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://market.feathercoin.com/