Particl blockchain was born in 2017, July 17th. From our first days to our meaningful first steps, learning to run and stacking on muscle, seeking out leaders/teachers and listening to our cheering section — this year has been an amazing journey!

Before we move into our critical sophomore year of building and growth I wanted to reflect on the past 6 months since PART began moving on the main chain and appreciate all the hard work and accomplishments the developers, community and team completed in 2017.

I’m preaching to the choir but you, our community, already know that building a coin (privacy enabled or vanilla) who’s value only comes from moving between exchanges and/or shifting into other coins depending on the mood of the market has a limited ability to change the world.

A recent article on Hackernoon logically broke the mass of cryptocurrency projects into 3 categories: Currency, Utility and Platform. While Particl wasn’t listed in their research [lame], this logic is embedded in our vision:

… to foster a fully independent, decentralized economy and provide a sustainable environment of collaboration and innovation that empowers peers across different blockchain projects while respecting their rights to freedom and privacy.

It’s a mouthful, but key words in it — decentralized, economy, collaboration, freedom, privacy — affect every decision the team has made since day one and every decision going forward.

First Days

Token exchange

Prior to going live in July we held a successful token exchange (March/April 2017). Dwarfed by funding raised by ICO projects and supported by our generous contributors, we reached all three milestones and our goal of $750,000 to support a focus team for 10 months for the development of Particl Core and the Particl Marketplace MVP.

Whitepaper

Developer Ido Kaiser presented the first draft of our marketplace in March 2017. https://github.com/particl/whitepaper/blob/master/decentralized-private-marketplace-draft-0.1.pdf

Particl Foundation

A crucial step prior to launching the PART blockchain was to create the Particl Foundation. A non-profit located in Zug, Switzerland, the Foundation controls all the donations received in the token exchange and financially supports the development of Particl.

The foundation and its board will strictly function as an entity with the mission of providing funding and support for the Particl ecosystem, the continued development of the Particl network and academic, non-profit & for-profit development of enhancements for the Particl platform and privacy domain. The foundation will not govern nor make choices for the network itself, as the network will be governed in a decentralized manner by the native voting system directed by the network token holders themselves

Currency

When Particl launched the PART token in July it was the only coin besides BTC and LTC running the latest secure code (0.14.2 at the time) and the first coin with native SegWit (all transactions on Particl use segregated witness).

On top of Bitcoin, PART was also the first/only coin with Confidential Transactions (CT) privately blinding transactions amounts (breaking traceability), and was the first/only coin with Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) allowing truly private transactions that privately obfuscate both amounts and addresses (breaking traceability and linkability).

The Particl development team launched PART with these “first in the industry” features, day one… you’re welcome!

To stop at the private, PART cryptocurrency was never in the cards for the team or our supportive community. The beginnings of an economy built on the decentralized network effects of blockchain starts with a currency but in no way ends there.

First Steps

Security

There is a responsibility put on a foundation/project to protect its userbase with the latest security research/development offers. Rule 1: maintain the codebase. Your codebase is your infrastructure, and in economics spending time/money on infrastructure paves the way for growth and prosperity.

This year Bitcoin has updated its codebase 3 times since the launch of Particl. Our team has merged those changes each time at a speed unmatched in the industry.

Bitcoin Core 0.15.1 (17.11.11)| Particl Core 0.15.1 (6 days later)

Bitcoin Core 0.15.0.1 (17.09.19)| Particl Core 0.15.0.2 (10 days later)

Bitcoin Core 0.15.0 (17.09.14) | Merged with above (15 days later)

To put this in perspective with other top cryptocurrency projects with Bitcoin as their codebase:

Please let me know if these codebase releases aren’t correct, I’ll fix np.

It’s worth noting even straight forks of the Bitcoin blockchain this year aren’t being responsible to stay up-dated after the ceremony of splitting, gifting “free” coins to historical BTC addresses and instant piggybacking on existing services.

The importance of fixing security breaches should be self evident in our technology dominated lives…

The above video is from the #BreakingBitcoin conference this year and this was the controversial presentation given by Chris Jeffrey exposing a big permissions bug that was later fixed in Bitcoin 0.15. All project codebases older than protocol 0.15 are vulnerable to this bug and the farther away from the latest code a project is the potentially harder it is to make fixes and protect its users.

Testnet

The moxie of a project can be gauged by their development community and testing environment. Before going live in July we opened up our open source code to testers and developers in June. Thank you to all the people that helped prepare for our genesis block and successful launch!

Two of our most important developments started on testnet this year: RingCT and Cold Staking (conditional staking). Cold Staking has since moved onto mainnet while RingCT is being reviewed with the help from researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

There’s no reason for Particl to not stay lock-n-step with Bitcoin researchers and developers throughout 2018 and beyond, and PART users should expect nothing less. Our privacy like CT & RingCT are enhancements to current protocol; making Bitcoin private… no matter what project forks BTC blockchain next year making the same claims 😜

Learning to Run

Wallets

With creating a top-tier privacy cryptocurrency in the books, our focus shifted to our other 2017 roadmap items that included tools to make PART use more mobile and user friendly. We built 4 wallets this year for Particl users, specifically our Copay Wallet and our Electron Particl Wallet.

The Particl team was the first crypto project this year to offer a Copay Wallet based off the open source, HD‑multisignature wallet from BitPay.

The wallet is like a swiss-army knife for PART with the ability to have multiple wallets, shared wallets, multi-signature addresses and more.

Our Electron Particl Wallet is a first-of-its-kind wallet in the cryptocurrency space. Opting for a better user experience and greater security, we moved away from the classic Bitcoin “Qt” wallet, instead building a full-blown WebEngine.

This approach allowed us to create a beautiful interface and a standardized API to build extensions upon. The team is using Angular as the main framework.

Utility

“You’re supposed to use these coins to consume services like identity lookups or decentralized DNS lookups but there is no platform to use these coins yet,” — Daniel Jeffries

Mr. Jeffries rightfully identifies one of the pitfalls of crypto coins (currency) or in this case utility coins. 90% of crypto in the space this year are currency only coins that have no intrinsic value and are only as meaningful as the person buying on the other end.

Again, circling back to Particl’s vision of building a decentralized economy, every decision we make is informed by this vision. Creating the currency was step 1, creating a marketplace for people with cryptocurrency to be spent helps form an economy. A cycle of spending and earning provides utility on the blockchain.

Particl Marketplace is scheduled for alpha release in Q1 of 2018. Work has been intense prepping the UI/UX and back-end as 2017 came to an end.