Soft Rebrand

As we are moving forward, the project is going to go through a soft rebrand, with today’s release being the first step towards that process. As you probably noticed, this marketplace build now features a brand new logo instead of the old one. The soft rebrand refreshes the color palette and logo of the project. We will be releasing another blog post later today explaining the details of this soft rebrand and the reasoning behind it.

Alpha, Beta, and the Way Forward

Earlier this week, we mentioned we were targeting today to be the final date for the Alpha version. This was intended to be this way so that we could time the end of the Alpha phase of development with the TOKEN2049 conference. However, while a portion of our developers was fixing bugs and improving the stability of the build, the other portion made some significant progress on a couple of other features that we would like to integrate into Alpha.

For this reason, we have taken the decision to extend the Alpha phase of development for a few days in order to bring these features on the Alpha build and ensure that they are part of our first mainnet version. These features are:

Multi-wallet capabilities

Blinded escrow

OMP Library

Multi-wallet: This feature adds the ability to manage multiple wallets within the same Particl Desktop instance. This is useful for both usability and, most importantly, security. Wallets managed by the same unique Particl Desktop are entirely isolated from each other, meaning no data is shared between wallets. This will allow buyers, vendors, and users to set multiple profiles and enhance their security setup.

Blinded escrow: While RingCT and Bulletproofs are available on testnet, they are not available on mainnet. For this reason, and because we’re first and foremost a privacy project, we’ve opted to integrate CT transactions right into Particl’s escrow. Because we already had an escrow system integrated with RingCT on Regtest (pre-testnet), we’ve decided to substitute RingCT for CT and bring that modification onto testnet. Progress made on that front has been super fast, and for this reason, we’ve decided to launch our first mainnet version with CT escrow enabled by default, effectively making the Open Marketplace private by default from Day 1. This won’t be as strong as RingCT escrow, but it sure is multiple times more private than a simple pseudonymous escrow setup.

OMP Library: The OMP Library is a protocol that brings various enhancements and attributes to the back-end of the marketplace. It is a requirement to successfully implement CT escrows and also adds a couple of security-related enhancements to it. The attributes it adds will be able to be leveraged by Particl Desktop in the future to put more information in listings and better categorize products. For more information about the OMP Library, head over to its documentation by following this link: https://kewde.gitbooks.io/protocol/content/

Beta & Mainnet

Following the implementation of these features, Alpha will end and Beta will start immediately thereafter. At the same time, Alpha will move up to mainnet as a private by default marketplace from Day 1. This Alpha phase of development extension shouldn’t affect the targeted release timeframe for mainnet too much, if at all, but it will bring features that will significantly increase the value and privacy of the product itself. In other words, we are still aiming for a mainnet release before the end of Q1 2019.