Just a few updates from the last month:
It's now easier and faster to place your first order on Zion than most other markets. We don't require buyers to sign up first, you can click Buy on any product and we'll create a new account, log you in, show you the username and password (which you can change) and the payment address to send BTC or XMR from your wallet/tumbler. One more click to send your shipping address and you're done. If you don't want to setup anything with multisig, you can just send the BTC straight to the address shown and we'll take care of the rest for you. It's that easy.
We're also rolling out a secure wallet for users who prefer the "regular escrow" workflow. It will work just like on markets with regular escrow where you deposit to your account address and then pay for any purchases from that balance, but behind the scenes it is much more secure because every user has their own multisig wallet (encrypted with their PIN) that all purchases/withdrawals are paid from. This is much more secure than having a single wallet shared among all users that an attacker can attempt to withdraw from. Secure wallets will be enabled for all users within 5 days.
For vendors:
Signing up for a vendor account is completely automated. If you have a profile on Grams, Hansa, or Valhalla there is no bond required as long as you can verify your PGP key. The bond for new vendors is 0.05BTC but we'll let you pay it with your first sale if you sell something that we don't have much of right now.
We've added the option to withdraw your payments directly to XMR (Monero) for easier tumbling.
We can import all your previous feedback from Grams and Hansa.
We also added XMPP (Jabber) notifications for new orders, messages, and signed payment backups (PGP encrypted).
And lastly, we now allow vendors to pre-pay their commission fees to avoid every payment being linked to our wallet addresses. Vendors can pre-pay directly or the system will send one entire purchase's payment to their commission account, then 100% of all subsequent payments will go directly to the vendor's wallet. This will greatly reduce mass blockchain analysis and improve the security and anonymity of buyers and sellers.
Once Monero implements disposable addresses this will allow buyers to send BTC directly from their wallets (no tumbling necessary) with guaranteed privacy from the vendors who are converting their withdrawals to Monero.
As always, comments & suggestions are welcome. If you want to check us out the URL is: http://zionshopusn6nopy.onion