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.
Mainframe is the platform for decentralized applications. Resistant to censorship, surveillance, and disruption, the Mainframe network enables any application to send data, store files, manage payments, run tasks, and more. With the exception of a catastrophic asteroid event or an aggressive alien invasion, the Mainframe network is simply unstoppable. We build with five fundamental principles as our guide. The Mainframe network is the messaging layer for the new web. This goes beyond human-to-human messaging. There are many use-cases and applications for reliably, privately, and securely routing data packets through the Mainframe peer-to-peer network. Mainframe is resistant to censorship, surveillance, and disruption. With the exception of a catastrophic asteroid event or an aggressive alien invasion, the Mainframe network is simply unstoppable. We build with five fundamental principles as our guide. The Mainframe platform is a developer-friendly SDK providing all these services in a secure peer-to-peer fashion. It is designed to be modular and pluggable, so developers and users can configure which projects they prefer to use for the underlying service layers. Our mission is to delight developers by providing an SDK that is well-documented, supported and backed by strong developer communities. Because it is not always clear which projects will gain the most momentum, and because developers often have varying preferences, we feel that it is important to design our underlying service architecture to be modular and pluggable, allowing developers and users to configure which projects they prefer to use for each service layer and abstracting away as much of the differences as possible. A single medium of exchange in the form of Mainframe tokens (MFT) is also used to improve the developer and user experience. Where underlying service layers cannot be retrofitted to accept MFT, we will implement atomic swaps between native service-layer tokens and MFT.