July 16th is our second planned hardfork of 2019 and this one on-boards two of the most desired privacy and speed features for the PART currency and ecosystem — RingCT and Bulletproofs.

The significance of these tools coming to PART mainnet isn’t lost on the many of us in the community who have been wanting these for day-to-day use since they first appeared on PART testnet in 2017. But, for those readers curious about the impact these will have in the privacy-focused, decentralized economy Particl is building, this post will help explain a bit more.

The Most Important PART

📣 This is a full hardfork.

After July 16th, no nodes below 0.18.0.10 should be on the main chain. That means everyone will need to update to Particl Core v0.18.0.10 (or newer) before 2019–07–16. For the procrastinators, you have 3 weeks!

Particl Core v0.18.0.10 builds are ready now. Upgrade today!

particl/particl-core
Particl Core integration/staging tree. Contribute to particl/particl-core development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com

Particl Desktop (v1.4) builds are ready now. Upgrade today!

particl/particl-desktop
Particl Angular GUI - The source for the Particl GUI. - particl/particl-desktopgithub.com

Important: Same as Particl Core wallet, users who haven’t updated to Particl Desktop (v1.4) or later by July 16th will NOT be on the main chain after the fork. We will send out another reminder 7–10 days ahead of July 16th to remind users to update. Particl Desktop builds will be included in that reminder post.

⭐️ For most users, the only important piece of information is summarized above. We do have more details about Particl Core development included in this post. For those interested to learn more, please, continue reading!

Hardfork Details

There are actually 2 hardforks coming to Particl in July — one for testnet, one for mainnet.

2019-07-01 12:00:00 UTC on testnet, hardfork to enable variable smsg difficulty.

2019-07-16 12:00:00 UTC on mainnet, hardfork to enable ringCT transactions and bulletproofs.

Release notes: https://github.com/particl/particl-core/blob/0.18/doc/release-notes-particl.md#01810

📆 Testnet fork scheduled for 2019.07.01–12:00:00 UTC

  • Enable variable difficulty for smsg free messages.

SMSG variable difficulty gives the network a way to disable free smsg messages if someone starts spamming. By design, each free smsg has to hash in a certain way (like PoW). This makes the difficulty variable as opposed to hard-coded.

📆 Mainnet fork scheduled for 2019.07.16–12:00:00 UTC

  • Enable bulletproof rangeproofs.
  • Enable RingCT transactions.
  • Enable variable fee rate for smsg paid messages.
  • Enable variable difficulty for smsg free messages.

Bulletproof rangeproofs are a much more efficient rangeproof than what has been on the network to date. When we launched Particl with Confidential Transactions (CT) in 2017 a major difficulty was the size of blind transactions compared to public transactions. CT transactions typically are 20x larger than non-CT transactions. Bulletproofs can allow doubling the range size while still reducing transactions sizes by 65% or more.

Bulletproofs are much more general than rangeproofs. They can be used to prove, in zero knowledge, arbitrary statements. They are equivalent in power to SNARKs or STARKs, but have native support for elliptic curve (EC) public keys and Pedersen commitments (so there is typically no need to implement EC math inside a program being proven). Also, unlike SNARKs, Bulletproofs have full 128-bit security under standard assumptions with no trusted setup. Unlike STARKs, they are fast enough to prove and verify reasonably-sized problems on typical computing hardware. — Andrew Poelstra

RingCT transactions are unlinkable and untraceable onchain transactions. RingCT is short for Ring Confidential Transactions. First described by Shen Noether of XMR Labs, Particl’s version is a complete ground-up build on the current Bitcoin codebase (0.18) by our very talented Lead Core developer Tecnovert.

For the record, this whole development update is directly tied to the phenomenal work Tecnovert builds into Particl Core. Give him a big “Thank You!” next time you stop in our Discord | Open Development Channel.

The announcement of RingCT coming to the main chain is huge news for a number of you waiting for fully anonymous PART transactions. Tecnovert first released RingCT onto the test chain in the middle of 2017 and we have had a number of respected researchers, educators and code auditors review it over the last 2 years.

The last security audit preformed by Quarkslab has been sent to the team and reviewed. We will have more news about it when they publish the public audit. We chose to engage Quarkslab on our MLSAG/bulletproof algorithms because of their previous work with identifying 4 major/3 minor vulnerabilities in Monero’s bulletproof security audit.

Cold Staking Pool Operators

Tecnovert has raised the daemon version for the coldstakingpool code to 0.18.0.10.

A new version page is available here: https://github.com/tecnovert/particl-coldstakepool/blob/master/doc/upgrade_daemon.txt

Don’t Forget!

📣 A planned hardfork on PART Mainnet is coming July 16th, 2019

After July 16th, no nodes below 0.18.0.10 should be on the main chain. That means everyone will need to update to Particl Core v0.18.0.10 (or newer) before 2019–07–16. For the procrastinators, you have 3 weeks!

Particl Core v0.18.0.10 builds are ready now. Upgrade today!

particl/particl-core
Particl Core integration/staging tree. Contribute to particl/particl-core development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com

Thank You

Particl Team