Setting Up the Stage

Particl is a project of many accomplishments. It was the first blockchain to natively integrate Segwit and have it enabled for all of its transactions, the first project to integrate RingCT on the Bitcoin codebase (or any other codebase other than Cryptonote), the first project to implement Confidential Transactions (CT) on Bitcoin’s codebase and push it onto mainnet, the first project to implement cold staking for its entire mainnet network, and the first project to enable a true PoS (not dPoS or dBFT) coin to safely cold stake from a hardware device (Ledger Nano S). To make all of this a reality, the Particl developers have been producing a lot of high-quality code, earning the team a spot within the top tiers of several Github audit reports/reviews.

All of these achievements are surely impressive, especially coming from a team that’s relatively quite small compared to other projects producing similar amount and quality of code (a look at the contributors section of this code quality ranking tells everything you need to know). But what this story fails to mention is that none of the accomplishments mentioned above actually are the main goal or product of the project, they are merely put in place to support the project’s main product. In fact, all of them exist for the sole purpose of strengthening the security, privacy, stability, and scalability of the network in prevision for the mainnet release of Particl’s first application: the Open Marketplace.

The Open Marketplace

The Open Marketplace is a product that’s been in the making for quite some time and has proven to be a huge undertaking due to its extremely ambitious nature.

In short, it is an entirely trustless marketplace with full privacy baked in by default and with almost no fee at all. The fact that it is trustless means that it can function autonomously and without any third-party having to get involved at any point in time. This allows fees to be brought down to the bare minimum and completely eliminates the trust factor involved when making online sales and purchases.

Its privacy aspect, which probably is the most groundbreaking aspect of the Open Marketplace, makes it so that all purchases and sales you make are verifiably private/anonymous. Whatever you do within the platform generates no identifiable data at all, meaning that it can’t be harvested by Particl or any other third-party other than the one you are transacting with. In other words, nothing you do on Particl’s Open Marketplace can leave any trace behind.

This privacy aspect truly is a revolution within the eCommerce industry, an industry that has made its fortune preying on its own users by collecting their data, without their consent, in order to get profits and influence.

The simple fact that no other project has ever attempted to build a completely trustless marketplace with rock solid privacy built directly at its core speaks about the complexity of the task. Being the first at doing something also means very few examples and proofs-of-concept are out there to help pave the way forward, but it also means that you can create a niche audience around your “new way” and capitalize on it!

Even though a lot of development progress has been made to the Open Marketplace in 2018, the fact it has only been operable on testnet for the entire year has made people more eager than ever to see some kind of mainnet release and finally get their hands on a working version of this groundbreaking technology.

Mainnet is Finally Upon Us!

The days where the Open Marketplace is only available as a testnet product are coming to an end. We’ve stated in the past we wanted this year to be different in nature from the previous one, and so let’s start it with a bang! Whereas 2018 was solely focused on development, 2019 will see much more action with the release of the Open Marketplace on mainnet. The best part? The mainnet release of the Alpha version of Particl’s Open Marketplace is now imminent!