Particl

Particl is an open-source and decentralized privacy platform built on the blockchain specifically designed to work with any cryptocurrency. It allows decentralized applications (Dapps) of all sorts to be built within a secure, highly-scalable environment and be integrated directly into Particl’s official wallet. All the fees generated by the platform are paid to the coin holders who are securing the network. Particl’s mission is to foster a new decentralized, private and democratic economy supported by its platform and native currency.

Adding to the untraceable currency transactions and encrypted messaging features already available on the platform, the Particl team is working on its first official Dapp: an entirely anonymous and decentralized marketplace for goods and services.

Particl Privacy Platform

Particl is a decentralized platform where users can use or create tools and smart-contracts that respect their rights to privacy. Such tools currently include its native privacy coin (PART), a P2P encrypted messaging system, a decentralized voting system and a fully anonymous and decentralized marketplace (MVP Q1 2018). All platform fees such as regular/private currency transactions, marketplace listing fees, and others are paid in totality to stakers, meaning that as the platform gets more traction, staking becomes exponentially more profitable.

Particl’s decentralized privacy marketplace will be a P2P/blockchain hybrid eBay-style marketplace and is self-governed by its community of stakers. It serves the purpose of letting people trade any goods and services in perfect anonymity and security using a decentralized and highly-scalable no-fee escrow system. Particl’s privacy marketplace accepts almost any coin and store its data (pictures, videos, digital files, etc) off-chain for increased scalability. Its privacy is assured at its core by using many of the platform-wide features that can also be used by any developer to create their own privacy Dapp. These features include (but are not limited to) decentralized voting, governance, messaging, escrow smart contract, atomic swaps as well as the CT privacy protocol, the SMSG decentralized storage network and the tor network.

Another major aspect of the Particl platform is that it is both currency and protocol-agnostic. Currency-agnosticism means that it accepts almost any currency, making the platform usable by any crypto community. However, even though Particl accepts almost all currencies, they are converted into PART whenever the platform requires a currency transaction (regular, untraceable, marketplace or smart-contract) so that it can leverage its features (CT, RingCT, voting, etc).

Protocol-agnosticism, on the other hand, refers to the ability of the platform to use any protocol as its decentralized data storage (DSN) protocol. 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 (SMSG, IPFS, DHTs, BitTorrent, etc) and blockchain solutions is still young and there aren’t any clear “winners” that meet all criteria nor may there ever be, thus the protocol must accommodate for it. Having extensibility built at the core of the platform allows it to easily scale up and switch between any DSN without having to patch the project with fixes that compromise privacy or decentralization.

Particl Privacy Coin (PART) Price

PART is a coin with various degrees of privacy to accommodate all types of users and is required to use the Particl platform’s tools. As PART coin is a native Segwit blockchain, all transactions use Segregated Witness (Segwit) by default making the platform very scalable and Lightning Network-ready.

The live Particl price is available on COIN360 widget:

Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 Codebase

PART is a privacy coin built from the Bitcoin Core codebase and is always updated to its latest version (currently 0.16.0). It is not a token (i.e. ERC-20) and is supported by its own blockchain.

Being built on the latest Bitcoin codebase not only allows the Particl platform to benefit from both Bitcoin’s stability and security, but it also enables developers to leverage and easily fork any product, service and technology development from the Bitcoin developer community. Recent Bitcoin development include but is not limited to Segwit, HD wallets, multi-sig addresses, block pruning, fast syncing, easy tor setup, watch-only wallet support, libsecp256k1 signing and signature validation, and most importantly a fix to the node-bricking bug that was recently disclosed at Breaking Bitcoin 2017.

Additionally, Bitcoin being the most integrated and worked with codebase in the industry makes Particl’s code much easier to integrate than lesser known codebases.

Multi-State Privacy

The PART coin can be sent as three different privacy states, each with their own degree of privacy and cost. As the highest privacy state requires the most transaction fee, it may not always be the best type of transaction depending on the situation, especially one where privacy is not predominantly required by the user.

Public

This type of transaction is pseudo-anonymous, just like Bitcoin. Public transactions are publicly auditable on any Particl block explorer and offer the least amount of privacy. They are the cheapest transactions to execute and are the default privacy setting.

Blind

This type of transaction uses the Confidential Transaction (CT) privacy protocol developed by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell to keep the transferring amounts visible only to the transaction participants (and those they designate), while still guaranteeing the transaction’s cryptographic integrity. This is a mid-level privacy option and is more expensive than public transactions, but cheaper than anon transactions. Mathematical and cryptographic details related to the CT privacy protocol are available on Maxwell’s original investigation into the protocol. Particl cryptocurrency is the first coin in history to deploy this technology on a Bitcoin Core codebase as well as on top of Segwit.

Anon

This type of transaction uses the RingCT privacy protocol developed by Shen Noether to hide both transferring amounts and participants’ blockchain identity by combining Cryptonote’s ring signatures and Maxwell’s CT protocols. It is the one of the highest level of trustless privacy protocol the crypto industry has to offer and was made famous by Monero. It is also the most expensive privacy setting to use. Mathematical and cryptographic details related to the RingCT privacy protocol are available on Shen Noether’s RingCT whitepaper. Particl cryptocurrency is the first coin in history to deploy this technology on a Bitcoin Core codebase as well as on top of Segwit.

Native Segregated Witness (Segwit)

The Particl platform is the first blockchain in the industry to ever be deployed with a native implementation of Segwit. This has the added benefit of making all transactions (including private ones) go through Segwit by default, resulting in better scalability and cheaper transaction fees. Unlike forked Segwit implementations, 100% of Particl addresses are compatible with Segregated Witness.

Segwit grants additional features to the Particl platform such as transaction malleability vulnerability protection and block capacity increase, but its most notable feature is that it renders Particl’s blockchain compatible with the Lightning Network

Lightning Network

The Lightning Network is a decentralized payment channel protocol first proposed by Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja in their Lightning Network whitepaper and powered using smart-contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant, near-zero fee payments across a network of participants. Its features include:

Instant Payments

Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Transaction security is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating on-chain transactions for individual payments. Contrary to non-lightning transactions, payment speed is measured in milliseconds to seconds.

Scalability

Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Its capacity blows away legacy payment rails (such as Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, and etc) by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click (micropayments) is now possible using no third-party at all.

Low Cost

By transacting and settling off-chain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant and high-volume micropayments.

Cross-Chain

The Lightning Network can be used as a second layer for the execution of atomic swaps. As long as the chains can support the same cryptographic hash function, it is possible to make transactions across blockchains without the use of any third-party.

Platform-wide Features

Particl Proof-of-Stake

The Particl platform uses a custom Proof-of-Stake protocol, Particl Proof-of-Stake (PPoS), as its consensus mechanism. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is a type of algorithm by which a cryptocurrency blockchain network aims to achieve distributed consensus. In PoS-based cryptocurrencies, the creator of the next block is chosen via various combinations of random selection of wealth and age. In contrast, the algorithm of Proof-of-Work (PoW) based cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin rewards participants who solve complicated cryptographical puzzles in order to validate transactions and create new blocks (i.e. mining).

PPoS is built and improved upon the popular PoS3 protocol on top of which were added several security and utility features. Its scheduled inflation rate is 5% of its total supply during the first year, then decreasing by 1% every year until it plateaus at 2% indefinitely.

Cold Staking

Cold staking is enabled by smart-contract functionality and lets users securely delegate staking powers to “staking nodes” which contain no coin. The purpose of these “staking nodes” is to provide a dedicated resource connected to the Particl blockchain and stake on behalf of another wallet without being able to spend its coins.

Cold staking nodes are intended to be used in combination with cold, hardware and paper wallets as well as multisig addresses, making it possible to stake “offline” coins with no risk of being hacked or exposing your public key to the network.

Staking nodes can be set up on any device, secure or not, such as public/cloud servers, virtual machines or RPIs.

Quantum-Resistance & Privacy

Current Proof-of-Stake implementations have a vulnerability not present in Proof-of-Work whereby they reveal the public key of staking addresses when they find and sign blocks. The most dangerous attack by quantum computers is against public key cryptography. On traditional computers, it takes on the order of 2128 basic operations to get Bitcoin private keys associated with Bitcoin public keys. This number is so massively large that any attack using traditional computers is completely impractical. However, it is known for sure that it would take a sufficiently large quantum computer on the order of only 1283 basic quantum operations to be able to break a Bitcoin key using Shor’s algorithm. This might take some time, especially since the first quantum computers are likely to be extremely slow, but it is still very practical. It could be estimated that it is maybe 2 to 5 years until quantum computers become an issue, but any project that plans on staying relevant on a long period of time should tackle these vulnerabilities way before they become problematic.

It is worth mentioning that public keys are NOT public addresses. To reverse a private key from a public address, it would require more energy than what is available in the universe, therefore a quantum hacker cannot just go pick public addresses with large amounts and reverse those.

When a Particl block is staked from a cold staking node, the private key of the address on the staking node (which contains no coin) is broadcasted to the network instead of the private key of the address which contains the staking funds. Because cold staking nodes are able to sign staked blocks on behalf of any wallet, hot or cold, cold stakers can effectively remain anonymous and shielded from theoretical quantum computer attacks.

Passive Income

PPoS can serve as a great passive income tool. It rewards stakers a minmum rate of 5% per year for securing the network, then drops 1% every year until it plateaus at 2%. This staking reward rate is true if 100% of the total supply is put up for staking, but gets higher as less coins are being staked. For example, if 50% of the total network is being put up for staking, the staking reward rate for the first year would be of 10%.

The Particl platform also redirects any fee generated from it directly to stakers, including but not limited to currency transactions, marketplace listing fees, extended messaging, privacy balance transfers and others, meaning staking becomes more profitable as the platform gets more traffic.

Decentralized Voting

Integrated into PPoS is a blockchain voting system that can be used by any PART coin user to poll others or vote. This tool allows the platform’s community to provably reach consensus and better coordinate itself. Polls run for a desired number of blocks and each staked block is a voting ticket, meaning the more blocks a staker finds, the more of his votes are registered. A staker can vote for any number of polls and they will all receive one vote for the selected option once the staker finds a block.

Embedding voting into PPoS means people who do not have any stake in the platform can’t vote, leaving the decisional power entirely up to the community of users.

Particl Foundation Self-Funding

The Particl Foundation, the Swiss legal foundation which supports the Particl project, gets 10% of all the staking rewards on the Particl network. This serves as a self-funding mechanism for the Particl Foundation to financially support, promote and market the Particl platform. This mechanism ensures the self-sustainability of the project and becomes more profitable as the speculative price of the Particl coin increases.

Data Storage Networks (DSN)

Data Storage Networks (DSN) are used on Particl to store any data (i.e. marketplace-related data such as images) off-chain. This allows the platform to scale well regardless of the amount of data it uses.

DSN is a generic term that describes a specific set of software with the purpose of storing and retrieving data on the internet. The usage of the term DSN is simply a layer of abstraction as it is not required to know how a specific DSN works internally as long as it can store blobs of data and later retrieve them using a comparable cryptographic identifier. Popular DSN include BitMessage, IPFS, SMSG, HTTPs, TOR, and etc.

A small hash of the hosted content is created and stored on the Particl blockchain when it is used to store data on a DSN. To verify the integrity of data when it is retrieved back from the DSN, its hash is recomputed and compared with the one stored on the Particl blockchain. The data is considered trusted if the hashes match, and rejected by the platform if they don’t.

Extensibility & Protocol-Agnosticism

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 data 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.

Particl’s way to deal with this reality is with the protocol agnosticism built at its core. The platform is indeed designed to be able to interact and exchange data with any DSN rather than using the same hard-coded DSN everytime regardless of context or user preference.

SMSG

SecureMessaging (SMSG), Particl’s very own DSN, is a decentralized P2P message mixnet where all nodes store a copy of everyone’s end-to-end encrypted messages and data for a duration of 48 hours (which can be increased for a fee). It is the default and most private DSN available for use on the platform. The reference implementation is developed in C++ and incorporated into the Particl daemon, allowing it to operate over the same peer to peer network as the Particl blockchain.

All nodes continuously attempt to decrypt every incoming message, but can only succeed if the node is able to recalculate the HMAC hash accompanying said message. If the hash check fails, then it can not be decrypted by the node, which means the message was either fraudulent, tampered with or meant for another node. SMSG messages and data are stripped from almost any metadata, therefore it is impossible for anyone to extract information such as IP addresses, sender or receiver. The only metadata accompanying data on SMSG are the hash, the encryption payload and a temporary public key.

IP Anonymization

Just like any cryptocurrency which builds on the Bitcoin codebase, the Particl platform allows its users to easily route their connection through the Tor network in order to hide their true IP address from the rest of the network.

Tor is a decentralized node network for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide and volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays to conceal users’ location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it much more difficult for a third-party to trace a user’s real IP address across the Particl network.

Onion routing is implemented by encryption in the application layer of a communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion. Tor encrypts the data, including the next node destination IP address, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit comprising successive, random-selection Tor relays. Each relay decrypts a layer of encryption to reveal the next relay in the circuit to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its destination without revealing or knowing the source IP address. Because the routing of the communication is partly concealed at every hop in the Tor circuit, this method eliminates any single point at which the communicating peers can be determined through network surveillance that relies upon knowing its source and destination.

Currency Agnosticism

In the spirit of connecting many different crypto communities together, the Particl platform is designed in such a way that it can accept almost any currency using two different methods. However, as the platform (marketplace, extended messaging, future Dapps, etc) requires PART to function in a private way (CT and RingCT), all incoming currency transactions are automatically converted into PART.

Atomic Swaps

Atomic swaps are decentralized and trustless trade between two users of different cryptocurrencies. As the blockchains are not related and transactions cannot be reversed, this provides no protection against one of the party never honoring their end of the trade. One common solution to this problem is to introduce a mutually-trusted third party for escrow, however this represents a scalability and privacy problem. It also does not offer any protection against collusion. Atomic swaps solve this problem without the need for a third party by using timed smart-contracts on both chains.

Atomic swaps involve each party paying into a contract transaction, one contract for each blockchain. The contracts contain an output that is spendable by either party, but the rules required for redemption are different for each party involved.

One party (called counterparty 1 or the initiator) generates a secret key and sends the intended trade amount into a smart-contract. The second party (called counterparty2 or the participant) can only redeem the funds by knowing the secret key. If a pre-determined period of time (typically 48 hours) expires after the smart-contract transaction has been mined or staked and the funds have not been redeemed by the participant, the funds can be refunded back to the initiator’s wallet.

For simplicity, we assume the initiator wishes to trade Particl for Decred with the participant. The initiator can also trade Decred for Particl and the steps will be the same, but with each step performed on the other blockchain. At this point, the participant is unable to claim the funds from the initiator’s Particl smart-contract because the secret key is unknown by them. If the initiator revealed their secret key at this moment, the participant could claim the funds from the contract without ever honoring their end of the trade, leaving the initiator at a loss.

To avoid this, the participant creates a similar smart-contract but on the Decred blockchain and sends the intended Decred amount into it. However, for the initiator to redeem the output, their own secret must be revealed to the participant. For the participant to create their smart-contract, the initiator must reveal not the secret key (since the participant could stil claim funds and not honor their end of the deal), but a cryptographic hash of the secret key to the participant so that the smart-contract can be properly deployed. The participant’s contract can equally be refunded after a pre-determined period of time.

The initiator then redeems the participant’s Decred funds by revealing the secret key to the participant’s smart-contract. The secret key is then extracted from the initiator’s redeeming Decred transaction providing the participant with the ability to redeem the initiator’s Particl contract.

This procedure is atomic (with timeout) as it gives each party at least 24 hours to redeem their coins on the other blockchain before a refund can be performed. This is the best option for people requiring privacy, and is also probably going to be the cheapest to use.

Third-Party Integrations

Using the very flexible and modular Particl Wallet, third-parties can easily be integrated to enhance the user experience and provide services. One such example is the integration of account-less exchanges such as Changelly, Shapeshift, Flyp.me or Altcoin.io. As these accounts do not require any account or KYC/AML verifications, they can easily be integrated directly into the Particl Wallet.

While not as private and cheap than atomic swaps, third-party services do offer some advantages over their decentralized counterpart. Liquidity and volume, for one, can be much better on centralized exchanges with more users. Some of these services (such as Changelly) also offer fiat options and pairs which allow the Particl Wallet to offer in-wallet fiat trading. The data fetched from these services’ APIs can also be used to facilitate many future wallet functions such as displaying fiat balances, setting listings in fiat prices, offering credit card deposits, etc.

Privacy Smart-Contracts

While not turing-complete, Particl is still able to deploy secure and complex smart-contracts. Good examples include the entire Particl marketplace, the MAD escrow mechanism and cold staking. Any developer can deploy their own Dapp on Particl and use the CT and RingCT privacy protocols to make contracts that natively respect users’ rights to privacy.

Decentralized Privacy Marketplace (Q1 2018)

Particl’s decentralized marketplace is a highly scalable and secure solution for e-commerce. Built with privacy at its core, it uses several platform-wide features to deliver the full suite of tools required to shop and sell products and services online.

The marketplace is built with privacy at its core, meaning that all transactions between buyers and vendors are fungible (untraceable and private). To achieve this feat, many privacy solutions are deployed such as CT escrow smart-contract, IP obfuscation, encrypted messaging and metadata leak protection.

Decentralized Escrow

As buyers and vendors do not know and trust each other, there is no protection against one of the party never honoring their end of the trade unless a mechanism is put in place. One common solution marketplaces and payment processors implement on their platforms is the use of a mutually-trusted third party (usually the platform provider itself) as “escrow agent”. However, not only does this represents a scalability and privacy problem but it also does not offer any protection against collusion between the escrow agent and one of the party. Particl, being a fully decentralized solution, solves this problem without the need for a third party by using what is called MAD escrow smart-contracts. This type of escrow does not require any fee to be paid.

Game Theory

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) 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, thus making their use not an option. It is based on the theory of deterrence and the Nash Equilibrium, 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. Particl’s MAD escrow mechanism replaces the nuclear annihilation deterrence factor of the MAD game theory for a mutual financial loss should one party acts dishonestly.

How It Works

Particl uses the BIP 65 opcode to enable MAD escrow contracts by locking funds in a secure multi-signature address until all of the parties sign off on the transaction.

The seller starts by depositing an amount they want the buyer to match to symbolize a virtual handshake. This could be between 0 and 100 percent of the item’s purchase price, but optimal MAD odds are achieved when the insurance deposit equals 100 percent of the item’s purchase price. The buyer then deposits an amount equal to the handshake amount plus the price of the item they are buying. The escrowed funds are not released to any party until both confirm that the transaction has been completed satisfactorily. To avoid filibustering, the MAD smart-contract has a timer that runs for a pre-determined duration of time (which can be extended if both parties agree) after which funds are destroyed/burned (forever locking them for both parties with no option to unlock). This prevents both parties from willingly delaying and hindering the escrow process.

When both parties are satisfied with the outcome of the transaction, they are required to confirm the transaction as completed. When this is done, the item’s escrowed funds are released to the vendor and the insurance deposit is refunded to both parties at no fee.

Privacy

Particl’s MAD escrow system renders the marketplace fully fungible as it makes all transactions untraceable by default. In fact, not only is the entire marketplace content encrypted at the DSN level, but all currency transactions are rendered untraceable through the use of the Confidential Transaction (CT). This is achieved by making the MAD escrow smart-contract only work with CT and forcing all transactions to have to go through it. This technique enhances privacy much more than if CT MAD escrow was optional, as it makes all marketplace transactions equally the same (fungible).

Another privacy-enhancing aspect of the MAD escrow mechanism is its lack of third-party acting as escrow agent. In fact, in most arbitrated escrow system, both parties need to keep their discussion in the same environment as the arbitrator., effectively exposing every detail of the deal. This is so the escrow agent can step in if any problem arises and issue a resolution based on the context. This involves a lot of trust in the arbitrator and assumes it is honest. By not requiring any third-party.

Community Governance

Keeping decentralization in mind, Particl is governed by its community of stakers rather than the team or a third-party. Since the marketplace is fully anonymous, it is not unlikely that undesirable items and services would be listed for sale so their must be a way to moderate the marketplace in order to preserve its legitimacy and for it to not be an enabler of immoral or illegal businesses and activities. Having a third-party be nominated as moderator introduces a whole lot of issues such as legal liability, centralization of power and lack of scalability.

Particl’s way to deal with this problem is to allow its own community of stakers be the moderators. In fact, all public listings can be flagged by stakers if deemed undesirable and once a certain flag threshold is reached, the listing is taken out of the marketplace. Note that this does not apply to private listings as they do not even appear on the public interface of the marketplace.

Private Listings

While public listings can be moderated out of the marketplace by the Particl community, private listings cannot. Private listings are a private form of listing that can only be accessed by users’ in possession of its access key. It is not possible to find these listings on the public side of the marketplace.

Anti-Spam Listing Fee

Spam is a problem which all networks are exposed to. To mitigate this possibility on the Particl marketplace, two measures are deployed: a listing fee and a payment renewal requirement.

Marketplace Data Storage

The marketplace data is stored off-chain on DSNs. The default DSN on Particl is SMSG, and it is also the one with the best privacy specifications. Storing marketplace data off-chain allows the Particl platform scale better without bloating its blockchain or centralizing nodes with masternodes. Content uploaded on most types of DSNs produce a small hash that can be stored on the Particl blockchain. This hash must match the hash of the content once it is retrieved from the DSN at a later time. If it does not, the content is considered fraudulent and is rejected by the Particl platform.

Wallets

Particl currently offers several implementations of it’s wallet technology. These are the Particl Wallet (GUI), Particl-qt (Basic), Particl-CLI (Command line) and Particl-Copay (Mobile). Each wallet implementation is outlined below.

Particl Wallet

Particl Wallet is Particl’s main GUI wallet. While it does not currently contain all Particl features as it is still in development, it will eventually do. This wallet is intended to be the centerpiece and default wallet of the Particl platform.

Particl-qt

Particl-qt is the first ever Particl GUI wallet and was released the same day as Particl’s launch. It includes a couple of features currently not implemented on Particl Wallet such as coin control, and filtering, but will not include platform-related features such as the marketplace or the messaging system which are designed to be implemented on the Particl Wallet only.

Command-line

Particl-cli is a command-like client that includes all Particl features but without all the advanced bells and whistles of Particl graphical clients. Particl-cli is recommended for advanced users only.

Controlled via command line interface, Particl-cli is usually used on remote machines and computers without monitors, e.g. servers and less powerful devices like Raspberry Pi (which make for great staking devices)

Particl Copay (Mobile Wallet)

Particl Copay is a mobile wallet forked from Bitpay’s Bitcoin Copay mobile wallet. It includes simple public coin transfer functions as well as advanced multisig capabilities. It is available on Google Play.

Team

The Particl project is lead by a sizeable team of 19 people including developers, managers, designers, researchers, cryptographers and a treasurer. The project can also count on the help of 7 advisors including some renowned names such as Charlie Shrem, Miguel Cuneta, John Bailon and Micah Spruill.

The Particl Foundation

The Particl Foundation (Particl Stiftung) is a non-profit Swiss foundation registered in July 2017 with the help of Swiss law firm MME enabling the organization and deployment of funding and logistics to ensure the safe development of the Particl project and vision. Particl Stiftung’s foundation status provides legal protection and resources to the Particl project ensuring its sustainability and compliance to current and new regulations.

The Particl Foundation’s funds come from both a token swap (1:1 for SDC:PART) and Bitcoin donation campaign that lasted from March 17th 2017 to April 15th 2017 and raised the total sum of ~590 BTC. The Foundation also holds 996,000 PARTs meant for a second donation raising campaign that is currently scheduled for Q1 2018. Particl Stiftung also has developed and implemented a self-funding mechanism on top of Particl’s proof-of-stake algorithm which rewards 10% of all block rewards to a fund controlled by the Foundation.

These funds are for meant to support and promote the Particl project by, for example, hiring more developers, initiating marketing and PR campaigns, establish global partnerships, generate community engagement, advocate for privacy and security in society and etc.

Resources

Particl Project website

Particl Project Wiki

Particl Whitepaper

Particl Cryptocurrency

Particl Coinmarketcap Info

Particl price and market state on Coin360