Infinite Markets and Full Particl Desktop Re-Write ✨

Over the last few weeks, the Particl development team has been hard at work preparing for the biggest release to date — Particl Desktop 2.4.0. Introducing Infinite Markets, Market Management, and a slew of new features and improvements, this release is going to bring to the table better, faster, and stronger codebases for both the marketplace and the desktop client.

With more than 100,000 new lines of code and 80% of the code being completely re-written, this massive update will also introduce a wide array of new features as well as significant improvements to the user interface (UI), user experience (UX), making it to the best Particl application ever.

Among all the things Particl Desktop 2.4.0 will introduce, the most noteworthy are as follow:

  • Listing fees reduced by 80% or more
  • Infinite Markets & Market Management
  • Identity Management and seller profiles
  • Significant performance boost
  • More lightweight Particl Desktop client
  • The marketplace can easily be activated on the initial setup
  • Various user-interface and user-experience improvements

Understanding the Significance of this New Release

Particl Desktop 2.4.0 is far from being “just another Particl Desktop update”. In fact, this new update not only applies critical updates to the marketplace codebase, but it also completely changes the codebase of the desktop client application. In other words, over the last few months, Particl Desktop has gone through a full rewrite of its code (more than 80% of the code is getting completely overhauled), a necessary change that is going to allow future updates to be integrated much faster and much more easily.

Why a Full Rewrite?

There is a very important fact about the current Particl Desktop application — it uses the same codebase as it did when it first released in 2017. Since its release, new features, including the marketplace itself, have evolved massively and the need for a more rock-solid foundation became apparent to be prepared for the next innovations and evolution of the Particl Desktop application. And Particl Desktop did its job well, as a cryptocurrency wallet, but over time, the client accumulated what can be referenced to as a “technical debt” as the new features introduced lots of new requirements.

Technical debt is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. As with monetary debt, if technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes. — Wikipedia

Additionally, the development team also planned out, since Particl Desktop’s first mainnet release, a lot of ways that the code could be improved and made better, faster, and stronger. That’s a direct result of working day in and day out on the same application for years and getting very familiar with the various processes that make it up. With the upcoming major changes required on both Particl Desktop and the marketplace codebase by the Infinite Markets and Market Management, it only made sense that the time was ripe to pay off that technical debt.

It helps keep the code clean and makes it tremendously easier to add new, more complex features, without having to risk to break other things while doing it or spend an absurd amount of time trying to “patch it in”. This full re-write of the Desktop application will not only be a benefit to the developers, but will also make the application much smoother to use and will feel much faster and polished. While the general UI will still look somewhat similar, the code holding it together will be dramatically improved.

What’s the Latest Progress on the Upcoming Release?

The biggest and most time-consuming part of the development process of bringing the new release on mainnet has been completed. On one end, the back-end code for the marketplace codebase is currently being tested with all sorts of automated and integration tests, and on the other end, the new codebase for Particl Desktop has seen its foundations being completed. What remains to be done is mostly the implementation of the newly updated codebase into the new Particl Desktop, which is expected to take more or less a month of coding time.

As it currently stands, the public testnet release is currently estimated to be ready within a few weeks, sometime around mid-April.

With this new testnet build approaching, now’s the time to let people around you know about it and raise awareness! This update will significantly improve the overall user experience of the marketplace and introduce one of the longest-awaited Particl feature ever. It will enable anyone to create private or public markets and storefronts, with a fine tuning of the identity, which means many times more use cases than today for Particl.

Do you know online sellers that accept crypto or would benefit highly from a more private, censorship-proof eCommerce solution? Get ready to reach out to them, because this next update is going to be blowing minds!