AMA/FAQ Livestream Summary

(4:07) Is it still the plan to integrate Changelly directly within Particl Desktop.

Yes. We still have big plans for Changelly, and we definitely think they will help a lot make our currency-agnostic vision become reality by providing a wide array of coins as well as the liquidity to support each of them. They also provide a great developer API toolkit which will allow us to experiment with a lot of what they offer and make the integration that much easier.

As per our currency-agnostic approach, we are designing Particl Desktop (our main wallet) in such a way that it could easily integrate Changelly, but also any other similar service. That means that while we are going to integrate Changelly directly within Particl Desktop, we may end up integrating several other services, some that may provide different coins, features, and services. We believe that Particl’s agnostic approach will help get the marketplace much more adoption as well as empower other cryptocurrency communities by providing them more utility and a convenient way to spend their coins.

(4:07) Is it currently being worked on?

The team is currently focused on the development of the Beta version of Particl Marketplace and the integration is not being actively worked on right now as it hasn’t been identified as a “Beta item”. We’ve also approached Changelly to discuss including them in one of our testnet iteration of Particl Marketplace, but they do not operate a testnet or test version of their product, so that makes integrating Changelly impossible within any of our testnet version.

Don’t forget that Particl Desktop is still designed in such a way that would make this integration easy to set up and, as we go down the list of priorities, this will be worked on after the release of Particl Marketplace Beta. Being currency-agnostic is and will stay one of our core vision.

We would like to mention that it is always possible to see what’s currently being worked on right and what’s scheduled to be worked on after that by checking out our Status Report page on particl.io.

(10:14) Can the team make atomic swaps more user-friendly?

As it currently stands today, atomic swaps (the trustless coin exchanging protocol) are very rough around the edges and most definitely a bleeding-edge way to trade cryptocurrencies mostly reserved for advanced users. There are no easy-to-understand guides out there yet, and the number of people willing to trade their coin through atomic swaps is definitely limited for the moment.

At Particl more precisely, we’ve had atomic swaps ready on mainnet ever since October 2017, but never really have integrated it into any of our wallets so far. As with everything we do, user-friendliness and making available accessible solutions is one of our top priority, so rest assured that our integration of atomic swaps will be built in such a way that it can be easily used by anyone without advanced technical knowledge. It might not be perfect on its first iteration but just like Particl Desktop, for example, it will keep on getting improved as time goes on and as we receive feedback from users. Considering how advanced and complicated executing atomic swaps currently is though, such an easy-to-use integration could take some time until it is officially released on mainnet. As for the integration itself, we have been bouncing ideas between two solutions:

Decentralized Exchange Dapp for Particl

It’s been discussed for some time that we might be interested in building a decentralized exchange based on atomic swaps somewhere in the future. This is obviously not an item on our current roadmap, nor is this even guaranteed to ever happen, but it is one of the solutions we discussed as being interesting for the platform.

Checkout Option

Having the ability to have the users choose what payment method they would like to use as part of the checkout process might be a more intuitive way to go about it. This is, after all, how most eCommerce platforms and plugins do it. This would not require users to store any coin on Particl Desktop and would be a really user-friendly way to use atomic swaps that resembles how people already do online payments.

Decentralized Exchange Integrations

There are, however, middle-ground solutions that could be deployed in the meantime. In fact, some projects are currently working on Changelly/Shapeshift-like services built using atomic swaps and other decentralized means of exchange. These are, of course, not 100% trustless solutions since most of these atomic swap exchanges use centralized order books and order matching systems, but they are still considerably more decentralized than their centralized non-custodial counterparts (i.e. Changelly). They also present themselves as interesting solutions as they will likely offer more liquidity than bare bone atomic swaps, and could even be able to be integrated into Particl Desktop either as DEXes or checkout options. Some good examples of such middle-ground services could be found in Altcoin.io and AtomicWallet.

(16:58) Has the NJIT Department of Technology Reviewed a Potential Weakness with RingCT When it Comes to Low Number of Transactions?

For some context, this question addresses the potential weakness of privacy protocols when confronted with a low amount of transactions. As a general rule of thumb, the more private transactions there are on a given chain, the more private these transactions are estimated to be. We’ve known this potential issue for some time, in fact, this is a problem every single privacy coins have to deal with. This is one of the reasons the marketplace and RingCT are on parallel tracks for mainnet release. Indeed, we strongly believe the number of marketplace transactions (since they will all default to RingCT) coupled with non-marketplace RingCT cryptocurrency transactions will at least maintain a solid anonymity set floor that will get higher as other Particl Dapps then start to make their appearance in the future. Because a lot of RingCT-based privacy coins are just that, coins, they rely on one single source of transactions (currency transactions) to keep their anonymity set high whereas, with Particl, real-world use-case is very likely to help a lot with the quality of the privacy on the platform.

That being said, our RingCT implementation has been academically reviewed by the NJIT Department of Technology and they’ve focused on various aspects of the protocol, including how to optimize privacy within various anonymity sets and ways to improve (or maintain) the overall privacy of the protocol when faced with many potential scenarios.

We’d also like to reemphasize that privacy, security, and decentralization are three of our core values. We absolutely agree that the marketplace should be as private and secure as it could potentially be once it launches on mainnet, and we are actively researching and working on implementations to make sure these three core values are respected at any time and with all of Particl’s core features.

(22:54) Is the team looking into other privacy protocols, and if so, what would be the implementation estimate?

We are not looking into other privacy schemes, but Tecnovert is currently working on some RingCT improvements he’s been wanting to implement for some time now. Although no major issue or vulnerability has been detected in both WSA’s security audit and NJIT’s academic review, some minor issues might have convinced him that it would be worth it to work on the improvements before we proceed with our RingCT + governance hardfork. Although these changes do not constitute an outright change of privacy protocol, they are small improvements our developers see the need to fix after over 1 year of testing and outside review. It might be interesting to note that, as Dasource/Shazzy (Particl Research & Development) mentioned, these changes being made to the RingCT scheme could mean that the privacy protocol may not be able to be defined as purely a ring signature + confidential transaction setup (RingCT) but something a bit different. These changes will make the RingCT protocol a more private solution and one that is potentially cheaper to use.

The very first commits related to these RingCT improvements have started appearing on Github this week. More details will be communicated at a later time. In the meantime, you can have a look at the work being accomplished by Tecnovert by following the Particl Core repository’s commit page.

(26:10) Will the team postpone the mainnet release of the marketplace in order to make sure Particl’s RingCT privacy is optimal?

As mentioned above, privacy is one of our core value and we would not release the marketplace on mainnet until we are fully satisfied with the level of privacy it offers. That being said, we are absolutely confident in the solutions and improvements that Tecnovert has identified and started working on, and we also believe that marketplace activity will greatly help with the transaction pool.

It’s also very important to note that privacy doesn’t stop at currency transactions. Everything built on Particl is being built with privacy in mind and in a constant state of evolution. For example, we are currently making a major code refactoring of the MAD escrow system which will make it more private and again, potentially cheaper to use. Another example of how privacy and security are being taken care of at every level of the platform is with the fiat price pegging mechanism. It would be easy to simply integrate some API from CoinMarketCap that updates prices every 5 seconds or so, but that would also leak some data such as user location based on currency bias that a passive observer could use to start profiling users.

Every single aspect of Particl Marketplace is built with privacy and security at its very core, and all these functions add up in symbiosis and contribute to the privacy factor of the platform. We are in a constant state of research when it comes to security and privacy solutions. As we often say, it’s in our DNA, and it is what we are all about!

(28:33) When is marketing going to kick up?

Internally, the preparations for the mainnet release of Particl Marketplace has already started. This week, our marketing/comm team has moved to Jira, just like our developer team has done earlier this summer. In fact, adopting agile methodologies has made a tremendous difference and helped our dev team a lot in attaining better productivity as well as intra-team communication efficiency, and we are looking forward to applying this same approach to our marketing/comm team. We’ve also been reshuffling some of our resources, are reviewing our budget, have started contacting some of the people we identify as key people for the launch, and have started drafting various documents and strategies to ensure that Particl Marketplace’s launch is done properly.

(35:11) Did Qiang Tang work on private listings for Particl Marketplace?

No, this is not part of what they reviewed.

(35:45) How much time would it take the team to release private listings on testnet?

Our team’s goal is to have Particl Marketplace Beta ready by the end of the year, so working back from that point private listings should be released on testnet within that timeframe. Private listings are probably not as critical of a feature as RingCT and governance, and while we do want this feature to be part of the mainnet release, it might also make its appearance on testnet after Beta. The marketplace has, however, been designed with this very feature in mind, and the word from our developers is that it should be relatively easy and quick to implement.

As with everything, Particl is a project with a lot of moving targets and the order and timeframe at which features are released can vary greatly depending on a multitude of factors.

(37:01) If the governance mechanism and RingCT work fine, would the marketplace potentially be pushed to mainnet even though all the items identified as Beta items aren’t ready yet?

As mentioned above, the two main items required for Beta are the governance system and RingCT. Other features will also most likely be part of the mainnet release, although it could be debated whether to include them or not at first if they are not ready and we are “in an urge” to release the marketplace.

(38:14) Could we at least have one guest per AMA/FAQ Livestream to show the project from another perspective?

Yes, we fully agree. Our developers are very busy with the coding part of the marketplace but it would be great to get more guests from time to time. Some of our best livestreams happened with some of our developers on. It might be possible that for the next livestream we’ll be joined by our Lead Graphic Designer CRZ.