- The IOTA Open Marketplace (OMA) has been launched for demonstration purposes in Berlin, Hamburg and Düsseldorf.
- Currently, “local leaders” are being sought to establish the project in other German cities.
The development of the IOTA Open Marketplace (OMA) continues to make great progress. The project aims to provide a decentralized trading place for food and other goods to provide an alternative to large corporations like Amazon, Uber and Co. Buyers and sellers will be put in direct contact with each other, peer-to-peer, without the need for an intermediary to earn high commissions. The Open Marketplace is completely free of charge and thanks to IOTA technology, transactions can be processed anonymously and free of charge.
Crypto News Flash has already featured the project several times. Most recently, the Open Marketplace project made headlines when it was recognized as the best application of the fifth week at the CODEVID19 Hackathon. As the development team has now announced via Medium, the first three Open Marketplaces have been launched in Berlin, Hamburg and Düsseldorf for demonstration purposes. As emphasized in the Medium post, however, development is still in its infancy:
The development is in a very early stage and the server setup is not final, so they could belong loading times while using a marketplace. Check out the first three demo marketplaces. More coming soon!
A look at Berlin’s Open Marketplace reveals that so far, numerous pharmacies and bakeries are available on the Open Marketplace. By clicking on the shop, users can write a shopping list. As long as the shop owner confirms the order, the order can be picked up. However, so far this is only a demo!
One of the developers of the OMA, “Huhn”, emphasized to Crypto News Flash that the demos do not initially contain any “real” shops and that the data for this will have to be supplemented in the next steps:
There are no real shops behind them yet – these are only open data from Open Street Map. We want to get more information about the shops – with the help of the local leaders and the shops themselves. The next steps here – going to the shops, so they can say, “hey, this is my shop”. Then we’re going to do a matching between open data and real world. So that then something can be sold.
Local Leader needed to promote IOTA OMA
To further expand the Open Marketplace’s presence in Germany, the team is currently seeking “local leaders” to bring the OMA’s vision to other cities, “with the mission to build an open marketplace and a local team to meet the needs of the city”. According to another Medium article, a “local leader is a contact person” who “knows everything that is happening in their city”, whereby one person per city is initially being sought.
Local leaders will create a marketplace and takes care of it. The second step is to build a team within the city and collect feedback, report it and solve problems and build improvements with other local teams.
Regarding the task of a local leader and creating the infrastructure for the Open Marketplace, “Huhn” elaborated on this in a statement to CNF:
A local leader has the task of bringing a marketplace to his city. For the time being, it is quite simple to have the marketplace hosted by us – but this is not in the sense of decentralization. We want to directly improve the infrastructure in the cities and villages so that theoretically the software can be run on a PC in the city hall.
