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.
OKEx, the 2nd most popular cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, launched its platform token ‘OKB‘ today with 10 trading pairs. On its official support page, OKEx describes OKB is a global utility token issued by the OK Blockchain Foundation. The total available supply of OKB will be one billion tokens (1,000,000,000), with a distribution model that allocates 60% of the supply will be given out to OKEx customers for community building and during marketing campaigns. According to OKEx, the company had officially issued OKB on ERC20 protocol earlier this month. The company denied ICO (initial coin offering) and public fundraising. Reportedly the company had stated that it would be soon shifting the token to its official OK chain and subsequently it will be applied not only on OKEx’s platform but also on other related projects. There will be in total 1 billion tokens supplied globally out of which 600 million coins will be distributed to OKEx customers for community building and marketing campaigns. Rest will be locked up for a period of 1 year to 3 years. According to OKEx, the company had officially issued OKB on ERC20 protocol earlier this month. The company denied ICO (initial coin offering) and public fundraising. Reportedly the company had stated that it would be soon shifting the token to its official OK chain and subsequently it will be applied not only on OKEx’s platform but also on other related projects. There will be in total 1 billion tokens supplied globally out of which 600 million coins will be distributed to OKEx customers for community building and marketing campaigns. Rest will be locked up for a period of 1 year to 3 years.