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Nicholas Gregory, Ray Youssef, and Antoine Riard have proposed a new peer-to-peer electronic market system on Nostr, the Bitcoin-friendly social networking protocol. Their introductory whitepaper describes a censorship-resistant system that uses Nostr for its order book and the Bitcoin blockchain for contracts and record-keeping.

The whitepapers notable authors call their new market proposal Civ Kit. They describe the new market as an enabler for global trade of goods, services, and foreign currency (FX) exchange. Specifically, they propose a way to sell any good or service through the following method.

Civ Kit leverages Nostrs reputation-based public keys. Within Nostr, content creators have a persistent public key allowing permissionless porting of followers across any social media application that supports Nostr public keys. Civ Kit marketplace participants have a financial incentive to build and maintain a positive reputation in the same way that eBay users have a financial incentive to maintain a positive reputation.

Jack Dorsey funded some of the earliest developments of Nostr. His endorsement granted the protocol and its most popular social network app, Damus, immediate popularity among Bitcoiners. Although the protocol doesnt use Bitcoins blockchain, the protocol endeared itself to Bitcoiners through its censorship resistance, Bitcoin-like nodes and public/private key cryptography, and early support for Bitcoin and Lightning Network payments.

Read more: What is Nostr and why do Bitcoiners love it?

Of course, there have been many peer-to-peer electronic markets in the history of Bitcoin, including OpenBazaar and Silk Road. This latest whitepaper by Gregory, Youssef, and Riard cites prohibitively high barriers to entry in global marketplaces today, a lack of access to dispute mediation systems, and a design that effectively shuts out large segments of the worlds population. The whitepaper also cited centralized parties that control reputation/review systems, as well as fiat on-/off-ramps with limited transparency.

Civ Kits innovations unlock a new combination of Bitcoin, Nostr, and blockchain contracts.

Previous efforts to create a decentralized marketplace include Silk Road and OpenBazaar. Developers created OpenBazaar in 2014 as part of a hackathon. They initially called it DarkMarket, and then abandoned the concept. Another team of developers picked up the prototype and rebranded it to OpenBazaar in an attempt to distance it from failed darknet markets like Silk Road.

OpenBazaar ceased operations in 2020 due to lack of funding. However, recent news indicates that it could relaunch as Version 3.0. Indeed, its Twitter account seems to be back online.

Even some early Bitcoin-related code indicates that Satoshi Nakamoto considered including a marketplace in the early peer-to-peer digital cash system. Nakamoto told Mike Hearn about work on an eBay-like marketplace before disappearing in 2011. Interestingly, an anonymous team of developers finished that project and launched it as Particl.

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Explained: Civ Kit, the Nostr marketplace created by Bitcoin devs - Protos