have to connect their Steam account to their DMarket account. DMarket blockchain items can be traded without connecting to Steam. Users have to register on DMarket. This creates a DMC wallet for them where they can store their DMC currency and DMarket items. The DMarket platform also has its own block explorer. All wallets and transactions are recorded in the public blockchain. DMarket has a future-proof use case as the demand for a universal gaming trading platform is imminent. Strategic partnerships between game title developers, the gaming community and gamers will ensure that DMarket lives well beyond its proprietary blockchain phase.