What Can We Take Back From 2019?

Last year was a year of straight-up delivery with both Particl’s long-awaited Open Marketplace and RingCT (with Bulletproofs) going live on mainnet. More importantly, 2019 will forever be the year where private, free, and borderless eCommerce became a reality for everyone. A very important milestone in human commerce’s history when you think of it…

It’s also a year where it became obvious that simply pushing innovative and unique blockchain code just doesn’t cut it alone for a project to see great success and get decent exposure. And that’s okay, even great, because it signals that the industry is becoming more mature and wants to see blockchain products finally get some “real-world adoption”. That’s the metaphorical “blockchain killer product”, and that’s precisely why Particl is bound to shine moving forward!

In fact, the Open Marketplace is a unique offering — it offers unmatched privacy in eCommerce and allows sellers and buyers to connect directly and safely transact by paying almost no fee at all. It takes third-parties (marketplace operator, payment processor, web host, etc) totally out of the eCommerce process and secures the user’s data and personal information at every step of the way, a perk that’s definitely becoming more and more valuable in an era of ever-increasing data mining, breaches, and identity thefts.

Particl’s Adoption

Yet, the level of adoption of the marketplace is still relatively low at this moment, a surprising fact for some. That’s due to a few reasons both internal and external to Particl, and luckily none of these reasons should really sound the alarm bell.

Some of these reasons are directly due to Particl itself. In fact, the Open Marketplace is still very much an early Beta software and is simply not ready for mass adoption just yet. After all, it more than clearly says so in the marketplace’s header banner on Particl Desktop.

As a matter of fact, some of the processes as well as the user interface of the marketplace are still relatively complicated for most people to use. The marketplace also lacks a few important features usually expected by either buyers or sellers on traditional online marketplaces. In reality, any significant amount of money invested towards aggressive user adoption campaigns would more than likely result in a poor user adoption rates simply due to the earliness of Particl’s product. Getting people to peek around is one thing, getting them to become Particl marketplace users is another thing entirely.

Some of the reasons are also external to Particl. For example, the more than two-year-long cryptocurrency “bear market” surely hasn’t really encouraged long-term cryptocurrency holders to spend their coins the same way a “bull market” would…

A New Roadmap is on the Way

The very good news is that the Particl team is very aware of its marketplace’s bottlenecks! With Market Management, a very major marketplace update, coming out in a few weeks, it will mark the completion of a very high-level overview of what the marketplace was initially imagined to be — an open eCommerce network populated by an infinite amount of markets. In other words, the release of Market Management marks the end of a very particular development phase for the project.

That being said, that also means that it marks the very beginning of a new development phase, one that will be all about building the right features and tools for its targeted users. This new phase will also be all about increasing the marketplace’s accessibility, ease of use, and user interface as much as possible. In simple terms, this new phase is all about eliminating any reason why most people would not buy and/or sell on Particl.

Buckle Up!

In the next few days, multiple blog posts will be published on Particl.news. They will be a deep dive into the marketplace’s current status, its level of adoption, and current bottlenecks. They will also explain, in detail, the reasoning behind the Particl team’s strategy moving forward as it jumps in this new decade with both feet. This mini blog post series will ultimately culminate with the exciting reveal of the new Particl roadmap! Get ready, as the new roadmap is more than likely to blow a few people’s minds! 😉