New Development Roadmap Released!

New Decade, New Way to do eCommerce! 💪

Want to see the new development roadmap right now? Then just CLICK HERE and jump straight to it!

In the past two weeks, we’ve taken a deep dive into Particl’s current status. We’ve reviewed all of last year’s accomplishments for the project and how its Open Marketplace has evolved since being released on mainnet in August 2019. If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that Particl is moving full steam ahead!

However, the marketplace’s level of adoption, compared to the overwhelming amount of development the team puts into it, also highlights a very important fact — the cryptocurrency industry has matured to the point where getting blockchain products into people’s hands is now what matters, not just delivering new and exotic code alone. Yes, your product is perhaps groundbreaking, but it needs to be used by “real” people for it to be worth anything in the “real world”.

Luckily, that’s always been the vision behind Particl, so this shift in mentality from hype to real-world use-cases is precisely where the blockchain industry needs to move towards for Particl to become successful.

Indeed, the project’s current team and advisory board are composed of old-school crypto developers, long-time online sellers, and veterans within the payment industry who see, in blockchain and distributed technologies, the opportunity to completely disrupt global eCommerce and dramatically improve it for all involved parties by taking out the need to do business through middlemen — something simply not possible when relying on traditional, web 2.0 technologies.

In other words, Particl was not formed and isn’t being developed because blockchain is the new cool kid in town. No, it’s because its novel technology is bound to have a profound impact on an industry (eCommerce) in dire need of improvements.

The Path Towards a Greater Adoption of Particl’s Marketplace

Particl’s Open Marketplace may be live on mainnet, but it’s still Beta software. For that reason, it may still be rough around the edges, lacking a few features, or seem more complicated to use than your typical online marketplace. And that’s all normal — it’s nowhere near its intended first version (that comes after Beta).

To that end, four main reasons why people may not want to use the marketplace in its current form have been identified in a previous blog post.

• Missing features
• Required improvements on some features/functions
• Required improvements on the marketplace’s performance and stability
• Required improvements to the user interface (UI) and experience (UX)

The good news is…the marketplace’s adoption is not on the slow-side of things because it doesn’t provide any benefit over traditional online marketplaces, quite to the contrary. No, it’s rather simply because Particl isn’t “adoption-ready” yet.

That’s precisely with “making Particl adoption-ready” in mind that the Particl team is proud to release, today, its new development roadmap for 2020 and beyond! What’s scheduled to be improved? What features are planned to be integrated? Just keep reading and that’ll be no mystery to you by the end of this article!

The New Roadmap is Here!

Particl’s new roadmap is designed with one goal in mind: eliminate the barriers to entry and make Particl’s Open Marketplace “adoption-ready”. In other words, each roadmap item is there for a very specific reason, which is explained in detail in the Why? section of the roadmap.

To better plan ahead, it has also been separated into three different categories, each representing a different “phase” of adoption: Core Features, Innovators and Early Adopters. Each phase targets different types of users and has its own development requirements. To understand the categorization of items, it is important to first understand the “product adoption curve”. It represents, by user volume, the adoption curve of product throughout its lifespan.

The more roadmap items within a certain “phase category” are completed, the more likely it is that its targeted users will start using the marketplace. It also makes the onboarding process increasingly easier.

Before getting down to the roadmap itself, let’s highlight a few important points:

• The roadmap is not binding, meaning that items could be added, taken out, or see their scope change at any time.
• There is no timeline associated with the roadmap. It shows what the team plans on working on in 2020 and beyond, but no deadline or ETA is provided, at least for the moment.
• The items, although separated in adoption phases, are not ordered in any particular way. That means items near the top of the roadmap won’t necessarily be delivered before items near the end of it.
• The roadmap doesn’t include ALL of the items that have been discussed by the Particl team due to the fact that some of them are more minor in scope. These will be integrated on Particl Desktop from time to time in various releases.
• While not specifically mentioned in the roadmap, general performance and UI/UX improvements are expected to be included with most releases. This is an ongoing process that will go on all throughout Beta and even after it.

Without further ado, let’s jump right into the new development roadmap for 2020 and beyond!

Core Marketplace Layer / Key Features

This stage of adoption has been limited mostly to the core Particl community due to the product itself (the marketplace) being so early in development and available features. It’s been a phase where the marketplace became reality, but still lacked a lot of very basic features and required improvements to attract new users. At that stage, the entire project is still considered experimental and probably even closer to an Alpha software rather than a Beta. Even though the marketplace is live on mainnet, it is still very much a testing phase (and thanks to YOU for being part of this very early but immensely important phase 🙏 ).

More information about this phase can be found in previous articles that have recently been posted on Particl.news (1, 2, 3).

The key features here are the ability to create and join an infinite number of markets, the customization of your identities on those markets, and do all of that for next to no fee.

Innovators Stage of Adoption

If you’re reading this, you’re part of the innovators. This adoption stage is when it starts getting interesting and when we see the first few blips of organic adoption. It is at this moment that new features and improvements will slowly start making the marketplace “adoption-ready” for the innovator type of people.

“Innovators” are people that want to keep up with cutting edge technology and have generally strong aptitudes for technical processes. They are passionate about new technology and want to be the first to try it. At this stage, users that start using Particl are still considered “pioneers” as they are willing to ignore some missing elements, contribute towards improving the project (i.e. giving valuable feedback), and deal with more complicated flows that they know will improve over time, but they are also the people that will kickstart Particl’s “closed-loop” economy by making real online commerce.

In the specific case of Particl’s Open Marketplace, this stage of adoption is likely to attract cryptocurrency enthusiasts, privacy advocates, and participants of various niche industries in need of what Particl offers (because they can’t find it elsewhere).

This phase is PACKED with deliverables, but here are some particularly interesting ones:

• The fine-tuning of the Escrow (rate, optionality, …)
• The possibility to run decentralized private auctions
• A messaging system between buyers and sellers
• The development SDK (for developers)

Early Adopters Phase of Adoption

After the innovators come the early adopters. As its name implies, early adopters are still early into the game but their numbers are considerably higher than innovators.

Instead of coming around due to the novelty of a platform or because they have a very urgent need for it, they start using the platform because they see it as providing them with a dramatic strategic advantage not possible to have on other platforms and not yet leveraged by their competitors. These people have all sorts of strategic applications and are creative in how they will use new technologies to their end. They’re also somewhat tolerant ofrisks as they know the rewards can potentially be a game-changer for them. Whereas innovators tend to be fine rushing in, testing out the platform, and help find its pain points, early adopters expect a much more “adoption-ready” platform with as little problems as possible (although they do expect the platform to not be 100% ready).

In the specific case of Particl, this stage will likely attract the more aggressive and opportunistic types of sellers and enterprises. This phase is much closer to being mainstream-ready, although it is not quite there yet.

Note: This section of the roadmap is preliminary. More items will be added to it as we inch closer to this phase of adoption.

Final Note

If you would like to help with Particl’s development and contribute to one of the items within the roadmap, feel free to contact the team on any of the channels available (Telegram, Discord, Riot, Reddit, etc) or by email.

If you would instead like to help out on getting new users onboard, then feel free to contact Cryptoguard on any of the channels available (Telegram, Discord, Riot, Reddit, etc).