Just before Satoshi disappeared, he was working on a way to extended Bitcoin to create trustless decentralised marketplace on the blockcahin. After nearly eight years of development Particl Marketplace launched last week, it provides a decentralised marketplace built into a blockchain using smart contracts. The wallet provides an intuitive eBay style GUI.
“I started implementing a marketplace feature earlier that facilitates offering things for sale and taking orders, it's only half done though. A bit like e-bay but without auctions, just "buy now". Among other things, it would make it easy for anyone to offer currency exchange.”
- Satoshi Nakamoto, Apr 14, 2009
I'm not a member of the Particl team, but I have been following the project closely since c.2014 so I can provide my notes here as a starting place for other people's research and am happy to answer questions as best I can. Below are some of the key highlights as I see them.
Particl integrates a trustless decentralised marketplace into the Bitcoin blockchain source code. Particl provides an eBay and Amazon style marketplace inside its wallet software, allowing users to buy and sell natively with crypto via blockchain smart contracts.
A decentralised exchange has also been built on the Particl blockchain allowing exchange between all cryptocurrencies that support atomic swaps such as Bitcoin, Monero and Litecoin. Atomic swapping allows currencies to be swapped directly between separate blockchains. This exchange is currently in working beta. Later versions will allow users to pay for goods on the marketplace using currencies supported by the built in exchange.
The marketplace connects buyers and sellers directly, with no middle man. They are protected by Particl’s decentralised smart contract escrow which makes scamming infeasible. It works in the following way:
Buyer makes payment for item plus a deposit into escrow (blockchain smart contract). The seller puts the same amount of deposit into escrow (the same blockchain smart contract). Seller ships item. If the buyer is happy with what they received, they release the escrow and the buyer gets back their deposit, the seller their deposit plus payment. If the buyer is not happy then they talk with the seller to try and resolve their issue. Only the seller can release the escrow. An escrow contact has no expiration period to give the buyer and seller time to resolve any disputes. The current escrow for the beta launch is 100% of the item price; in future this will be adjustable between 100-0%. See diagram for more datils. Unlike centralised cryptocurrency marketplaces and websites, Particl cannot disappear with your funds, so your money is always safe. Everything goes via the blockchain. No third party needs to handle funds.
Buyers and sellers do not need to sign up - signing up is the same as creating a bitcoin address - so no personal information is submitted to the network. The marketplaces can also be viewed for free simply by
downloading and running the wallet.
Security is paramount: all communication between users is encrypted. The software does not permit things like hyperlinks outside of the client as this could reveal a users IP. There is shortly to be native Tor and I believe I2P support is in the works too.
Anything can be listed, but socially inappropriate items can be voted off by users, using their coin balance as voting weight.
Particl is an evolution in privacy coin technology. Like Monero it uses ring signatures, but provides more; 24 vs 11. It also provides blinding.
Non-transaction data, such as images and text, are kept off the blockchain and sent via Particl’s inbuilt encrypted messaging system instead. This protocol is based on bitmessage. To avoid spam users pay for the duration they want each of these messages to persist on the network. This is more scalable for data intensive dApps than something like Ethereum.
To stake Particl coins, users need to lock-up their coins for a period of time. Furthermore each time an item is purchased and shipped, the decentralized escrow locks the payment, plus a deposit from the buyer and seller, into escrow. Both these activities take a lot of coins out of circulation. So Particl’s price should rise with actual use as the same amount of Particl coins chase more and more goods on the marketplace.
Since its beta launch in August 2019 Particl has facilitated tens of thousands of listings and thousands of sales.
Particl is open source and closely mirrors the Bitcoin code base and remains current with all its latest upgrades such as taproot.
Particl was a top 20 crypto in 2015 for around two years. It has remained a top 10 crypto for code commits since 2015 -
https://www.cryptomiso.com/.
Particl is a dApp platform, the decentralized marketplace is just the first app.
You can download the software here:
https://particl.io/downloads/Links for more information:
Website:
https://particl.io/Team:
https://particl.io/team/Linked In:
https://linkedin.com/company/particl/Github:
https://github.com/particlTwitter:
https://twitter.com/ParticlProjectForum:
https://particl.communityReddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParticlInstagram:
https://www.instagram.com/particl.officialYoutube:
https://www.youtube.com/c/particlFacebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ParticlProjectBitcoinTalk:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/annpart-particl-p2p-anon-marketplaces-ringct-v3-upgrade-this-summer-5227333