Haven is now open source!

We’re pleased to announce that Haven is open source and MIT licensed.

This announcement comes with some mixed emotions. It was always our intention to open source Haven. Ideally, we could keep Haven a free and zero-fee marketplace in the hope that could monetise via advertising (as a function of significant growth). Unfortunately, we were unable to achieve the type of growth necessary to execute this monetisation strategy.

Strategically, we kept the app closed source in case we did not meet our growth targets, as a value-add for a potential acquisition. Over the past few months we have come close, at least twice, to an acquisition of both the company and the app. However, as those doors closed, it became clear there was no reason to delay open sourcing the app as we had originally intentioned.

Haven began as a side project using a framework called Jasonette, which built a cross-platform mobile app using nothing but JSON. The fun little experiment started to get more serious. Originally, the app would be little more than a thin client that connects to a remotely hosted OpenBazaar server. Thanks to a discussion with Andrey Petrov, we were able to compile a mobile friendly framework/library of OpenBazaar using gomobile.

The limits of the Jasonette framework necessitated the move to something more mature. For a few months, we attempted to build a native iOS app using Swift. This process was both expensive and time-consuming relative to the volunteer effort from a contributor, who had decided to build an app with react native. We shifted our development entirely to react native, and didn’t look back.

Throughout this journey we’ve been privileged to work with some amazing developers and designers to make this crypto ‘super app’ possible. I’m immensely proud of all the hard work people have put into it, and the buyers and sellers who made this marketplace so special.

Going forward, Haven development will be primarily driven by open source contributions. We will still publish updates to the app if there are new features and bug fixes from contributing developers. OB1 will continue to support the 3rd party services that Haven integrates to enhance the user experience for the time being.

If you’d like to support Haven development going forward, we have the following donation addresses you can contribute to:

BTC: 3JuykfZRbCepzkVLLseSaiufDJ5AC8ae8R
LTC: MTTEVR5pdAHJNmmFNzVjaQhGB9qLkHLk7m
ZEC: t1UEN9mf9hMccwTznqBoJFh2FERgyuMJ2oA
BCH: qq9favzja34zywrp222cwrx4fny9fe64pyaxl5dvar
ETH: 0x71A6e8B0580104dacA0633a9BA6F90181C6F40a5

Until next time… stay free, trade free 🙏

Download Haven now from the Apple App Store or Google Play and get your favorite cryptocurrencies ready to shop!