Feathercoin eBay-style auction marketplace

Feathercoin, an altcurrency based on Litecoin, has today announced that it is opening an auction site to facilitate the trade of physical items between individuals paid for by Feathercoins.


The site is at an early phase of development but already has 70 auctions ongoing. It also supports a feedback system so sellers can build a reputation, much like eBay. Feathercoin says that the site will soon implement a shopping cart and a range of merchant tools.

Peter Bushnell, the founder of Feathercoin, told us that the service had been created to solve the problem of forum users trying to auction off items on forums, often without someone standing in as an escrow provider. Bushnell also told us:

“To begin with members will either use external escrow or pay directly to each other. The next phase of the site will be to create online wallets and a built in escrow system.”

However, the primary goal of the marketplace is to facilitate mainstream adoption of Feathercoins – surely a relative term compared against the ‘mainstream’ adoption of Bitcoin. The Feathercoin founder had this to say…

“The focus is on merchant adoption. Rather than just asking merchants to use Feathercoin, we are working to provide them with the tools to make this happen. If we do most of the hard work, merchants will be able to easily integrate Feathercoins into their existing payment solutions. We are asking merchants to tell us what they need and then respond to that with our development.”

Going forward, the road map for Feathercoin’s auction house looks something like this:

1. Create Feathercoin shopping carts for several well used systems.

2. Create an API for merchants to use, this can be queried for the current value of FTC in different currencies and will return total price in FTC when queried with real world currencies. Initially this will be a simple

3. Make an online tool available that can generate buttons and icons for Feathercoin with the option of Feathercoin URLs that will be supported by the client.

4. Put together our own Official Feathercoin merchandise shop as a demonstration of what bringing all the tools together can do.

More details will be available on the Feathercoin website, and you can find the market at https://feathercoinmarket.com/browse.php?id=168

BitcoinIntel analysts advise cryptocommodity investors to keep their eyes on Feathercoin (FTC) over the next month, as the altcoin has been quietly gaining traction and swelling in value on major exchanges such as BTC-E.com .

While the market rates of crypto-to-USD continue to fluctuate with extreme volatility and are subjected to the whims of global events, market fluctuations between crypto-to-crypto commodities are more predictable, less dramatic, and more profitable within shorter periods of time. Traders and automated arbitrage bots have been observed engaging in frequent trades between cryptocommodities, specifically BTC/LTC/FTC. The sole purpose of flipping crypto-to-crypto in this manner is to increase their physical holdings. Many of these investors see cryptocurrency as having significantly more value than USD, and as a result hedge in altcoins like FTC as opposed to USD.

Small Units, Large Gains

At the time of writing, 1 FTC is priced at .00046 BTC, equivalent to about $0.38USD, according to the BTC-E exchange.

Within the last 30 days, Feathercoin rose to from 0.00040 BTC to 0.00128 BTC on Novemer 30, 2013. Traders who bought in using BTC at 0.00040 on November 27, 2013 saw a 278% ROI if they sold on November 30, 2013. Within the last few days, the market rate has slowly deflated back to the 0.00040 range. The Feathercoin market is anticipated to experience similar spikes and dips over the next few weeks as global events are announced related to Bitcoin and Litecoin. The current dip is being interpreted as parabolic by BitcoinIntel analysts, creating a temporary bear market that can yield significant profits for those with resources to diversify into Feathercoin via BTC-E before the market swings back to the .001+ range. The FTC/BTC fluctuations are available at CryptoCoincharts.info.

“If the value of Bitcoin drops by 500% overnight, it won’t matter to smart investors because they hedged in FTC instead of USD. At the end of the day, they still have cryptocurrency,” stated Alexander Heid, co-founder of BitcoinIntel.com and CEO of HackMiami . “FTC can always be traded for another kind of crypto if needed, or it can be spent on a good or service. The only losers in the cryptocurrency arbitrage game are those who rely exclusively on USD as a safe haven for market fluctuations. If markets don’t move in the anticipated direction, the trader can end up taking a significant hit and be left holding a USD voucher code for an exchange that they now have to figure a way to turn to cash. Keeping trades within the realm of crypto-to-crypto allows for quick and easy withdrawal, eliminates regulatory requirements, and keeps wealth within the cryptocurrency economy and stays true to Agorist principles.”

About Feathercoin

Feathercoin (FTC) was released in April 2013 as an open source fork of the Litecoin (LTC) cryptocurrency project. FTC was added to the BTC-E exchange in May 2013. Feathercoin has emerged to be considered one of the most prominent ‘altcoins’ behind Litecoin, and has a very active development community continuously maintaining the codebase. FTC operates much like LTC because it uses Scrypt as its primary encryption algorithm. However, it is designed to be more lightweight (hence the image of a ‘feather’), less resource intensive, and has the ability process transactions at greater speeds using a smaller blockchain. The Feathercoin concept and code was first developed by Peter Bushnell, who was a minor contributor to the Litecoin project.

https://feathercoinmarket.com/browse.php?id=168

The Feathercoin Market has relaunched better than ever. The market allows you to trade new and used goods in exchange for Feathercoin. A new escrow system is in place to limit opportunities for scams. This allows the market to hold the funds until both parties have confirmed the transaction has take place. With a simple yet elegant design, the site is very intuitive and easy to use.

Good news. The Feathercoin market is back with a major improvements and many bug fixes. Most noticeable is the built-in escrow system which in my mind makes the market work.

The escrow holds the funds from the buyer until the goods have been received. Once you buy an item you send the funds to the escrow address on the screen. The seller can see that payment has been sent and can send the goods. Once done the buyer can mark the item as received and the funds will be released.

https://feathercoinmarket.com/browse.php?id=168

source: http://www.coindesk.com/feathercoin-launches-ebay-style-auction-marketplace/ & http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/12/prweb11424537.htm & http://cryptosource.org/feathercoin-market-opens/

Feathercoin eBay-style auction marketplace