In-Depth Presentation of the Particl Project

Hey guys, I’ve been following an interesting cryptocurrency project that has great investment potential for quite some time and have noticed that very few information was available about it online, so I’ve decided to write a complete in-depth presentation of it and make it my first Steemit mini-series. I will post the first half of the presentation today and the other half tomorrow, so stay tuned :) 

What is Particl?

To  sum it up briefly, Particl is a privacy-focused blockchain/P2P hybrid  ecosystem that will host a decentralized and anonymous marketplace as  well as an array of Dapps using a native cryptocurrency. The first  officially supported Particl Dapp will be a fully decentralized and  anonymous marketplace which allows buyers and vendors to securely  transact between each other without the need to ever interact with a  third-party. It also encompasses a fully anonymous messaging system  built similarly to BitMessage. The platform is currency and protocol  agnostic (more details on what is means later in the presentation).Note,  however, that these Dapps are not the same kind of Dapps as on  Ethereum. They do NOT work using smart contracts but are instead  hard-coded into the client. This makes Dapps much more secure and  efficient.

What’s Its History?

Particl is the successor of the ShadowProject (https://shadowproject.io/en),  a privacy-focused cryptocurrency project started back in August 2014.  The team behind this project are known for being innovators in the  cryptocurrency scene, being the first to produce many feats such as an  HTML5 wallet, a staking mobile wallet with encrypted messaging and  transactions, as well as having the first ring signature and HD wallet  implementation on BTC codebase. Their Umbra graphical wallet, built  using HTML5, is widely known in the “altcoin” community for being  absolutely gorgeous and very user-friendly. It was not so long after  switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake that this very capable  team started working on a fully anonymous and decentralized marketplace.  This has long been seen has the ultimate value proposition of the  Shadowcash blockchain.Back  in late December 2016, word spread around the community that the  ShadowProject team had met with major partners in Hong Kong and that big  things were coming regarding the way forward. Then, on March 17th, the  team announced they were leaving the ShadowProject to start working on a  new and more professional project: Particl. This move was encouraged by  the fact that the team wanted to have a more professional branding and  were looking for funding so that they could work full-time on it and get  it going for good. In fact, they had been told by the Hong Kong  partners, as well as many legal and PR firms, that the name “Shadowcash”  was deemed to shady, most of them even refusing to associate their name  with such a sketchy sounding project. The new vision of the project  also required a lot of major code changes to be done to the SDC  blockchain/client and team structure. It is for all these reasons the  SDC team decided to completely sever the link between Shadowcash and  Particl and start the new blockchain from scratch, using their final  Umbra release as prototype for the new platform.

The Particl Foundation

The  Particl Foundation is a registered Swiss legal entity. As the Particl  team was looking to raise money to fund the project, they needed to have  a legal body that could receive the funds and spend on behalf of the  project. It is also required for most of the logistics of the project  (hiring and paying employees, paying hosting fees for the website, etc)  as well as interacting with third-parties (partners, exchanges,  gateways, legal & PR firm contracts, etc). There will be much more  details to come once the Foundation is officially registered. It is  currently awaiting approval by the Swiss government and it is the last  step to be up and running.As  a funding strategy, the Particl team offered SDC holders an opportunity  to swap their SDCs for PARTs at a 1:1 rate, with the possibility for  the holder to add an additional amount of BTC to the swap transaction to  get a variable PART bonus added to their stash. This extra BTC is what  the team collected as funding as SDCs sent into swap transactions were  not and will never be sold into the market.They  have raised 750,000 USD worth of Bitcoin (now worth around 1.4M), and  reserved for themselves 513,502 PARTs (6% of total supply) from the  total supply. Another 996,000 PARTs are reserved for a second funding  round once the MVP of the market is out and released. The funds they  raised will be used for salaries, legal expenses for Swiss Foundation  creation, initial business consultation expenses, new team members,  professional PR, third-party code audits and University grants.While  it may have been tempting to raise more money, the reasoning behind  this crowdfund structure is actually quite sane. The total amount raised  is what the team estimated were necessary to run the project for one  full year. It is true that other ICOs are raising tens and even hundreds  of million, but in many cases, the developing teams simply don’t need  that much money. It could be argued that as these projects raise tons of  money, they lose a certain incentive to work hard on their project as  they have already cashed out on their idea. In more traditional VC  environments, you would very rarely (if ever) see projects raise  hundreds of million with only ideas, vague whitepaper, and no working  products. It is also likely that some of these projects will attract the  attention of regulatory bodies due to questionable funding methods.The  Particl team has mimicked the VC way of initially going through a seed  round before going for a larger round of funding. This crowdfund  strategy is what was advised by Swiss legal firms which are used to  working with blockchain projects. Also, not only does this structure  allows for a fair money-raising method, it also incentivizes the Particl  team to work hard on their project and deliver a working product that  will impress the community. After all, they will want to raise as much  money as possible in the second round, and with a maximum of 996,000  PARTs that can be offered, they have all the reasons in the world to  make a good product which would bring more value to the Particl coin.  When we think about it, this crowdfunds/ICO was pretty fair and  exemplary from a legal standpoint.

Particl Features

Quick video presentation:

Release date: July 17th 2017, 13:00 UTC

Currency name: Particl (not to be confused with Particle)

Currency ticker: PART (not PRT, which is Particle’s ticker)

Supported by: Particl Foundation (Swiss Foundation)

Total supply: 8,634,140 PARTs

Particl Foundation ownership: 513,502 PARTs (6%)

First funding round contributors ownership: 7,124,638 PARTs (82.5%)

Funds time-locked for 2nd funding round: 996,000 (11.5%)

Network consensus: Proof-of-stake (PoSv3)

Block time: 120 sec

Block size: ~2mb

Inflation: 5% year 1, 4% year 2, 3% year 3, 2% year 4+

Available on: Windows, OSX, Linux and ARM (Raspberry PI, BeagleBone Black, etc)

Bitcoin Codebase

Particl  is a privacy platform using its own native currency, PART. It is built  on top of the latest Bitcoin codebase (0.14.2) on which the dev team added as much as 100,000 new lines of code  (as of the time of this publication) to turn it into a completely  unique coin filled with a ton of cool features. Bitcoin is the first  cryptocurrency to ever exist, it is the coin that everyone knows how to  work with and also the most battle tested blockchain. For these reasons,  it could easily be argued that Bitcoin has the safest codebase on which  to build on top of.Some other features inherited from the current Bitcoin codebase version include (but is not limited to) HD wallets, multi-sig addresses (fully integrated into graphical wallet), block pruning (saves quite a lot of disk space after the chain is fully synced),  fast syncing, easy tor setup, watch-only wallet support, libsecp256k1  signing and signature validation, direct headers announcement,  notifications through ZMQ, compact block support and ARM builds. You can read this article to get more information on these features: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-core-0140-released-whats-new/

Dual Token System

Why  should we have to choose between privacy and convenience when we can  have both on the same chain? This is the premise behind one of the major  changes the team has made to the Bitcoin codebase: a duel token system.  Particl uses two different tokens that can seamlessly be transferred  for one another. One of these is a public token, which carries the same pseudo-anonymity characteristics as Bitcoin, while the second one is a completely anonymous and private coin.  Users can easily send public coins into private balances, and the  wallet automatically converts the public coin into a private coin. The  same can be done if a user sends a private coin into a public address.  Sending a private token to a private address successfully “mixes” your  coins and allows you to maintain a top-of-the-line privacy. Note that it  will be very easy and effortless to do these conversions on the GUI  wallet.

Public Token

While  Particl is mainly a privacy-focused project, the use of a public token  (default token) is very important in terms of management, integration,  and security. 
One of the problems with exclusively anonymous  currencies is that it can be hard to confirm the authenticity of the  block creation process. What if an attacker had the key to generate an  infinite amount of coins? What if no one noticed of the hack until the  attacker dumps large orders of fraudulently created coins on the trading  market? These are very serious threats that are a reality with some of  the 100% private coins. ZK SNARKS, for example, a crypto privacy  protocol, also has this “hidden inflation problem”. In fact, the chain  is initially generated from a set of master keys which could  theoretically be used to generate an infinite amount of coins at any  time without anyone ever noticing. This is why people say this protocol  relies on “trusted setups”; you actually need to trust the party who  spawned the chain would successfully destroy the master keys. There is,  of course, no way to know for sure whether they didn’t keep copies  somewhere or that they were not compromised during any step of the  process (software, hardware, network, OS, BIOS, ME chip exploits). After  all, cryptocurrencies are now worth a lot and they have become the  primary target for hackers around the world.This  is precisely for these reasons that the Particl team opted for a fully  transparent coin generation process. Because all newly generated coins  are public, a hacker/bug would instantly be detected and measures could  be taken to fix the problem.Additionally,  since the public token is built in a very similar way as Bitcoin, it is  much easier for third-parties such as exchanges, websites, and wallets  (Jaxx, Exodus, Ledger Wallet, etc) to integrate. They do not need to go  out of their way and spend many dev hours without knowing if it will be  economically worth it for their project to work with a new way to  integrate a coin. The best example I could find concerning this, in  particular, is the case of Monero and Jaxx. Jaxx is a well-known  multi-cryptocurrency wallet and they tried to integrate Monero earlier  this year. After trying to add the coin to their wallet, they announced  they would finally not do it because it was too complicated and they  didn’t the dev time spent on this particular project would not be worth  it. This would not happen with Particl as the BTC codebase is what  everybody is used to work with and can integrate it without much effort.This  public token is also very useful for people who do not necessarily  require a permanently anonymous experience. Fully-anonymous currencies  can sometimes hinder one’s ability to effectively keep track of  financial records and transactions. Some services ask for extra  information (i.e. a payment ID for Monero) in order for a transaction to  be accepted and there are many situations where one could forget to  note that transaction ID down or lose it afterward. There’s also a lot  of scenarios where one would need to go back several months into the  past to see specific transaction details. In most cases, it is simply  harder to keep track of things with fully private coins so having one  that does possess great accountability tools is definitively  appreciated.On  top of this, a transaction using any privacy coin is generally going to  cost more in fees than a public transaction on a non-bloated BTC  codebase currency as it typically involves more data movement and  computation. A “public user”, one that does not necessarily want to be  anonymous, should not have to pay for privacy features he does not need.  By making the public token the default coin, this ensures that only  users seeking privacy options will use the privacy token, while the  public users (which will probably end up being the majority of Particl  users if the platform becomes mainstream) default to the public token.  This also has the non-negligible effect of putting less stress on the  network (as public transactions are more lightweight and do not fill  blocks as much as private ones), keeping the network efficient.

Private Token

Particl’s  private token has a variable degree of privacy which can be adjusted by  users according to their preferences. In fact, when making a private  transaction, it is possible to send it using Confidential Transactions  or RingCT (which is a blend of ring signatures and Confidential  Transactions). It is noteworthy to mention that this is the first time both these protocols are being implemented on the Bitcoin codebase.  While a few coins use Confidential Transactions as their privacy  protocol, only one uses an implementation of RingCT on their main net:  Monero.Confidential  Transactions, or CT, is a privacy protocol initially developed for  Bitcoin that hides amounts sent from the public and makes it visible  only to parties involved in the actual transaction. While it is very  efficient to obfuscate most regular person-to-person transactions, its  most interesting use case is when used in Particl’s marketplace  decentralized escrow system. As a matter of fact, if the market’s escrow  system worked using the public token, it would be trivial for  determined attackers to detect patterns in the public escrow contracts  and match them to potential users. On a long enough timeline, users  could be identified with particular marketplace orders with a high  degree of certainty. With the help of Confidential Transactions, this  cuts off this attack vector and makes the escrow system fully anonymous.  To learn more about CT, please consult this link: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txtRingCT,  on the other side, is an even better privacy protocol combining ring  signatures to the aforementioned confidential transaction protocol.  Applied on double stealth addresses, not only transaction amounts are  hidden but the sender and receiver addresses as well, making RingCT  transactions completely untraceable. It should be taken into  consideration that RingCT will not be available when Particl first  launches, but will it be implemented soon enough. This feature is  currently on testnet #3, but it still requires some work before it is  incorporated into the main chain. The team also wants to have it fully  audited by a third-party before going live with it.One  useful feature of the Particl wallet is that users are actually  presented with the option to choose the privacy protocol they want to  use according to their needs. CT is a good privacy protocol for basic  privacy, but RingCT is even better as it makes transactions unlinkable.  However, the latter is much more expensive in fees than the first one,  and people who do not require a “paranoid” level of privacy may not want  to pay larger fees.In  my subjective opinion, Particl will offer the best privacy experience  on the market as it is very flexible but makes no compromise. RingCT is  considered top-of-the-line technology and it simply works fantastically  in preserving one’s privacy. Some could argue that ZK-SNARKS offer a  better solution, and that is rightfully debatable. They do offer an  interesting privacy solution, but they do have their share of problems  and vulnerabilities as mentioned above. Centralized coin mixers are  obviously not to be trusted as there is no way to know the legitimacy of  the website owner, and coinjoin services are demonstrably weak and  exploitable by determined adversaries.The  hidden inflation problem is also one of the reasons why I believe  Particl, with its dual token system, has a “safer” (and easier to  integrate) implementation of RingCT than Monero. Don’t get me wrong,  there are good arguments people could make about Monero having the  better integration. For example, RingCT being mandatory and by default  on all transactions makes it impossible to make a basic human mistake  (they do happen), but it also makes Monero a more expensive currency to  use and a blockchain less likely to be able to support a huge influx of  users (as transactions are heavy and would bloat the blockchain faster).  This is the kind of debate where both sides have pros and cons, so I  will let you make your own conclusion on this topic.Also  related to Particl’s privacy but not its private coin, it is possible  to route the wallet’s connection to TOR in order to maintain your node  IP address private. This is absolutely needed if you want a secure  staking setup (unless you used OpenVPN with solid network rules) as  broadcasting the real IP address of a staking node to the world is  asking for trouble.

Decentralized & Anonymous Person-to-person Marketplace

Quoted from Particl’s whitepaper draft: “Satoshi  Nakamoto, the visionary and creator of Bitcoin, originally intended  that Bitcoin is paired with a marketplace, as evidenced by beginnings of  a market framework included in early snapshots of the Bitcoin codebase.  The market-related code was eventually stripped out, however,  presumably as he decided to focus first on creating his world-changing  currency. The concept of a decentralized marketplace in itself is not  novel, there have been a small set of academic constructions and even  serious attempts at creating them. They either propose solutions that  scale extremely well and neglect the privacy implications, or they  propose very privacy conscious solutions that do not scale well. Privacy  and efficiency are often at odds with each other, ”to hide the signal  there must be noise”. Tor exemplifies this well, the traffic is pushed  through various nodes with several layers of encryption before arriving  at its destination, it is deliberately inefficient but the privacy  provided by the
trade-off is well worth it”.

Particl Marketplace mock up posted during the fundraiser (Confirmed outdated, but gives a rough idea where the team is going visually speaking)

In development for about two years, the Particl marketplace strives to be the first decentralized marketplace to successfully nail scalability and full privacy at the same time. The team aspires to achieve this accomplishment by using the OMP market protocol they developed internally.

Open Market Protocol

The Open Market Protocol, or OMP, is a “standardized and open format that can encompass all the economic interactions of an online marketplace” (https://kewde.gitbooks.io/protocol/content/#).  The OMP is built with three main components in mind, namely  extensibility, privacy, and market data portability. It can be adopted  by anyone who wishes to build a decentralized market of some sort.Its extensibility  characteristic makes it much more resilient to new, more efficient  technologies to come out. This aspect is explained in details in the  Protocol-agnosticism section of this presentation.Privacy is also an important cornerstone of this protocol. “Recent  revelations and academic papers have proven beyond a doubt that there  are many active threats to our digital privacy and security.  Additionally, decentralized networks, as well as blockchains, are open  public books full of sensitive information for passive attackers to  abuse. This was of great concern when designing [the OMP] protocol as it  could potentially put [its] users at risk”Portability  is the ability to easily move market data such as inventory, images and  shipping details (among others) data between different markets. “One  of the many frustrations that online merchants and vendors suffer is  the lack of portability of the inventory data between the many different  online marketplaces. The more markets your products are available on,  the greater their exposure and thus the greater their potential revenue  streams. Yet importing the inventory data into another application or  website remains a cumbersome process, often on purpose to prevent  vendors from using competition” By making market data standardized,  it becomes very easy for vendors to open a shop on any marketplace  using the OMP protocol and realize their full economic potential.

Decentralized & Trust-less Escrow System

There  are many challenges in designing a fully anonymous and decentralized  marketplace. One of the these is to ensure that neither the vendors nor  the buyers get scammed by the other party. How do you make sure the  vendor doesn’t simply take the money and doesn’t ship the product? How  do you make sure the buyer actually pays for a shipped product? In most  cases, typical marketplaces such as Alibaba, eBay or Amazon use what is called an escrow system. The platform acts as a middle-man and receives the payment of a product or service on behalf of the vendor and holds on  to it until the buyer confirms he has received the product. Should  problems arise, the escrow agent will usually take the role of a  mediator and decide what happens to the escrowed funds (it will either  be a refund for the buyer or a release of funds to the vendor). Since the Particl marketplace aims to be entirely trustless, it cannot use escrow agents as that constitutes centralization. An agent could be  wrong on a decision, go rogue, collude with a party, and above all, they always charge a fee. No escrow agent will work for free. The Particl team developed what they call the MAD escrow system. This  trust-less and free service is based on the Mutually Assisted  Destruction game theory. As defined on Wikipedia,  Mutual assured destruction (or mutual assisted destruction) “is a  doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would  cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.  It is based on the theory of deterrence, which holds that the threat of  using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy’s use of those  same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once  armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to  disarm”. In  the context of an escrow system, it simply means that the escrow is  designed in such a way that it financially punishes both parties if one  of them behaves badly. The MAD escrow works by requiring the buyer to  deposit twice the amount of the desired product in a 2-of-2 multisig  escrow address, while the vendor has to deposit the full value of the  item he is selling as insurance. Both parties need to sign the release  of the funds before a set time for the deal to conclude, otherwise, the  escrow busts and funds are sent over to the stakers.For  example, if you were selling a 500$ TV to a user, you would have to  fund the MAD escrow with 500$ and your buyer would need to fund it with  1,000$ (500$ item value + 100% insurance deposit of 500$). The document  section of the shadowproject.io website explains in an understandable  fashion how the psychology behind MAD escrow works:From ShadowProject’s documentation page: “If  the buyer receives the item and decides not to finalize the transaction  then the address becomes unspendable after the expiration date and  neither party gets their insurance deposit back. The buyer will have  effectively paid twice the price but the vendor loses his insurance  deposit and the item. [If] the vendor does not to ship the item, [it]  leaves the buyer with the option to finalize the transaction or not:  finalizing the transaction causes him to minimalize his losses to one  time the price of the item and the vendor makes a profit of one time the  item price. If the buyer decides not to finalize the transaction he  loses twice the amount of the item price but also causes the vendor to  lose his insurance deposit. The buyer is to some extent at a  disadvantage and motivated to finalize the transaction to minimize his  losses in case of a vendor scam. Both the buyer and the vendor will be  motivated to extend the escrow transaction and work towards a refund  agreement that both parties are willing to sign.”Of  course, this MAD escrow system is flexible. If a problem arises during a  transaction, both parties can agree to either extend the escrow  deadline time or proceed with partial refunds. It is also entirely up to  the users to decide what insurance deposit percentage they want to use.  A vendor and a buyer could agree for a 25% insurance deposit, meaning  that for a 500$ TV purchase, a vendor would need to deposit 125$ into  the escrow while the buyer would need to deposit 625$ (500$ + 25%  insurance deposit of 125$).

Self-Governance

Another  of the big challenges in designing a decentralized and anonymous market  is trying to reduce the irresponsible and criminal use of the platform  as much as possible. Since it is censorship-resistant, no central  authority can delete its content and so it could easily be abused by  criminals, spammers, and trolls. This would end up making the platform  look much less appealing to the regular honest user and enable  undesirable activities.Particl’s  solution to this problem is a self-governance system where users can  flag undesirable content. At this moment, it is not confirmed whether a  listing considered undesirable is completely taken out of the market or  if it puts it in an NSFW kind of state where users can decide whether  they want that type of content to be displayed or not (similar to how  OpenBazaar does it). The method of governance is also not confirmed, but  if we are to speculate, it could possibly be tied to staking like  Particl’s voting system works (will be explained later in this  document).

Private Listings

As  mentioned just above, there is a self-governance in place preventing  the platform from essentially becoming a decentralized version of the  infamous Silkroad marketplace. There is, however, a form of listing  which cannot be flagged by the community: private listings. These  listings do not appear on the public marketplace and are hidden even  from the blockchain itself as they are fully encrypted. Only a vendor  and a user possessing a specific link to the listing can have access to  its content, making it a very interesting use-case for alternative  markets as anyone could simply run a website making external references  to these private listings, fundamentally creating the perfect semblance  of a 100% anonymous and censorship-proof (even from Particl’s  self-governance system) marketplace that cannot get hacked, be busted or  exit scam their users.

Fighting Spam

As  mentioned above, spammers are another major concern on popular  blockchain platforms. In the crypto world, there are many reasons why  one would want to mount a spam attack on a chain. It could be because  that entity wants to short the coin on trading markets, or because he  has invested in a competing platform that is seeking to destroy the  reputation of Particl.Fighting  spam attacks will always remain an ongoing battle as spammers will  always try to find new ways to make themselves an annoyance, and the  Particl team plans on keeping the platform spam-free a priority. On  market release, the platform will already be armed with two  spam-fighting features other than the self-governance flagging system.The  first one of these measures is to make listings stay up for a maximum  of 48 hours. That means a spammer has to constantly keep the attack up  otherwise it will not have any long-term damage to the platform. This  also helps the market be much more scalable as it only requires to have  two days worth of listings. The second measure is the implementation of a  very small listing fee (initially 0.01 PART, can be adjusted and  ultimately made dynamic) making a sustained attack quite costly for an  attacker. While the fees are quite small, mounting a considerably  effective spam attack would require large amounts of funds to be paid to  the market every two days.As  will be explained further down this presentation, market fees actually  go to the stakers (people who run nodes that secure the network), which  brings an interesting dynamic…Any  spammer that wants to heavily spam the Particl marketplace inevitably  ends up sending his money to the very community he is trying to bring  down!

Going Mainstream

The  project doesn’t hide the fact that it wishes to become the first  decentralized marketplace to become used in the multi-billion  “mainstream” world of commerce. This is why user-friendliness and  usability are at the core of the team’s strategy. The ultimate goal is  to make the cryptocurrency side of things all in the background so that  even your grandmother could intuitively use it.Another  mainstream-appealing feature the team is working on is the integration  of many in-client fiat gateways from which one could fund his Particl  wallet. Some solutions being explored at the moment would allow users to  use bank transfers, credit cards, and Localbitcoin-style services.  Note, however, that neither the Particl developing team nor the Particl  Foundation are licensed financial organizations, therefore this  implementation most certainly would be the result of partnerships with  other services (i.e. Changelly, Tether, etc). It would be very  surprising if fiat gateways were part of the initial release of the  wallet.

Low Fees

One  great thing about the Particl marketplace is its relatively low prices  compared to centralized competitors. In fact, selling on websites such  as Amazon or Alibaba is great because they bring vendors a lot of users,  but they also charge a huge premium just so their user base can be  leveraged. After all, it is generally Amazon/Alibaba/eBay that brings a  company new customers, not the other way around, so that premium fee is  the price to pay to get new customers from these big e-commerce  platforms.Let’s  take Alibaba, for example. It is one of the most valued e-commerce  websites on the internet and has a huge user base of both buyers,  merchants, service providers and suppliers. If you wanted to start  selling products on it, you would probably want to get a gold membership  so you don’t get absolutely buried in the thousands of listing and so  that you at least have a minimum set of features you could use. Their  gold membership is subscription based and according to Harry Peterson, a  professional in China sourcing and B2B (business-to-business)  marketing, businesses located in mainland China need to pay almost up to  5,000$ USD a year just to get their membership. Businesses outside  China mainland have variable subscription fees based on which  jurisdiction they are doing business from, but it is estimated that an  average subscription amounts to around 2,999$ USD a year (https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-sell-on-Alibaba).  On the Alibaba website itself, subscription fees seem to be even  higher, now priced at 5,999$ USD a year for the full package (http://seller.alibaba.com/memberships/index.html).Of  course, there are various packages and these fees are somewhat  flexible, but that gives you an idea what a gold membership costs like  if you want to use Alibaba as a platform and get the whole set of  features that will allow you to leverage the full capacity of what the  platform has to offer. Don’t forget that on top of these memberships,  Alibaba charges a whopping 5% fee on any transactions done through its  escrow system, as it is centralized and requires staff to manage. All  these fees, end up being costly for both buyers and sellers. Remember  that Particl’s MAD (mutually assisted destruction) escrow system is  absolutely free of charge as it is entirely decentralized and managed by  both the buyer and the vendor.Amazon,  on the other hand, chooses a different fee schedule to make its money  by applying two types of fees. The first one is a generic “per-item”  selling fee. You can choose two plans: the individual plan, which  charges 0.99$ USD per items sold, or a professional plan, which is a  subscription of 39,99$ USD per month (https://services.amazon.com/selling/pricing.htm).On  top of that, it also charges what is called a “referral fee” which is a  percentage of your item’s value that Amazon keeps for itself. This fee  ranges from 6% to an almost insulting 25% depending on the item’s  category. Some Amazon-branded items can even go up to 45%. Please visit  this detailed article to know the exact fee schedule Amazon uses: http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2014/06/sell-on-amazon-pricing/.  There is also another type of fee which Amazon can charge, but that  only applies if you want Amazon to fulfill your order (meaning you send  your inventory to Amazon and they do the processing, storage, and  shipping for you). These fees are all indicated in the CPC strategy  article I linked just above.What  about eBay? While listing an item isn’t really that expensive, your  first 50 listings of each month being free and the subsequent being  0.30$ USD, the website still charges you a non-negligible 10% “final  value fee” (the final value is calculated AFTER shipping fees are  applied) with a maximum of 750$ USD per transaction. You can visit this  link which details all the listings (plus some advanced feature fees I  will not go into): http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.htmlEtsy?  Well, it is admittedly much cheaper, but still considerably more  expensive than Particl. They charge 0.20$ USD per listing posted and  then apply a “transaction fee” of 3.5% (which isn’t applied to shipping  cost as well if you are selling either from the USA or Canada but is  applied otherwise). There are also various other fees if you wish to use  more advanced features such as Etsy’s “Direct Checkout”. For their fee  schedule, please visit this link here: https://www.etsy.com/legal/fees/.As  it is probably obvious by now, these platforms charge their users HUGE  premiums, which is kind of understandable since they are critical to the  success of a good number of these vendors. Particl is going to be a  much, much cheaper option for vendors, regardless if they are big or  small. It will also greatly benefit buyers by basically charging them no  fees at all except low cryptocurrency transaction fees (listing fees  are paid for by vendors). Vendors will only need to pay 0.01 PART per  listing renewed every two days. This fee is likely to be made dynamic so  that it goes down when PART’s price goes up and vice versa.

Target Users

Going  for the mainstream world of e-commerce certainly is a huge ambition. It  is true that a decentralized system is likely to be less efficient than  its centralized counterparts, but it does also offer services that  giants like eBay, Amazon or Alibaba simply cannot provide to their  customers: privacy and censorship-resistance. So who, exactly, would end  up using a potentially less efficient but more private platform than  well-established e-commerce Goliaths?During the time of the initial funding round, I’ve written a lengthy article going over exactly this question. Here’s a tl;dr list of potential early users:

- Controversial & potentially illegal goods & services 
- Perceived gray area businesses
- Unfairly blocked businesses
- People looking for better protection of personal/corporate data & documents
- Taxation resistance & revolts
- People from the unbanked world where banks and e-commerce websites are not present
- Much lower fees than centralized counterparts
- Any crypto user looking to shop with his favorite coin

This  article only lists what I could think of at the time, but the potential  of a decentralized marketplace and escrow system is huge and there are  some use-cases one could not think of until someone actually comes out  with it. One of these use case not featured in my previous article and  that became apparent to me since is the use of Particl marketplace’s  escrow system for OTC exchange of unreleased ICO coin accounts (trading  coins before their chain is released). This seems to be an increasingly  popular practice among the crypto world, with most vendors/buyers doing  these trades on Slack/Reddit.

Currency-Agnosticism

By  definition, “an agnostic person is one who believes it is impossible to  know anything about God or about the creation of the universe and  refrains from commitment to any religious doctrine”. In our context, the  platform is considered “agnostic” because its developing team does not  believe its native coin should be created with a “one coin to rule them  all” mentality and thus should have a platform that can work with as  many cryptocurrencies as possible. As we do not know what coins will be  the most used in 5 years, let alone in a month, it is safe and  forward-thinking to make the platform be ready to work with them at any  time.This  feature will mostly be used for the Particl marketplace Dapp, as it  will allow people to shop online using their favorite cryptocurrency  without ever leaving the wallet or having to manually trade their coins  prior to purchasing a product. While it may seem like that would reduce  Particl’s potential valuation as that would generate less demand for its  native coin, it actually does not. Because the market’s decentralized  escrow is a 2 of 2 multi-sig CT PART address, it requires any non-PART purchases to be traded (automatically done by the wallet) for PART to operate.  Vendors do not even need to state what coins they want to accept, as  they all get paid in PART. They are then free to Shapeshift back to any  coin they want, again without ever leaving the wallet.This  currency-agnosticism actually brings a lot of value to the platform’s  native coin. For one, any order made on the market, whether it is paid  using PART, BTC, ETH or any compatible currency, ends up being a buy  order for PART. This feature also brings a non-speculative use case for  all compatible currencies, as the holders of those coins can now shop  online with them and not simply hold them for speculative reasons. This  has the potential to end up putting a lot of buy pressure on the PART  coin.

Shapeshift Integration

This  ability to seamlessly shop with any coin is powered by Shapeshift. That  means that any coin available on their platform can be used to shop on  Particl. Some of the use cases I personally find interesting is the use  of the DGX token (gold-backed cryptocurrency, not yet available on  Shapeshift though…) and USDt (fiat USD-backed cryptocurrency) to  seamlessly shop with coins that are backed by real assets. Gold bugs  will immediately understand why this is a big deal, but let’s pause for a  moment and appreciate what opportunity it presents. When was the last  time people could just go out and shop using actual gold coins? The way  it is designed, the vendor does not even have to “accept” the currency  on his store, and you can send tiny fractions of that gold coin (which  is obviously impossible with physical bullion). This could become a  really big use case for Particl if the world economy ends up crashing  and people abandon fiat for value-based assets such as gold. This could  even initiate a paradigm shift in how people conduct commerce around the  world.Note,  however, that this Shapeshift integration is a temporary solution as  the team plans on designing its own fully decentralized and trust-less  currency exchange system. This is due for much later though, and I  believe that for the time being Shapeshift will be more than satisfying  as an option.

Protocol-Agnosticism

In  this context, being protocol agnostic refers to the fact that the  Particl platform does not limit itself to one decentralized data storage  protocol, but rather make it extensible and easy to integrate various different protocols at the same time, and let the user choose which one he prefers using. As Kewde, a Particl developer, elegantly puts it on his Open Market Protocol GitBook: “Technology  moves at an exponential rate, and the very few protocols that survive  the test of time are all designed with extensibility in mind. A protocol  looking to be relevant on a long enough timeline should be both robust  and flexible enough that it easily allows any developer to securely  expand it. The development of decentralized storage networks (DHTs,  BitTorrent, IPFS) and blockchain solutions is still young, there aren’t  any clear “winners” that meet all criteria nor may there ever be, thus  the protocol must accommodate for it”.To  illustrate why this is a good concept, let’s say Particl only uses its  native SMSG protocol to run its marketplace on. That would work  fine…until the marketplace gets very popular and cannot scale anymore  because there are too many people using it. On a protocol-agnostic  platform, it would be very easy to simply add a new, more scalable  protocol to support the flock of new users, but if it wasn’t designed  with extensibility in mind, it would be stuck with a technology that  cannot support its own popularity. In most cases, the platform would  either be abandoned by its users, require some kind of fork (which is  risky), or the developing team would abandon the project and start a new  one with better technology.In other words, Particl is designed in such a way that it embraces new protocols instead of being rendered obsolete by them, and it does so without ever requiring a fork of some kind.

Decentralized Network Storage

Decentralized  storage networks, or DSNs, are decentralized extensions “plugged” into  the Particl protocol to help it store data in a decentralized and  off-chain fashion. They are what I referred to as “new protocols” in the  last section. The use of DSNs is essential as the Particl platform does  not store its marketplace data on the blockchain itself as that would  quickly bloat it and make everything much more inefficient. Here is an  excerpt from Particl’s whitepaper draft: 

“The  Data Storage Network (DSN) is tasked with storing market listings as  well as messages between sender and receiver and all other accompanying  data (such as but not limited to images and videos). Sensu stricto the  market listing references, stored in the blockchain, are also  protocol-agnostic, simply meaning it can handle different DSN protocols  such as BitMessage, IPFS, HTTPS…”

Here is a non-exhaustive list of DSNs that could be integrated into Particl:- HTTPs (Privacy:- ( — )
- TOR (Privacy: + + )
- SMSG (Privacy: + + + )
- * IPFS (Privacy: + )
- * Siacoin (Privacy: + )
- * Storj (Privacy: + )
- * SafeNetwork (Privacy: + + + )

* This DSN hasn’t been integrated yet or is not production-ready.

As  there isn’t really a “best” solution, the Particl platform lets users  choose which decentralized storage network they want to use. Some DSNs  provide great anonymity characteristics but don’t scale as well as  others (such as is the case with SMSG). Some provide great scaling  capabilities but are more expensive to use. There is also the fact that  some of these DSNs required a native token transfer (Sia, Storj,  SafeNetwork), making the integration trickier (but still possible) and  possibly less interesting for users. Don’t forget that these DSNs which  use a native token either charge the uploader of content or the  downloader depending on what storage network is being used.While  DSNs are mostly used by the marketplace application (and the messaging  system in the case of SMSG), the agnostic and extensible design has been  standardized by the team so that it can be easily be deployed whenever  the platform needs to interact with third-party software, once again  ensuring that it never gets outpaced by new technologies but embraces  them instead. It also has the potential to add use-cases to other  blockchain projects (for example, providing a complete and decentralized  merchant and escrow system to Siacoin).

This completes the first part of my 2-part Steemit mini-series on PART. Stay tuned for when I post the second half tomorrow! It will focus more on Proof-of-stake, investment returns, GUI and other cool features Particl will offer to the crypto community. As a teaser, here is a Particl Staking Revenues Calculator I've made on a spreadsheet. Just follow the link and download the file so you can modify the values to your own and calculate how much profits you could do by investing in Particl: http://onlyo.co/2uQdLoM