Thank you to our developers, community and team!
Particl blockchain was born in 2017, July 17th. From our first days to our meaningful first steps, learning to run and stacking on muscle, seeking out leaders/teachers and listening to our cheering sectionâââthis year has been an amazing journey!
Before we move into our critical sophomore year of building and growth I wanted to reflect on the past 6 months since PART began moving on the main chain and appreciate all the hard work and accomplishments the developers, community and team completed in 2017.
Iâm preaching to the choir but you, our community, already know that building a coin (privacy enabled or vanilla) whoâs value only comes from moving between exchanges and/or shifting into other coins depending on the mood of the market has a limited ability to change the world.
A recent article on Hackernoon logically broke the mass of cryptocurrency projects into 3 categories: Currency, Utility and Platform. While Particl wasnât listed in their research [lame], this logic is embedded in our vision:
⊠to foster a fully independent, decentralized economy and provide a sustainable environment of collaboration and innovation that empowers peers across different blockchain projects while respecting their rights to freedom and privacy.
Itâs a mouthful, but key words in itâââdecentralized, economy, collaboration, freedom, privacyâââaffect every decision the team has made since day one and every decision going forward.
First Days
Token exchange
Prior to going live in July we held a successful token exchange (March/April 2017). Dwarfed by funding raised by ICO projects and supported by our generous contributors, we reached all three milestones and our goal of $750,000 to support a focus team for 10 months for the development of Particl Core and the Particl Marketplace MVP.
Whitepaper
Developer Ido Kaiser presented the first draft of our marketplace in March 2017. https://github.com/particl/whitepaper/blob/master/decentralized-private-marketplace-draft-0.1.pdf
Particl Foundation
A crucial step prior to launching the PART blockchain was to create the Particl Foundation. A non-profit located in Zug, Switzerland, the Foundation controls all the donations received in the token exchange and financially supports the development of Particl.
The foundation and its board will strictly function as an entity with the mission of providing funding and support for the Particl ecosystem, the continued development of the Particl network and academic, non-profit & for-profit development of enhancements for the Particl platform and privacy domain. The foundation will not govern nor make choices for the network itself, as the network will be governed in a decentralized manner by the native voting system directed by the network token holders themselves
Currency
When Particl launched the PART token in July it was the only coin besides BTC and LTC running the latest secure code (0.14.2 at the time) and the first coin with native SegWit (all transactions on Particl use segregated witness).
On top of Bitcoin, PART was also the first/only coin with Confidential Transactions (CT) privately blinding transactions amounts (breaking traceability), and was the first/only coin with Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) allowing truly private transactions that privately obfuscate both amounts and addresses (breaking traceability and linkability).
The Particl development team launched PART with these âfirst in the industryâ features, day one⊠youâre welcome!
To stop at the private, PART cryptocurrency was never in the cards for the team or our supportive community. The beginnings of an economy built on the decentralized network effects of blockchain starts with a currency but in no way ends there.
First Steps
Security
There is a responsibility put on a foundation/project to protect its userbase with the latest security research/development offers. Rule 1: maintain the codebase. Your codebase is your infrastructure, and in economics spending time/money on infrastructure paves the way for growth and prosperity.
This year Bitcoin has updated its codebase 3 times since the launch of Particl. Our team has merged those changes each time at a speed unmatched in the industry.
- Bitcoin Core 0.15.1 (17.11.11)| Particl Core 0.15.1 (6 days later)
- Bitcoin Core 0.15.0.1 (17.09.19)| Particl Core 0.15.0.2 (10 days later)
- Bitcoin Core 0.15.0 (17.09.14) | Merged with above (15 days later)
To put this in perspective with other top cryptocurrency projects with Bitcoin as their codebase:
Itâs worth noting even straight forks of the Bitcoin blockchain this year arenât being responsible to stay up-dated after the ceremony of splitting, gifting âfreeâ coins to historical BTC addresses and instant piggybacking on existing services.
The importance of fixing security breaches should be self evident in our technology dominated livesâŠ
The above video is from the #BreakingBitcoin conference this year and this was the controversial presentation given by Chris Jeffrey exposing a big permissions bug that was later fixed in Bitcoin 0.15. All project codebases older than protocol 0.15 are vulnerable to this bug and the farther away from the latest code a project is the potentially harder it is to make fixes and protect its users.
Testnet
The moxie of a project can be gauged by their development community and testing environment. Before going live in July we opened up our open source code to testers and developers in June. Thank you to all the people that helped prepare for our genesis block and successful launch!
Two of our most important developments started on testnet this year: RingCT and Cold Staking (conditional staking). Cold Staking has since moved onto mainnet while RingCT is being reviewed with the help from researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Thereâs no reason for Particl to not stay lock-n-step with Bitcoin researchers and developers throughout 2018 and beyond, and PART users should expect nothing less. Our privacy like CT & RingCT are enhancements to current protocol; making Bitcoin private⊠no matter what project forks BTC blockchain next year making the same claims đ
Learning to Run
Wallets
With creating a top-tier privacy cryptocurrency in the books, our focus shifted to our other 2017 roadmap items that included tools to make PART use more mobile and user friendly. We built 4 wallets this year for Particl users, specifically our Copay Wallet and our Electron Particl Wallet.
The Particl team was the first crypto project this year to offer a Copay Wallet based off the open source, HDâmultisignature wallet from BitPay.
The wallet is like a swiss-army knife for PART with the ability to have multiple wallets, shared wallets, multi-signature addresses and more.
Our Electron Particl Wallet is a first-of-its-kind wallet in the cryptocurrency space. Opting for a better user experience and greater security, we moved away from the classic Bitcoin âQtâ wallet, instead building a full-blown WebEngine.
This approach allowed us to create a beautiful interface and a standardized API to build extensions upon. The team is using Angular as the main framework.
Utility
âYouâre supposed to use these coins to consume services like identity lookups or decentralized DNS lookups but there is no platform to use these coins yet,ââââDaniel Jeffries
Mr. Jeffries rightfully identifies one of the pitfalls of crypto coins (currency) or in this case utility coins. 90% of crypto in the space this year are currency only coins that have no intrinsic value and are only as meaningful as the person buying on the other end.
Again, circling back to Particlâs vision of building a decentralized economy, every decision we make is informed by this vision. Creating the currency was step 1, creating a marketplace for people with cryptocurrency to be spent helps form an economy. A cycle of spending and earning provides utility on the blockchain.
Particl Marketplace is scheduled for alpha release in Q1 of 2018. Work has been intense prepping the UI/UX and back-end as 2017 came to an end.
particl/dapp-shell
dapp-shell - DApp Shellgithub.com
Open Market Protocol (OMP)
Developer Ido Kaiser had the pleasure of presenting at Hackers Congress ParalelnĂ Polis this year. One of the pieces he shared was the development of our OMP specification for the platform.
The intent of this specification is to create a standardized and open format that can encompass all the economic interactions of an online marketplace. It is a good reference for the functions the team is building into Particl Marketplace.
Stacking on Muscle
Ok, in this review Iâm about 3 months into our 6 months of being live on the blockchain. Thereâs no way we could do so much this year, so fast, without our amazing global team!
Growth
At this time weâre approaching 20 people on the Particl Team. All team members are paid and 18 are full-time. The development team makes up the largest group with 14 full-time developers, 1 part-time developer.
Currently, the team is optimally loaded more on the development side to deliver the Particl Marketplace MVP as promised, Q1 2018. The marketing and communications team will be growing next to start 2018 as a big push for community growth, awareness and adoption across the cryptocurrency landscape is priority #1 ahead of the markeplace release.
Hardfork / Cold Staking
Particl had our first hardfork Nov.10th, 2017. A planned hardfork to activate Cold Staking, the community came through with spreading the word through creative graphics and viral tweets.
Atomic Swaps
In October, 2017 the Particl and Decred teams completed cross-chain atomic swaps between both chains. We will continue to test and collaborate cross chain transactions with other projects. This is a big part of our vision for the cryptoagnostic Marketplace.
Integrated: BTC, LTC, VTC, DCR
Seeking Leaders/Â Teachers
We began strategically laying out Particl and 2017âs critical path to deliver the Particl Marketplace MVP with a strong, solid team of advisors that includes: Micah Spruill, Joe Fisher, Yann Alleman and Arcanum.
Tapping into experience and expertise within the cryptocurrency space is always something Particl is searching for. As we move into 2018 and once Particl Marketplace is live the opportunities to engage other communities, developers and services multiplies tenfold.
We closed out 2017 with great additions to our team that increased our knowledge base and strategic business connection possibilities.
Advisors
Adding advisors like Charlie Shrem, Miguel Cuneta, John Bailon is the recipe for success that the Particl community and all crypto communities should be really excited about heading into 2018!
Research
The Foundation began November with a $35,000 donation to the New Jersey Institute of Technology that gives us a focused team of students and faculty lead by Assistant Professor Qiang Tang.
His team will spend 6 months combing over privacy enhancements Particl has added on top of Bitcoin such as Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) and focused research surrounding decentralized marketplaces, privacy and user acquisition/localization strategies.
Professor Tangâs research interests lie in applied & theoretical cryptography, privacy and computer security. In particular: blockchain technology, post-Snowden cryptography, accountability, and information theoretic security.
Biggest Fans
Community
Our community has some heavy contributors. Closing out the year, more than 20 people contribute and add value to the Particl Project on a regularly basis in multiple disciplines. This number is steadily growing and the Particl team is honored and thankful to have their passion, vision and skills on their side.
Join the emerging Particl Community via our socialmedia channels.
Of note: Our Twitter page has surged past 10.5k followers over the 2017 holiday season! đ
As 2017 comes to an end the entire team at Particl says âThank You!â
Our vision of building a decentralized, anonymous economyâââwhere currency users arenât just moving coins from exchange to exchange but actually are owners of a decentralized marketplace flowing through the network to actually spend and earn PARTâââhas never wavered.
Happy New Year!
Particl Team