Recently, the spotlight has been placed firmly on BasicSwap DEX, and rightly so.

It is important to remember, however, that BSX was not developed in a vacuum, but rather as an integral part of a much wider picture: a decentralized, confidential and pro-liberty economic system, which runs parallel to the world economy.

That is, after all, why the DEX and the Particl Marketplace dApp are being built in tandem: because they are each critical components towards that higher goal.

To that end, and now that Particl Desktop 3.3 is on mainnet, the new development cycle for Particl can finally begin, bringing us back to a more balanced development focus between BasicSwap and other aspects of the Particl ecosystem. Notably, this new cycle will bring forth groundbreaking advancements to the Particl Marketplace, making it more attainable and user-friendly than ever before.

This blog post will provide an overview of the Marketplace's short-to-medium-term roadmap, as well as a clear breakdown of the early development plans that will shape Particl into an open, connected, and modular ecosystem.

After reading, you will have a clear understanding of the progress and milestones that Particl will reach in 2023 and beyond — be sure to give it your full attention!

A New Journey Begins

Particl Desktop 3.3 has recently been released on mainnet, and with it officially begins the new development cycle that will transform Particl into a modular, open, and highly efficient ecosystem for privacy-first and pro-liberty dApps.

While Particl Desktop 3.3 made early strides towards that vision by decoupling Particl Core from the desktop client, the vision for Particl’s improved architecture goes way beyond the confines of Particl Desktop.

Indeed, one of the most prominent benefits of this new phase will be the introduction of massive improvements to the functionality and accessibility of the Particl Marketplace, a dApp that we believe is essential to our mission to create a parallel, independent economy.

Major Marketplace dApp Improvements Underway

In its current form, the Particl Marketplace is more a set of Particl Desktop features than a standalone entity. This poses certain limitations that can only be rectified by turning it into a proper standalone, flexible, and hyper-connected client.

Since the Marketplace’s debut and over the course of its various iterations, we've gathered feedback from our user base, including buyers and sellers who have utilized the dApp extensively. By doing so, we have been able to compile a concise list of essential enhancements that must be implemented in order to ensure the marketplace achieves widespread adoption.

Consequently, the improvements we are introducing to the marketplace dApp, and to the ecosystem as a whole, seek to increase its adoption potential by actively addressing its primary shortcomings.

The following items represent the aspects of the Particl Marketplace dApp we want to improve in the months to come.

Simplicity and User Experience

As it stands, Particl Marketplace is not optimized to support widespread adoption: its complex and time-consuming setup process, its reliance on a desktop application, and its intricate user flow all render it unsuitable to the average user. This is particularly true for less tech-savvy users, or users coming from outside of cryptocurrency-focused communities.

Furthermore, it can be said that the desktop interface, which was created for both sellers and customers, increases the complexity of the platform compared to conventional e-commerce sites, which typically provide specific portals for the two types of users.

Accessibility

The currently limited accessibility of the Particl Marketplace is also an important hindrance to adoption and growth; as of now, in order to use the marketplace, users must first download, install, and sync the Particl Desktop application.

Right from the onset, it is a tough sell to persuade online sellers and buyers to download a program for their eCommerce needs when there are numerous web-based marketplaces available. What’s more, the need to first create a wallet, wait for a complete blockchain and then a secondary P2P network to sync in full is an additional, cumulative deterrent to even give the Marketplace a try in the first place.

It’s not difficult to see how the absence of a web gateway and third-party integration within the Particl Marketplace has hindered its adoption progress, especially as we see the wider blockchain industry moving towards a more web-based approach (i.e., Defi). Addressing that shortcoming is a key element of the current Particl Marketplace development roadmap.

Liquidity and Agnosticism

A further impediment to the wider adoption of the Particl Marketplace is the limited liquidity of the PART coin, as well as the lack of support for other digital currencies.

On one hand, by introducing the ability to accept multiple currencies on the marketplace (while still maintaining PART as the privacy-preserving settlement layer), the dApp could rapidly expand its user base and broaden its use cases.

However, as PART is vital to this process, there must be sufficient liquidity for other currencies to exchange in and out of PART, and do so rapidly, without causing significant slippage.

Furthermore, sellers who wish to carry out transactions exclusively with PART must still find a way to convert a portion of their sales revenue to cover operational costs, inventory, and other associated expenses. This is currently a challenge due to the limited liquidity, which also leads to slippage and financial unpredictability.

The integration of BasicSwap-powered services into the marketplace and the forthcoming seller app holds considerable importance for both liquidity and the inclusion of new coins into the Particl economy. Other solutions are also actively being considered to further bolster liquidity for merchants.

Scalability

Finally, although not an immediate concern, it is our intention to improve the marketplace’s scalability. This is due to the fact that the SMSG network, which serves as the foundation of a significant portion of the Marketplace dApp, is also a main component of the BasicSwap DEX.

Consequently, should either of these two dApp's achieve considerable usage and generate large amounts of activity on the SMSG network, it could negatively affect the performance of other SMSG-dependent dApps.

In light of this, we have decided to begin work on a new version of SMSG, tentatively named SMSG 2.0. This new version will facilitate message distribution, allowing for a much more scalable ecosystem where high usage of individual dApps will not affect the performance of other dApps also utilizing the SMSG 2.0 network.

New DeCommerce Apps Coming Up

It can be said that the liquidity, agnosticism, and scalability of the ecosystem are reliant in parts on some of its other components (i.e., BasicSwap and SMSG 2.0); however, the user experience, simplicity, and accessibility can be directly enhanced by optimizing the marketplace dApp itself, as well as its gateways.

As such, our strategy for the near and intermediate future regarding the Particl Marketplace is to introduce two separate applications: a seller app (seller dashboard) and a buyer-oriented web/mobile gateway.

Let’s explore each of these applications in more detail, and examine how they will work synergistically to significantly improve the Particl Marketplace.

Seller Dashboard (Standalone App)

The first application scheduled for release is a standalone seller dashboard to assist vendors on Particl Marketplace to manage their listings and activities. The dashboard is composed of three distinct sections:

Remote Services Management: This suite of capabilities provides the means to manage connections to external services, such as WooCommerce and other eCommerce platforms (Shopify, Medusa, etc), inventory management systems, liquidity providers, and more.

The Particl Seller App is designed to integrate external services, granting sellers access to an ever-expanding range of eCommerce technologies, platforms, and plugins, and allowing them to leverage their various benefits directly on Particl Marketplace.

Inventory and Listing Management: This category deals with anything inventory and listing related. This includes management of listing data, prices, and publishing methodology, among other functions.

Notably, the app will enable sellers to automatically republish listings on Particl Marketplace after expiration and to adjust PART prices in accordance with current coin value via the optional utilization of APIs. This will significantly improve the seller experience and minimize the time needed to manage and maintain Particl listings, which has been a widely requested improvement from Particl Marketplace sellers.

Marketplace Activities: This category encompasses all activities related to the marketplace, including order management, customer communication, escrow progression, and more.

In the end, sellers will be able to carry out all their tasks and activities exclusively from the seller app, without the need for Particl Desktop.

Typical Flow

In order to understand the full potential of what this application enables, let us examine a hypothetical example of how it might be used by a fictitious seller.

Alice, a dropshipper, has an eCommerce store powered by WooCommerce and is looking to expand her reach by utilizing the Particl Marketplace. She downloads the seller application and, with the help of the remote service manager, is able to seamlessly connect her WooCommerce store and import her full inventory with the press of a button. Additionally, due to a specific WooCommerce plugin she uses which dynamically updates her item prices based on supplier data, she opts to have her inventory on the seller app stay in sync with any changes made on WooCommerce.

Having imported her inventory, she now configures her Particl Marketplace account preferences. She opts to peg her listing prices to a fixed US dollar valuation, pushing the price update once daily and ensuring that her items stay listed on the marketplace consistently. As a renowned seller in her community with recurring buyers, she also decides to set her escrow rate at 0%. And then, to lock in the value of her sales, she opts to automatically swap PART to USDT when a sale is finalized; she proceeds to the remote services manager and enables a liquidity plugin for that purpose. Finally, she enables a function to automatically accept bids from certain countries to expedite the service she provides to her customers.

Then, as she receives orders, she can manage them all via the app, including dispatching tracking numbers, messages, and more, all without having to undergo Particl Desktop's extensive setup process.

Subsequent Improvements

The example described above illustrates a few of the advantages sellers will gain in terms of user experience, convenience, and added capabilities via external integrations. But this proposed seller app is merely the first phase of what is ultimately envisioned.

In later stages, we intend to integrate its range of features into a comprehensive web dashboard, enabling sellers to benefit from its features without requiring a software download.

We also plan on building a ready-made WooCommerce plugin that provides sellers with the same features of the app, but fed directly into their WooCommerce dashboard. This includes the ability to receive, accept, and manage Particl Marketplace orders inside WooCommerce’s regular dashboard, in addition to sending and receiving messages and other supplementary features. When complete, this will offer sellers the ability to list their inventory on Particl Marketplace with minimal disruption to their regular workflow, a considerable step towards simplifying the acquisition of new sellers.

This is earmarked as a subsequent stage of the seller app, and requires further exploration. Nevertheless, this should give you a good understanding of the potential that Particl's open, modular, and highly-interconnected architecture provides.

Ultimately, our goal is to incorporate a lot of these features into the desktop version of Particl Marketplace — which will remain the best solution for those looking for the maximum amount of decentralization and privacy — but first deploying them within a standalone application is a quicker path towards providing sellers with those much-needed improvements.

Marketplace dApp Designed for Buyers

Even with the wide range of features and enhancements to the seller experience, we must not forget that Particl Marketplace is a two-way street. Without buyers, sellers cannot exist, and our plans for improvement would be incomplete without considering both sides of the equation.

That is why, subsequent to releasing the initial iterations of the seller app, the next step will be to develop a mobile and/or web edition of the marketplace, featuring an entirely redesigned user experience tailored to buyers.

This will give online purchasers a more straightforward user experience, ridding them of all superfluous vendor-related and technical features they don't need or care about, and making Particl Marketplace more akin to what one would generally expect from an online marketplace, while still benefiting from the advantages associated with its decentralized and privacy-first nature.

Although the exact features and functions of this app are yet to be determined, we can confidently say that our goal is to provide a buyer experience that is as streamlined and accessible as possible. To that end, we plan to focus on user-friendliness and the intuitiveness of its user interface, wider accessibility through either web browsers or a mobile application (or both), and providing a tailored experience that meets the specific needs of buyers.

Upon completion of both the buyer and seller applications, Particl's DeCommerce ecosystem will be able to provide privacy, decentralization, and freedom, while minimizing the usual drawbacks associated with those terms. In essence, by simplifying the use of Particl's DeCommerce products, the adoption potential of Particl Marketplace will inevitably be increased, bringing its benefits to as many people as ever.

Liquidity Solutions

Having great products is one thing — however, when it comes to Particl and DeCommerce, the liquidity of the underlying assets (in this case, PART pairs) is of equal importance.

This is why we are adding a remote services connector to the seller app, to work in tandem with BasicSwap DEX. With a modular and open approach to Particl, we can integrate different liquidity services, such as instant-fill orders on BSX, as well as third-party liquidity services for the marketplace, to facilitate the purchasing and selling of PART for DeCommerce purposes.

The incorporation of these systems offers market makers the chance to benefit from the emergence of DeCommerce and generate income from Particl Marketplace sales, by providing the essential liquidity users will inevitably need to tap into.

As we progress with the development of the aforementioned applications, we are also researching various liquidity plugin concepts. We believe those will significantly enhance the user experience of the marketplace and enable Particl to be a successful, autonomous economy that keeps its no-compromise approach to privacy and freedom.

The Evolution of DeCommerce

We hope that, by now, you have acquired an understanding of our short-to-medium-term plans for the Particl Marketplace and the substantial advantages of adapting Particl into a more open, connected, and modular system.

As we strive to enhance Particl Marketplace, please bear in mind that this is only one element of our broader vision for Particl to become a privacy-first and pro-liberty economy. We seek to build usable, accessible, and easy to use applications that bring the benefits of privacy and uncompromising decentralization to as many people as possible, and we make important progress towards that goal every day.

The Open-Source Revolution

Remaining mindful of our open-source origins, we strongly urge you to stay up-to-date with the progress being made concerning the platform's modularity. This will enable you to take advantage of a wealth of possibilities to create plugins, services, apps, and integrations that can optimize and expand the overall Particl ecosystem.

Also, if you’re not a developer and just have a great idea, you can also make a proposal to the community! Who knows, maybe a great concept that ends up revolutionizing the deCommerce game is really just one proposal away :^)

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Particl Marketplace and DeCommerce — What’s Coming in 2023