Multi-Wallets

We announced a few days ago that the first mainnet version of the marketplace would contain multi-wallets. This feature has now successfully been implemented on RegTest (pre-testnet) and is fully working. Some of the Particl developers are now using the time between now and the mainnet release to make it more resource-efficient and smoother to use. As Arnold Bansemer says, “Better to use the time we have until the release to get it done properly now rather than just enough to make it work”.

The multi-wallets feature should hit testnet somewhere this week or early next week. Visit particl.news later this week as we will publish a full article explaining everything there is to know about multi-wallets.

Decentralized Governance

Demonstrating in real-time the Open Marketplace in Hong Kong has been a very constructive exercise. It showed the current V2.0 build to be pretty stable and able to handle hours of demonstration without really causing any issue. It has also been the best opportunity we’ve ever had to test the decentralized governance mechanism of the marketplace.

In fact, while we were at the conference demonstrating the marketplace, undesirable products started to be listed by some testnet user. Remember, the Open Marketplace is entirely decentralized. No party can singlehandedly remove listings from it. Still, we wanted to keep the marketplace as clean as possible as we were showing it off.

Luckily, the Particl testnet network is different from the mainnet network. It is tweaked in a way where the Particl team holds a large sum of testnet coins. This is to ensure the network can run smoothly with a low number of nodes and that the team can easily test the decentralized governance mechanism.

We did successfully take those listings off using the builds we had at the conference. This confirms and validates that the decentralized governance mechanism is now ready for mainnet!

CT Escrow (Privacy Enabled by Default)

The implementation of CT transactions in the escrow smart-contract makes all marketplace transactions untraceable — amounts will be hidden — by default. This requires a special form of escrow that processes transactions using only CT. — See OMP Library and Bitcoin 0.18 below for more info.

The Particl developers already have a working escrow in RegTest (pre-testnet) that works using RingCT transactions only. By playing around with it, they realized modifying it so that it could work using CT transactions (instead of RingCT) would be relatively easy. It would also protect the integrity of the project. Particl is, after all, a privacy-focused project. It is not looking into compromising privacy or security for anything else. This is why we’ve decided to implement CT transactions before releasing the Open Marketplace on mainnet.

As it stands today, the escrow mechanism has been successfully converted to work with CT transactions. The team is currently fine-tuning some of the system’s parameters and working on the full integration into the marketplace. This escrow system will effectively replace the one currently in place on testnet.

The good news is that most of the heavy lifting has already been done in regards to this task. The integration and fine-tuning processes are trivial in comparison.

OMP Library

Particl’s Open Marketplace is based on the Open Market Protocol (OMP) developed by Particl developer Kewde. It is a standardized and open format containing most of the economic interactions of an online marketplace. This library gives the Open Marketplace’s backend much more flexibility and options than it currently has. While it was already implemented into the marketplace, its full integration is necessary for the new escrow model to function.

Except for the new CT escrow, the OMP Library will not offer any noticeable/visible improvements until some point in the future. In fact, all it does is give the back-end of the marketplace more tools and parameters to leverage (i.e. custom listing fields, escrow refunds & negotiations, etc). The library will, however, prove itself to be essential as we move forward into the Beta phase of development.

The OMP Library is still currently being implemented into the marketplace and Particl Desktop application.

UI/UX Tweaks