Did you miss our last AMA/FAQ livestream on Youtube? Don’t worry, this update should keep you up to speed with all the latest developments and news surrounding the project!

AMA/FAQ Livestream Summary

(4:50) Could you start communicating a bit about the upcoming funding round?

We’ve stated in the past that our lead group will be discussing the next funding round when we meet later this year. To be honest, we haven’t had any formal communication on it, only thoughts and ideas were bounced around and we will try to share those with the community as they come up. The second funding round will be one of the main talking points of our next team meeting and we’ll have a plan of attack after that time.

(6:14) You said you want to rise about 20 million USD, you only have around 1 million coins to sell for the second funding round…

The numbers that we have gathered over a year history of managing a decentralized team and with a good array of active and future products make us feel comfortable in seeking $20 million in funding. That number, although could change, would be all that is needed to ensure the continuous development of the Particl project for as long as people want to use its privacy-focused and decentralized applications.

(8:10) I am wondering if the low price of the particl coin is an issue for this funding round

In order to raise around $20 million dollars, the price of the Particl coin would indeed need to be at or around 20 dollars. This will be taken into account during our next team meeting when we craft our funding strategy. We may also, should we have enough funds left from the previous funding round, postpone the funding round until more favorable market conditions arise. In other words, there is nothing set in stone yet and we will keep the community updated with the funding structure as we move forward after the meeting.

(9:14) How many investors will participate in this funding round?

We have a collection of inquiries that have already voiced an interest and reached out to us about the funding round. This will 99% most likely be a private funding round, not an ICO or community funding event. That will be nailed down, as with the rest of the funding strategy, during our next team meeting later this year.

(10:24) If we have only one (or a few) investors, then a very large part of the supply will be held by one (or a few) holders. Any thoughts on this?

We’ve discussed (again, just brainstorming at this point) having PART lots with minimum and maximum buy orders per investment group. For example, a minimum could be 1,000 PART lots or the max could be 10,000 PART lots. We don’t know yet how exactly we’ll be going on about it but it’ll absolutely be done in a manner that respects the integrity of the network, its decentralization as well as its community, even if that means ruling our some potential investors that’d be a bit a too aggressive in their tactics.

(11:55) I think these coins being put in circulation could scare future buyers. Do you plan to set some specific rules so these investors cannot dump their coins on the market?

We haven’t talked anything about the terms & conditions of the round. Typically private investment rounds have rules and participants are less impulsive than daytraders or casual investors. Details will be worked out with our legal teams too, but again, this has yet to happen. As mentioned above, everything will be done in the most responsible manner possible and will put the integrity and health of the network first.

(13:57) Do you have any kind of plan B in case you can’t raise the amount you need?

There are two scenarios that could happen. The first one is that we can’t raise the amount we need to and then have to postpone any funding round until the market conditions (or the investor pool) are more favorable. Note that, as we have secured the salaries and funds required to support the project until at least April of next year, that leaves a lot of time for market conditions to turn around and for Particl to turn some heads. It is also far from excluded that these funds could last for longer than that, so in reality, there could still be quite a long time until the moment the project outright requires more funds to survive.

The second scenario is that the market conditions are more than favorable, we raise the amount that we are seeking to raise, but don’t use the full 996,000 PART coins to do so. This would present more options to improve the network by possibly conducting a burn event of the extra PART coins that weren’t required, or set up new funds for marketing, community stimulation, development, events, philanthropy, acquisitions, even a fund for future funding rounds, and etc. This would present itself as the ideal scenario as that would give us an unlimited number of options on how to best spend these leftover funds.

(18:44) The word on Discord is that staking pools will be available soon — any information or ETA on that?

Tecnovert has been working on staking pools on both testnet and mainnet networks. He has gotten rather far so far with it but it is still in testing mode. We may be able to see or participate in some of the testing on the testnet one at some point in time soon.

As for an ETA, it’s pretty hard to tell as he may very well switch back over to RingCT and planning the upcoming hardfork as we near that event. RingCT is ready for mainnet and the governance bit (see the Status Report and this tweet) is moving smoothly.

Long story short, higher priorities may pull him away from staking pools, but yes, there are prototypes.

(23:29) How is it possible that the remaining funds from the first funding round will only last until April 2019?

To clarify, the funds going to April 2019 are only salaries which were hedged in advance to ensure that we could pay contributors in the case of any crazy market happenings (see 2018). There is, of course, more funds in the Particl Foundation coffers which could be requested by the Particl team should it need additional fundings to cover salaries and operations past April 2019.

(28:46) How can one pay for services such as featuring or highlighting their products on Particl Marketplace?

This is not going to be part of the initial version of Particl Marketplace on mainnet, but we see this feature as being very useful. It is not something that’s part of our roadmap, yet, and it might come faster if some third-party developer builds it using the coming SDK tools, but we might end up tackling it ourselves at some point in the future. Vendors are going to want tools to promote themselves and increase their sales, we are aware of this and will be something that is most probably end up being part of Particl, whether it’s part of Particl Desktop or third-party services like Mubiz, for example!

(32:31) Will the marketplace have reviews?

There will probably be reviews and it is planned in some form or another. It’s not part of our roadmap just yet but is something we’ve identified as something we want to work on eventually. There is still a lot of research that needs to be done in order to make it as efficient and accurate as possible (i.e. make it harder to fake reviews), and also do so in a way that entirely preserves users’ identities.

(34:30) Will it have a user reputation mechanism?

It is still a floating idea, but we may never have a reputation system if it proves to be detrimental to one’s privacy/security (since we are, after all, a privacy-focused project). It also might be hard to do without it being able to be gamed by users which would thus make it more or less useless. As we stand right now, we are tentatively opting for a model that is going to make use of governance paired with reviews rather than a “reputation” system.

(39:01) Does PART have a reorganization limit making long range attacks impossible?

Particl Proof-of-Stake doesn’t have a reorganization limit. This attack is mostly based on weak subjectivity which only works if a bad actor convinced the other nodes to download a modified client from a bad source. While they might have the resources to reorganize the blocks, they’d also need to trick people into using their own client and not the official one. This is one of the reasons we very strongly recommend downloading Particl clients directly from our official website or from our Github page as well as always verifying the integrity of your downloaded Particl files.

More technical details revealed by Paul here.

(43:36) Does it have Economic Clustering which makes it possible for forgers to detect forks early and switch to the chain where the other important nodes are?

​Economic Clusters is a counter-measure to the stake griding and basically includes the ID of one of the recent blocks so that peers need to be on the same chain to validate. PoSv3, thus Particl Proof-of-Stake, which is vaguely based on it, fixed this issue with dynamic stake modifier although it still is not the end all-fix all. Here are two quotes from our developers on the matter:

Tecnovert: PoSv3 removes the possibility that someone could save up stakeweight over time — that made it a lot easier for someone to save a large amount of part for a few months and have enough saved weight to rewrite a few blocks in succession. A 500 block reorganization limit (for example) wouldn’t have stopped that though” Dasource “ I agree…I wonder what the other rationale was behind it...since most attacks related to stake weight would have been less than a dozen blocks in which case it would have never helped as the default setting (in pre-PoSv3 versions) was 500”

More technical details revealed by Paul here.

(47:35) Is Particl making any effort into researching and improving Proof-of-Stake?

While the team is not solely focusing on working on Proof-of-stake and making a PoSv4, we are still improving our own PoS mechanism by making it more secure than most of its counterpart. Cold staking is one such example, which allows users to stake their funds without requiring to expose their public keys (when signing staked blocks). Moreover, if users choose to use cold staking in combination with a Ledger hardware wallet, their private keys also do not need to be exposed to any computer ever, dramatically increasing the security of Proof-of-Stake which actually usually requires users to expose both these keys at some point or the other along the staking process.

The Particl development team doesn’t currently spend time on Proof-of-Stake research specifically, but it is always aware of the developments going on around the scene and seeks to make Particl Proof-of-Stake one of the most, if not the most, secure Proof-of-Stake algorithm. Security is, after all, one of our core values which are reflected in all aspects of the project.