As crypto-devotees know, it is already possible to buy and sell many things with cryptocurrencies. However, it’s not always easy. Many of the options available right now require high fees, time-consuming account registrations, or giving your personal data to a big company. Moreover, they always introduce a middle man to the deal – there is currently no truly decentralised cryptocurrency-based ecommerce solution for people wishing to buy or sell goods. And that’s the void that Particl is looking to fill.

Particl aims to instantly and directly connect vendors that accept cryptocurrencies with buyers that want to spend cryptocurrencies. As an entirely decentralized platform that uses a mix of P2P messaging and blockchain technologies, Particl is exclusively run by its community of users, and there is no third-party or intermediary operating it or exhorting any sort of control. The Open Marketplace, built on top of the Particl network, allows anyone to buy and sell goods and services, physical or digital, regardless of where they are located in the world.

Advantages of the Particl Marketplace

The Particl Marketplace could change the ecommerce game, and they are offering many advantages.

It’s cheaper

There is no added fee, except for a small (anti-spam) listing fee of a few cents, making it cheaper to list and sell goods as compared to conventional markets (such as eBay). The theory is that the buyer will now gain access to cheaper products since the listing fees will not be passed on as a hidden cost.

It’s private

The Particl Marketplace was designed to be completely private by default. It is not a public blockchain – some transaction are pseudonymous like Bitcoin, but the levels of privacy can be increased to ring signatures and, then, to ring signatures that have been blinded so no identifiable data can be traced back to users. This way, transactions are hidden on the blockchain, images are stripped of their metadata, data exchange is encrypted, and you can even connect the marketplace through the Tor network. In other words, users of the marketplace can be completely anonymous.

There is no registration or account creation, currency transactions are untraceable, and no identifiable data is generated (and, consequently, cannot be collected by any 3rd-party). Even the metadata in your photos is stripped out before they are broadcast to the network with an item listing.

It’s safe

To add security, the Open Marketplace uses a fee-less and decentralized type of escrow (or resolution center). Just like the rest of the platform, this escrow system doesn’t rely on any third-party for issues to be resolved. Based on Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) game-theory, this system requires both sellers and buyers to make a security deposit, on top of the regular payment, into a smart-contract. The security deposits are refunded in full, to the participants when both of them mark the transaction as complete i.e. both are happy. Any disputes need to be sorted out between the buyer and seller, there is no middle man.

Challenges of the Particl Marketplace

One main challenge Particl has anticipated is issues with moderation. After all, an anonymous marketplace can easily attract fraud and dubious listings.

So Particl has put in place a completely decentralized governance mechanism where any user can vote to remove undesirable listings, comparable to the Reddit upvote/downvote system: any user can upvote or downvote a listing, and when it reaches a certain negative threshold, that listing gets deleted from the marketplace.

To vote against a specific listing, users need to flag it using the Open Marketplace user interface. Once the first user marks a listing as undesirable, it gets taken into a queue of previously flagged listings where other users will be able to either agree that it should be taken off the marketplace, or disagree and vote for it to remain listed. For a listing to be completely removed, its score needs to reach a certain negative threshold, currently -9,000 (as of the first mainnet version).

A user’s vote is the number of coins in their wallet. Voting is free; they do not need to spend the coins to vote.

Other platforms attempting this setup might have issues with one user creating multiple accounts or using virtual machines to game the system and register fraudulent votes. However, this is not an issue for Particl, because Particl counts votes on a 1 coin = 1 vote, which makes it impossible to game the system. So, if a user wants to add more power to their votes, creating multiple addresses, spamming a listing or trying to game the system will not make a difference, because they will still need to pay for their votes. So they can do it in a legitimate way: acquire more PART coins.

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Louise Elali

Communications