OB1, the development company behind open-source peer-to-peer marketplace OpenBazaar, has raised $3 million in a seed funding round backed by BlueYard Capital, Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Launched in April this year, OpenBazaar provides a decentralized P2P e-commerce marketplace powered by bitcoin payments that use P2P networking, Ricardian contracts, decentralized reputation and multi-signature escrow.

As reported when it launched, the site cuts out the middleman by connecting buyers and sellers directly, meaning that there are no fees to use the network, and no terms and conditions to sign, which OpenBazaar describes as “permissionless” trade.

“Existing platforms (Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, etc.) run centralized marketplaces that they control, which at the same time can be vulnerable to external influence,” BlueYard explained in a blog post. “Their terms, algorithms and pricing structures can put merchants and buyers at a significant disadvantage. They can also lock out merchants and buyers that happen to be outside of their scope of operations (e.g. type of products, geography).”

By contrast, BlueYard added, “OB1, the company behind OpenBazaar, is building an open source marketplace that is fully decentralized. There is no gatekeeper that can influence who can participate in the marketplace, what goods are sold and at what price.”

It’s not clear exactly how many people are using OpenBazaar, but the company claims that buyers and sellers from 129 countries have joined.

Although it’s often compared with Silk Road, the online black market shut down by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in late 2013, OpenBazaar has one issue for users: At least at launch, a seller had to have the client for OpenBazaar open at all times on an active connection. That’s because pages for selling items are served up directly from the sellers computer, in a similar way a Torrent file or in years past a file on Limewire would only be available from a person offering the file while online. This works for those with persistent connections, but it does deliver a somewhat disjointed selling process.

Including the new round, OB1 has raised $5.5 million to date. This company said it would use the money to continue improving its open-source software and expanding the peer-to-peer trade community.

Image courtesy of Openbazaar