Over the past two weeks the open source contribution team has worked harder than ever before and has achieved significant progress. SegWit claiming is now available, our merchant payment solution team is nearing the QA stage of development and design, and our first of its kind brand ambassador program has been rocking full steam ahead.

Before we begin the update, we always ask that the community help us review any outstanding pull requests. Check them out here: https://github.com/BTCPrivate/BitcoinPrivate/pulls

Core blockchain:

After thorough review, SegWit claiming has been introduced to the BTCP community. This is a very big accomplishment for the BTCP ecosystem and we thank all community members who were a part of this particular development.

SegWit claiming via private keys is now supported

Further improvements to the BTCP blockchain are being investigated and worked on

Official Wallets & Payment solution:

Pull requests for both Trezor and Nano are still pending

Full node wallet version 1.0.3 has been released and supports SegWit outputs, it also allows for use of the z_shieldcoinbase command in the GUI

We are still working on Electrum supporting SegWit outputs as well

Wallets for the merchant payment solution are being finalized

We have a working prototype of an SMS to SMS method of transferring BTCP, no install or signup needed. Will be refining over the coming weeks.

Our merchant solution beta release is currently on track for a late April release and is coming together very nicely. We’ve included a couple sneak peaks as to the website content that will be used to market it, along with a peak at the product itself.

We are aiming to get the beta version of the website up by some time next week to allow for easier merchant pre-signup

The web development team will be meeting later this week to assemble all of the active components to the payment solution and begin prototype testing

Design has commenced for all / most aspects of the UI

Marketing, Support, & Public Relations:

Our marketing strategy continues to revolve around the technology, product, and community growth achievements at hand. As mentioned previously, we are investigating various enhancements to our blockchain that would be a first of its kind development in all of crypto. We are not certain yet that it can be achieved, but we are hopeful.

The merchant product roll-out will likely utilize most of our marketing bandwidth for the end of April / early May, to ensure proper education, support, and growth of such payment solution. We do plan for a large marketing “push” to accompany the launch and cross-promotion of initial vendors.

Our brand ambassador program has also rolled out its first contest giveaway running from April 9th — April 28th. Be sure to get involved!

If you have any media contacts or have a media inquiry yourself, feel free to put them in touch with us at press@btcprivate.org. We are looking to discuss our mission and strategy with anyone and everyone and would love to spread the word on Bitcoin Private across the world!

Exchanges:

We sent HitBTC a test BTCP transaction last week to help with their wallet testing. We have no further information regarding HitBTC at this time.

Accessibility to BTCP via exchanges remains one of our top priorities.

Vendor & payment gateway partnerships:

Over 50 merchant vendors have signed up for our beta merchant product and they will serve as our “first fleet” who will provide very important feedback for our product and integration support. We have assembled a partnerships team that will be leading the charge on support and vendor signups & integration. We are establishing a robust “work-flow” framework for this initiative which will be formally instated by next week.

We will have more specific details on our merchant partners once we release our phase 1 beta. If you are a merchant who wants to accept BTCP or know of any merchants who want to accept BTCP, please fill out / have them fill out our merchant vendor form.

Closing thoughts:

As we have promised in the past, we will be providing a longer-term development roadmap in the coming few weeks for Bitcoin Private. The purpose of the roadmap will be to educate and inform our community on the general direction of our technology and product initiative over the next several months and beyond.

As always, we remind our community to only trust resources and information shared from our official website, our official Github, our official Twitter account, and this Medium account.

If you would like to join our engineering team, you can apply here. If you would like to contribute on any of our marketing efforts, the best way to start is to join our ambassador program here.

We are excited to continue this community driven, open source journey to bring private transactions, both P2P and commercial, to a mainstream audience. Please leave any feedback you may have in the comments below or feel free to tweet at us!

Bitcoin Private Contribution Team