Brian Hoffman - CEO, OB1

Position: CEO, OB1

Brian Hoffman is the CEO of OB1, which is the parent company of the decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar.

History with OpenBazaar

OpenBazaar began as Dark Market, when Amir Taaki published its first code in 2014 at the Toronto Bitcoin Hackathon. Hoffman forked Dark Market’s code on GitHub and re-branded it as OpenBazaar.

Quotes

On OpenBazaar’s goals:

The vision is opening trade for every kind of activity. We’re not building a marketplace that specifies one kind of user or trade, we just build the network and it’s up to the participants to decide what goes across that network, much like the Internet. Same goes for bitcoin. I think some of these new technologies, early on, get adopted by some unsavory groups, because they’re the ones that are most willing to be risky about the way they conduct business.

On OpenBazaar:

OpenBazaar is not a company; it’s not a business. We don’t have servers in some data center collecting all this data and controlling our users. It’s just a protocol. It’s just a bunch of computers talking to each other, so what happens on that network is up to the whim of the users.