Already being tested on TESTNET6, Cold Staking is the concept of “defining a node which has the sole power to only stake.” The result is a more secure ability to stake while using multi-signature addresses.

Cold Staking will bring protocol changes that, when launched on mainnet, will make it the first planned hard fork on the Particl blockchain.

Creating the Particl Market is the prime goal of this Roadmap. This is the decentralized marketplace Minimal Viable Product (MVP) everyone is most excited for. Alpha will be well designed and bring major protocol changes.

RingCT on mainnet, the audit of Particl Core (including RingCT) and our university Research Grant all will likely fall into Q4 as well. This is a good example of versioning on our roadmap. Version 1.1 will get to a point it is no longer useful, at which time we will update it to better reflect real-time activity on the project. RingCT, for example, will be a planned hardfork on Particl blockchain so releasing it with other Q4 protocol changes will be considered by the team.

When we launched the Particl blockchain, 996,000 PART tokens were created and time locked in a multi-sig address* that was reserved for our Primary funding round. Delivering the decentralized marketplace MVP is a requirement before these tokens can be made available.

Below are both explorers displaying this address. The insight explorer will show the PART as available after midnight, November 30th, 2017. The CryptoID explorer shows the full count of PART (996k) but the distribution is “unconfirmed” until unlocked (17.11.30).

*This is the largest PART address representing ~11% uncirculated PART.

Our Primary Round and “Beta” marketplace both fall in Q1/2018. These are parallel tracks and are unrelated to each other. The project is well funded.

The differences between Alpha and Beta are expected to be trivial, mainly bug patching, as no significant software features will be added to the Beta release. It is important to keep in mind Alpha/Beta are minimally viable products that prototype features. These releases will be well done and give buyers and sellers a solid and secure platform to transact with each other.