AMA/FAQ Livestream Summary

When is the RingCT and governance hardfork is going to happen?

There is no official date set for it yet, and the plan to combine RingCT and governance into the same hardfork hasn’t changed since we last spoke about it. Tecnovert is still working on some RingCT improvements on stability, performance, and security, and wants to complete those before releasing it on mainnet. He did start to officially work on the Bulletproofs implementation and so it is likely that it will hit mainnet WITH bulletproofs included.

Does the Particl team plans on integrating a lock-up time for PART coins when they are unlocked for staking so that coins are locked for a longer time and can’t be moved/staked/sold before your node finds a block?

In short, it is not an immediate issue we are targeting. While this might be a good idea, in theory, to make it more difficult for people to accumulate coins and then misuse them to attack the project by abusing the Proof-of-Stake protocol, such as measure would likely severely handicap Particl as a currency. This isn’t to say that a similar measure won’t ever be considered or implemented, after all, Particl is all about security, but right now the focus is mostly on Particl Marketplace and Particl Desktop. It’s important to note that we have a Research & Development team constantly putting up to test, researching, and evaluating the many solutions popping up all over the industry, meaning that our team is pro-actively putting your security at the highest priority.

One interesting dynamics related to this question specifically is how Particl Marketplace’s escrow mechanism, which is based on the MAD game-theory and requires double security deposits from both vendors and buyers, will actually lock some of the supply out of circulation. In fact, both vendors and buyers need to deposit funds into an escrow smart-contract to ensure both parties’ honesty. This, in turn, results in a portion of the supply being locked. Contrary to the proposed solution in this question, having some of the supply locked through the marketplace’s escrow is much more organic and less intrusive, as everyone who’s going to contribute to this “lock up” will do so in a perfectly voluntary basis, as opposed to being “forced” to lock some coins up for an extended period of time by the protocol. This is a scenario we believe to be more fair to the users and less handicapping. Additionally, in the future, more Dapps could make use of Particl’s decentralized escrow mechanism and lock even more supply out of circulation, especially once we release the developed SDK toolkit. This will make it considerably harder for attackers to acquire large sums of coins and misuse them against the network (although that behavior is akin to an “economic suicide” from the attacker’s standpoint).

Looking at recent events with Charlie Shrem, does he have access to any documentation or internal chats?

No, none of our advisors have any access to internal chats and documents, except for Joe Fisher which has been heavily involved with Particl Marketplace lately (as per his experience as a career product inventor and online seller). All of Charlie’s communication with the team has been done through private messages. Like any other company that would have one of its advisors accused of some misbehavior, we’re adopting a wait and see approach to the situation, instead deciding to keep a close eye on the situation rather than proceed to hasty conclusions. Should Charlie Shrem be recognized guilty of the allegations made against him, we will have no choice but to distance ourselves from him and his brand. Until that point, we’re staying alert to the situation.

Will Particl hire a market maker and make deals with bigger exchanges like Binance?

It seems that some representative from Binance may be hanging in our community and chatrooms as we get some pretty pointed questions from them from times to times regarding happenings, updates, and news we publish. While in reality, this may not mean anything, it is definitely a good thing for the industry in general that this exchange is keeping itself super diligent. Some of their questions are actually pretty good and shows they really are keeping a close eye on what’s happening surrounding the project.

Right now, we’re mostly focused on larger exchanges such as, of course, Binance, but also Coinbase, Circle, Poloniex, Bitfinex, and other similarly large exchanges. We do not focus on smaller exchanges that are asking for a listing fee and that we believe wouldn’t yield us some return (in terms of community growth) on our investment. This is directly in line with our responsible fund management strategy and part of the reason why we are guaranteed to have funds for development for at least until the end of Q1 2019 (after which an additional funding round will be in sight).