Haven 1.3+ 🚀 “ETH”

Published in

gethaven

4 min readJun 1, 2020

It’s been a long journey getting here, but the time has finally come. This release is a major update with a ton of under-the-hood changes.

Ethereum

We are extremely excited to announce that Haven now supports ETH as a payment option! This is part of a wider update that is going out to the entire OpenBazaar ecosystem today.

Listings can be purchased with ETH directly from a seller in a simple value transfer, or via the ‘payment protection’ escrow smart contract we developed, independently audited by OpenZeppelin, and deployed.

As with the Bitcoin multisig, any peer on the network can be selected to ‘moderate’ an order in a non-custodial manner, requiring two-of-three signatures to release funds to the buyer/seller. In the event of a dispute, the moderator is used to mediate the dispute and release funds to whoever they consider to be the winning party. Alternatively, if an order goes smoothly (i.e. no disputes arise), the funds are released to the seller without moderator intervention. The full spec of the smart contract can be found here.

In Haven, you can configure the coins that your store will accept for payment in Settings.

Listings that accept ETH will display the amount required for payment in the Listing view. We’ve also enhanced the payment method view in Checkout to display your balance for each coin.

The addition of ETH is just the beginning. We will be rolling-out payment support for ERC-20 tokens over the coming weeks.

Fees

The escrow smart contract is designed to manage the moderated payments for all OpenBazaar users, so they don’t have to deploy a smart contract for every purchase. This reduces fees substantially.

To add ETH to the escrow smart contract requires 346,041 gas, or ~$0.14 using a safe-low fee; this fee is paid by the buyer. Releasing funds from escrow costs 141,217 gas or ~$0.06 using a safe-low fee. This fee is the same across all scenarios where funds are released, but is paid by either the buyer or seller depending on the situation:

Normal payouts => seller
Refunds => seller
Dispute resolution payout => winner of the dispute (buyer/seller)

The escrow smart contract is also used to safely hold funds for direct payments where the seller is offline. Here, the seller can withdraw funds from the smart contract if they accept the order, or refund it back to the buyer. We recommend that buyers only make direct payments to reputable sellers.

Search

Today’s update contains the most significant improvement to search we have ever deployed. When you create or modify a listing, those changes will be seen in search within seconds!

Personalised feed

The global social feed has been an interesting section of the Haven app in many ways. While it has been a phenomenal tool to discover new amazing content, at times it could get spammy and diminish the user experience.

For the time being, we have disabled the global feed leaving only the personalised feed to display posts from stores that you’ve followed. Over the next few months we aim to roll-out discovery features to help users find quality stores and content on the network.