If you haven’t noticed yet, a new development Status Report has recently been posted on our website. This new report contains a lot of information about the status of the project’s development as well as a pretty good presentation of the features that are most likely to be included in the Beta version of Particl Marketplace.
What We Are Busy With
This section of the report shows what the Particl development team is already working on. These items are currently under active development and are the primary short-term focus points of our developers.
Marketplace
As many of you already know, the team is currently heavily focused on developing and putting together both the project and marketplace governance systems.
The project governance system will allow users to create and submit proposals for the community to vote on. These proposals will be extremely useful to reach consensus within the community in a provably fair fashion. This proposal system is required for the community to vote on what to do with the remaining funds in the Community Initiative Fund (~33,000 PART, 100% community-owned).
The marketplace governance system, on the other hand, is the function that allows users to flag undesirable content on Particl Marketplace. As no party other than the community itself has moderation powers over the marketplace, this feature is considered an absolute requirement for the marketplace DApp to be released on mainnet. Indeed, this mechanism gives community moderation powers over the content posted on it so that it can stay clean and free of reprehensible or spammy content.
Aside from both governance systems, there is also quite a few improvements being made to the marketplace based on the various feedback we’ve received from all of the people who have tested the Alpha version. This includes the refactoring of several aspects of the code, making it much smoother, faster, and intuitive to use, and a few new feature enhancements such as advanced filtering options and expiry time on listed products.
A few items here are actually quite interesting. In fact, the team is currently working on a new hardware wallet integration, Trezor, to give users more options when it comes to secure storage of funds.
Multi-Wallets
A major and long-awaited Particl Desktop feature has also started being worked on, namely multi-wallets. This function enables the possibility to set up several different wallets within the same Particl Desktop instance. This is a great feature for both security, privacy, and usability.
Multi-wallets allow users to segment their entire profiles and eliminate the risk of mismanaging personal data through isolation. In fact, multi-wallets can be seen as different “accounts” within the same application (Particl Desktop), each wallet having its own set of addresses, transaction history, marketplace profiles and wallet parameters (i.e. cold staking keys). In other words, there is no data being shared between each wallet, and when switching between them, the previous wallet’s data is entirely purged before even loading the other wallet. This isolation and data purging process makes it impossible for any type of data to leak between different wallets even if they are running from the same Particl Desktop instance.
This feature will be crucial for users to create different marketplace profiles or accounts (i.e. a buyer and a vendor account) and will make not mixing marketplace activity and personal finances a very easy and foolproof process. Users can also get creative and use this feature for all sorts of purposes, one of them being the easy “budgeting” of one’s staking revenues.
Indeed, multi-wallets make possible to set a different staking node per wallet, even if they are operated from the same Particl Desktop instance. Then, each staking node can be set up in such a way that it sends staking rewards to a different address (as in, not to the same addresses actively staking) per wallet. That way, stakers can easily budget their staking earnings by redirecting their rewards to various different addresses at the percentage they want (i.e. 50% sent to a savings address, 25% sent to a “vacation fund”, and the other 25% sent as a donation to a Community Fund used to fund and develop projects on the Particl network).
Trezor Integration
We’re currently working on the Ledger Wallet integration, but we’re not stopping there. With the goal of providing our users with more flexibility by making more options available, we can announce that we have started working on an integration to the Trezor hardware wallet!
Trezor is a single purpose device which allows you to make secure Bitcoin transactions. With Trezor, transactions are completely safe even when initiated on a compromised or vulnerable computer. Because the use of Trezor is very easy and intuitive we believe it will help Bitcoin adoption among people not familiar with the security issues. — https://wiki.trezor.io/FAQ:Overview
Waiting for Review
A few items have been completed and are awaiting the final review before being integrated. Actually, all the Particl Desktop items listed as “Waiting for Review”, that is, the cold staking widget as well as the user interface upgrade, have been completed and are already part of our Particl Desktop 1.2.2 mainnet pre-release. The rest of the “Waiting for Review” items should be integrated soon, namely the location selector for better price structuring, the proposal screen and notification system for order status changes.
What’s on the Horizon — Beta
This section is probably the most interesting as it reveals the projected items for the Beta version of Particl Marketplace. These listed items are indeed what the Beta will most likely include and paints a clear picture of what the development team will be working in the short to mid-term.
Multi-Wallets
As pointed above, multi-wallets are already under active development and are going to be a big part of the marketplace’s security, privacy, and usability.
Starting Particl Desktop Without the Marketplace
This simple feature will allow people to launch Particl Desktop in wallet mode only when one doesn’t wish to use the marketplace. This will make Particl Desktop more lightweight in terms of resources required from the device you’re launching it from (~400mb less memory required).
Private Markets & Listings
Private markets are unindexed marketplaces within the Particl network. These markets are not going to be accessible or readable from the public interface of Particl Marketplace and will instead require users to input a unique key or link (usually provided by the market creator).
Private listings are listings displayed only in private markets that, just like private markets, cannot be accessed by using the public interface of the market unless a special key or link is entered by the user. These private listings intend on emulating face-to-face transactions such as what you would do if you were to sell an item or service to a personal friend in exchange for cash money.
While these private listings can still be moderated out by the community if they are deemed undesirable, the fact that they are private and can only be accessed with a custom key will make them very hard to even reach the flagging threshold in order to be deleted. It could be expected that the only way a private listing would be delisted by the community is if the undesirable content becomes very popular and its private key leaks to the Particl stakers.
Escrow Enhancements & Deposit Negotiations
The decentralized MAD escrow system is one of the major aspects of Particl Marketplace and will, of course, undergo several enhancement phases. One of the very obvious enhancements being worked into the escrow is the full integration of the RingCT privacy protocol, which has recently been academically reviewed by the NJIT Department of Technology and audited by the WSA cybersecurity firm. Other enhancements include, but are not limited to, the user experience, its stability, the possibility to adjust the security deposit amount percentage, and more.
Particl Desktop Settings Page
Another needed feature for both the marketplace and the Particl Desktop client is a settings page. This page will allow users to set up their profiles as well as various Particl Desktop wide features. This Settings page will be an ever-evolving section of Particl Desktop and will integrate more and more options as the Particl platform grows.
Particl Software Development Kit
Another long-awaited and exciting feature is the Particl SDK: a development toolkit that will allow any developer to easily build decentralized applications, widgets, and features on the Particl network. We fully expect the release of this SDK to mark an important turn in the Particl project, one where outside developers will be able to grow the Particl platform on their own. We fully intend on organizing hack-a-thons and development contests using Particl’s SDK, and firmly believe the release of this toolkit will cement Particl as a solid decentralized application platform.
Decentralized Funding & Decentralized Organizations on Particl
Combining multi-wallets and the Particl SDK will allow people to request fundings from Particl stakers for any kind of development actively benefiting the Particl network. While still a few months away from being a real possibility, any outside/third-party development team will be able to submit formal proposals to the Particl network and request stakers to passively donate a portion of their staking rewards to a development fund.
This funding model is quite different than the now popular ICO model, as it doesn’t automatically secure an upfront amount of money to a development team, instead providing a steady but more reasonable stream of funds. This ensures the development teams stay motivated and incentivized to develop the product that they promised the community, which is even truer when the funding itself can be cut at any moment by the stakers (they only need to stop redirecting their staking rewards to this project’s development fund).
This form of funding model also encourages developers to build products that are beneficial to the entire Particl ecosystem itself. That is because decentralized applications on Particl will work using the PART coin, at least initially, and do not allow developers to create tokens for themselves and disregard the Particl ecosystem as a whole. This is true for stakers as well, redirecting their staking rewards to a project’s development fund does not award them with any kind of token, therefore they will want to donate to projects that are going to be directly beneficial to the Particl platform, coin, and ecosystem.
Stay Tuned!
There is so much development being made on Particl right now, stay tuned for more detailed updates about each of the aforementioned items as they near mainnet or testnet implementation. The Status Report is always a good way to keep yourself up-to-date with all development updates surrounding the project. Don’t forget to also take a look at our Github page, especially the Pull Request tabs of each of our repositories.