Great question. Yes, Bitrated is indeed centralized, but strives for a model that requires putting as little trust as possible on the service operator.

For example - user reviews, contracts and profile fields are signed with the user's ECDSA key, to make it possible to independently verify its authenticity and prevent tampering by third parties (or even by Bitrated itself). All the information is also freely available via open APIs, to make it easily archivable. User funds are fully recoverable in case Bitrated shuts down.

I would say that many of the benefits that can be gained from decentralized technologies can in fact also be achieved by using standard cryptography and leveraging the blockchain technology in smart ways. We have some interesting plans in regards to that.

We expanded more on that here:

https://www.bitrated.com/security#trustless-server-model

https://www.bitrated.com/security#cryptography-backed-digita...

We choose that route because building a decentralized solution requires a lot of additional resources, effort and time, and we believe that the Bitcoin ecosystem needs to have a working solution today. But we'll definitely be considering an even more decentralized approach as the technology evolves.