Mainnet Features, Progress, & Outstanding Items

We packed our bags and headed off to TOKEN2049 last week with the Open Marketplace in tow. If you haven’t had a chance to try Alpha V2.0 yourself, give it a try now!

Note: The current Alpha Open Marketplace Alpha 2.0 has successfully been tested on mainnet. There hasn’t been any new identifiable issue as a result of this internal test.

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

https://github.com/particl/particl-desktop/releases/tag/v2.0.0-alpha

Table of Contents (Clickable)

The Open Marketplace Impressed in Hong Kong

The Particl team was in Hong Kong from the 11th of March to the 14th to attend and man a booth at the flagship TOKEN2049 conference. This event attracted a lot of the industry’s key players — a good number of them stopping at Particl’s booth to chat with the team and see the Open Marketplace live in action!

We can definitely say the conference was an unequivocal, overwhelming success. It has allowed us to get the Open Marketplace in front of many people, some of them now looking into listing their own products on mainnet. It has also allowed us to test the marketplace in a different environment, with a more diverse set of testers, and under a more realistic context.

Stand by for a TOKEN2049 recap blog post in a few days!

Particl Open Marketplace Development Update

This Hong Kong conference has allowed most of the core team members to hold an important development meeting. This meeting addressed the strategy to complete the last few items required to launch the Open Marketplace on mainnet.

Development Progress of Items Required for Mainnet (Clickable)

More details on our latest Status Report (last updated on 18–03–2019)

Multi-Wallets

We announced a few days ago that the first mainnet version of the marketplace would contain multi-wallets. This feature has now successfully been implemented on RegTest (pre-testnet) and is fully working. Some of the Particl developers are now using the time between now and the mainnet release to make it more resource-efficient and smoother to use. As Arnold Bansemer says, “Better to use the time we have until the release to get it done properly now rather than just enough to make it work”.

Realigns market-beta branch with market branch by zaSmilingIdiot · Pull Request #1512 ·…
This opts for the non-destructive (albeit 'muddy') commit history. This is in preparation for reviewing and merging of…github.com

The multi-wallets feature should hit testnet somewhere this week or early next week. Visit particl.news later this week as we will publish a full article explaining everything there is to know about multi-wallets.

Decentralized Governance

Demonstrating in real-time the Open Marketplace in Hong Kong has been a very constructive exercise. It showed the current V2.0 build to be pretty stable and able to handle hours of demonstration without really causing any issue. It has also been the best opportunity we’ve ever had to test the decentralized governance mechanism of the marketplace.

In fact, while we were at the conference demonstrating the marketplace, undesirable products started to be listed by some testnet user. Remember, the Open Marketplace is entirely decentralized. No party can singlehandedly remove listings from it. Still, we wanted to keep the marketplace as clean as possible as we were showing it off.

Luckily, the Particl testnet network is different from the mainnet network. It is tweaked in a way where the Particl team holds a large sum of testnet coins. This is to ensure the network can run smoothly with a low number of nodes and that the team can easily test the decentralized governance mechanism.

We did successfully take those listings off using the builds we had at the conference. This confirms and validates that the decentralized governance mechanism is now ready for mainnet!

CT Escrow (Privacy Enabled by Default)

The implementation of CT transactions in the escrow smart-contract makes all marketplace transactions untraceable — amounts will be hidden — by default. This requires a special form of escrow that processes transactions using only CT. — See OMP Library and Bitcoin 0.18 below for more info.

The Particl developers already have a working escrow in RegTest (pre-testnet) that works using RingCT transactions only. By playing around with it, they realized modifying it so that it could work using CT transactions (instead of RingCT) would be relatively easy. It would also protect the integrity of the project. Particl is, after all, a privacy-focused project. It is not looking into compromising privacy or security for anything else. This is why we’ve decided to implement CT transactions before releasing the Open Marketplace on mainnet.

As it stands today, the escrow mechanism has been successfully converted to work with CT transactions. The team is currently fine-tuning some of the system’s parameters and working on the full integration into the marketplace. This escrow system will effectively replace the one currently in place on testnet.

The good news is that most of the heavy lifting has already been done in regards to this task. The integration and fine-tuning processes are trivial in comparison.

OMP Library

Particl’s Open Marketplace is based on the Open Market Protocol (OMP) developed by Particl developer Kewde. It is a standardized and open format containing most of the economic interactions of an online marketplace. This library gives the Open Marketplace’s backend much more flexibility and options than it currently has. While it was already implemented into the marketplace, its full integration is necessary for the new escrow model to function.

Except for the new CT escrow, the OMP Library will not offer any noticeable/visible improvements until some point in the future. In fact, all it does is give the back-end of the marketplace more tools and parameters to leverage (i.e. custom listing fields, escrow refunds & negotiations, etc). The library will, however, prove itself to be essential as we move forward into the Beta phase of development.

The OMP Library is still currently being implemented into the marketplace and Particl Desktop application.

UI/UX Tweaks

New Hover Function Shows Spendable, Locked, and Total Balance Anywhere on Particl Desktop

While we were presenting the marketplace in Hong Kong, we met many people coming from different backgrounds and with different experiences. This has generated for us a long list of feedback, comments, and suggestions, lots of them being about UI/UX improvements.

Some of our developers have taken this list and started implementing the suggestions we think will improve the user experience. These tweaks are minor and won’t take much time to resolve. They are not function-related issues, but merely visual fixes. At this moment, The Open Marketplace’s interface is ready for mainnet. These tweaks will only make it better.

Bitcoin Codebase 0.18

Have you noticed that all the latest testnet versions of the Open Marketplace have been running on Particl Core 0.18 while the mainnet version of Particl Desktop still operates on Particl Core 0.17? That’s because most of the modifications we’ve made to the marketplace in the last few weeks have been built with Particl Core 0.18 in mind.

There have been lots of issues when testing testnet (0.18) within the same environment as a mainnet wallet (0.17). This is due to a so-called “backward compatibility” issue — some of the new features may need to be integrated differently on 0.17 than on 0.18. Yes, we are definitely serious when praising Tecnovert for his amazing work. Keeping Particl’s codebase, as well as everything built on top of it, up-to-date with Bitcoin’s latest core version is a complex, ever-evolving, and time-consuming task.

We’ve been following the development of Bitcoin Core 0.18 very closely. We’ve also been constantly preparing all the changes required for the update. Earlier this month, the Bitcoin developers have released the tentative release date of April 3rd for the 0.18 Bitcoin update.

Release schedule for 0.18.0 · Issue #14438 · bitcoin/bitcoin
Here is a proposed release schedule for 0.18.0, the next major release of Bitcoin Core. Like for previous major…github.com

Since the release date of Bitcoin Core is scheduled for after the end of Q1, we would need to modify a lot of components of the marketplace so that they could work on Particl Core 0.17. They would then need to be reverted back to their initial form (built for 0.18) only a few days after the first mainnet release. This would be an unnecessarily time-consuming process that wouldn’t provide any added benefit to the marketplace. This is the main driver for why the mainnet release of the “official” Open Marketplace builds will go just a few days into Q2.

We’ve also always said we didn’t want to release a Bitcoin codebase version prior to Bitcoin doing it. This is not only a mark of respect for the developers working on this incredible codebase but a security measure for the Particl project. This is why we always wait a couple of days before updating our codebase — should there be any issue on Bitcoin’s end, we would wait for it to be resolved before updating our codebase.

This is why we have taken the decision to wait for Particl Core to update to its 0.18 version before releasing the marketplace on mainnet. Not only will this save a good amount of development time (which will be used more efficiently), but it will also allow developers to keep perfecting the release and run more tests while we wait for the Particl Core 0.18 update.

Note: The current Alpha Open Marketplace Alpha 2.0 has successfully been tested on mainnet. There hasn’t been any new identifiable issue as a result of this internal test.

General Small Tweaks & Fixes

As always, the Particl developers are constantly making tweaks, fixes, and improvements to all the components of the marketplace. This will always be the case as we strive to offer the best, blockchain product in the industry, bar none. Don’t forget to log any feedback, suggestion, bug, or comment on Github. This is the best way to attract the attention of one of Particl’s developers and is the quickest way to make changes happen!

NOTE: For more information about what item are being worked on and reviewed, please visit the Status Report page on Particl.io

Mainnet Release Timeframe

With all the above considered, we’d like to make the mainnet release timeframe clearer. At this moment, we’ve successfully tested the Open Marketplace Alpha 2.0 on mainnet, without any issue. We will, however, publicly release the first mainnet version of it only after Particl Core 0.18 is released — taking us into mid-April if the current Bitcoin release schedule sticks. That’s because we need to let Bitcoin Core 0.18 run on Bitcoin for a couple of days, make sure no issue arises, update Particl Core to 0.18, and then push the Open Marketplace on mainnet.

The short time between now and the date of the mainnet release for the marketplace will allow Particl developers to implement the changes and fixes identified in TOKEN2049 as well as fine-tune and improve the initial mainnet features (CT escrow, multi-wallets, interface, etc). This small extra time will also allow them to run more tests and deliver a more stable first mainnet build.

If you’ve been looking into selling and buying stuff on the Open Marketplace, then now is definitely the time to get prepared! Particl is going to unlock the full potential of global online commerce and will lead to the biggest revolution the eCommerce sector has ever had. It only gets more exciting from this point onward.

We have a lot of content coming in the next few days — announcements, future features sneak peeks, explainers, blog posts, videos, tutorials, and etc. Don’t miss any of it by joining us on the awesome Particl Discord server!