Let’s celebrate! 🎁🎉

Today is Particl’s second anniversary, and there are plenty of good reasons to take a moment and celebrate.

This blog post is definitely a celebratory one. In the first part, we’ll have a quick look at what’s been accomplished this year around the project, and in the second part, we’ll unwrap a very special gift in the form of brand new information about the Particl Open Marketplace, Particl Desktop 2.0, and the path forward.

Particl’s Second Year Recap

It’s now been 2 years during which the Particl team has been working tirelessly to build and improve the completely decentralized ecosystem around its privacy coin — PART.

And evolved it has! Here’s a breakdown of the most major accomplishments of this past year.

Releases

Cold Staking Ecosystem Improvements

Testnet Improvements

New Team Members Join the Particl Team

Particl Around the World at Events

Hardforks

Security Audits & Academic Reviews

Miscellaneous

It’s safe to say, a whole lot has been happening around the project, but the best thing about it is that it’s just getting started!

So as you know, today is a very special day, but it’s not only because it’s Particl’s second anniversary. No, there is indeed some very exciting news that is now ready to be shared. Are you ready to unwrap that intel gift?

Particl Open Marketplace Updates

All of the bugs that have been identified during the last testnet run (with blinded escrow) have been fixed. As it stands right now, we would feel 100% confident to release, on mainnet, the Open Marketplace with blinded escrows. The product is stable, secure, and runs very smoothly.

All there is left to do, now, is to finish the integration of the RingCT protocol into the escrow system of the marketplace so that all transactions can be completely untraceable.

New Marketplace Testnet Build Releases Next Week

As you probably are well aware by now, the 16th of July hardfork has been successfully completed, meaning both the RingCT and Bulletproofs protocols are now available on mainnet.

And because the OMP Library had initially been coded with RingCT in the first place, the integration of this privacy protocol into the escrow system has been pretty quick to go through. Of course, it was necessary for Quarkslab to complete its audit of MLSAG and Bulletproofs before integrating these two protocols into a live version of the marketplace, but as the results were published on the 5th of July (with the actual report being received by the Particl team a few days prior), it took just a few days for the Particl developers to bake in the integration into the back-end.

The team is currently running tests and making a few tweaks that are required to ensure the integration is as stable as the blinded escrow system was. We are estimating that these tweaks will only take a few days to complete, which would bring the next testnet build of the Open Marketplace, with full anon (RingCT) escrow, to somewhere within the next week. As always, this isn’t a hard deadline, but this is what we are targeting and feeling confident about at this moment.

This build will contain fixes for all the bugs and issues identified last week as well as the new RingCT-powered escrow system. This new testing round will allow you to see how the marketplace will look like once it hits mainnet, but it will also allow you to earn a few PART!

Two Bug Bounties

At the same moment as the release of the new testnet build, two bug bounties will officially start — one for the testnet marketplace build, and the other as a permanent, general bug bounty for mainnet.

The testnet bug bounty is pretty self-explanatory: earn PART for finding bugs that remain in the latest version of the testnet build. This bug bounty, which will run for two weeks, is put in place specifically to ensure that the first mainnet release of the Open Marketplace is as smooth as possible and that the code is entirely secure. Note that, as bugs and issues are identified, it is likely that there will be more than one build posted throughout the duration of the bug bounty.

The second bounty, the permanent one, is a mainnet bounty that’s going to stay posted on Particl’s official website. This bounty is dedicated to incentivizing people to find bugs, vulnerabilities, or issues, and properly disclose them to the Particl team in exchange for compensation for their work and contribution. More information about the bounty will be given when it is published on particl.io, which is going to be on the same day as the release of the next testnet marketplace build.

Generating Market Keys (Advanced Users can Start TODAY)

As the back-end code of the marketplace is now ready for launch, with RingCT escrow now baked in, it is now possible for anyone to start generating their very own market keys using the repository (and its README.md file) linked just below.

particl/particl-market
Particl Marketplace. Contribute to particl/particl-market development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com

Note: The Particl team has been building testnet and mainnet builds for conferences and community/internal testing using this repository, but they haven’t been fully anon until after the hardfork.

A market key, or Market ID, is a unique stream of characters and numbers which gives you access to a marketplace. These are, in reality, “private markets” that anyone can create. These markets can only be accessed by those who possess the key, after which they gain full permissions over it (purchase products, list items, flag undesirable content, etc).

Bootstrapping the Public Interface of the Open Marketplace

Generating a market key is important as the Particl team itself isn’t going to launch the marketplace. In fact, the Particl team is giving the opportunity for anyone in the community to create their own market key, push it on Github, and have it be selected as the default key for the public interface of the marketplace. In other words, the default key for the marketplace is going to be 100% community-powered.

You see, on Particl, there is no difference between a private and a public market. The public interface of the Open Marketplace is merely a private market which has its key set as the default key on the Particl Desktop client. Any private market could be set as the default market, and this is the opportunity that you will have as a community member.

Don’t worry, there is no risk associated with integrating a community’s market key as the default market. This is nothing like a trusted setup, and the market key’s creator won’t have any sort of special access or permission over the marketplace once the generated key gets merged. It’s not a master key.

For the next few days, it will be up to the more advanced users to figure out how to generate market keys for themselves (following the instructions of the README.md file and the folder structure should give you enough hints on how to do it). Then, in a few days, we’ll be giving out more details on how to do it so that more people can join the fun.

Particl Desktop 2.0 Releases on August 12, 2019

On the 12th of August, if everything goes well and no critical or significant bug is found on next week’s fully anon marketplace testnet build, Particl Desktop 2.0 will be released on mainnet.

Particl Desktop 2.0, as it’s version number implies, is a pretty big milestone for the project. Not only will it contain many new features (i.e. multi-wallets, community proposals, etc) and UI/UX improvements that have been on testnet ever since, but it will also be fully compatible with the Particl Open Marketplace, on mainnet.

This is it! This is the final burst to the finish line.

What is tremendously exciting is that this isn’t actually the end by any means, but rather the beginning of a new phase for Particl.

With the Particl Open Marketplace on mainnet fostering private, decentralized, and permissionless eCommerce, we are excited to see how vendors and buyers alike will use the available features.

So get ready! The months of July and August will be ones to remember for a very long time!