Particl, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency platform and decentralized marketplace, has successfully hard forked. With the activation of RingCT and Bulletproofs, Particl’s already rigorous privacy protocol has been strengthened even further, giving users the ability to send completely untraceable currency transactions at a fairly low cost.
Originally made popular by the open-source cryptocurrency Monero, the RingCT privacy protocol fully anonymizes the transacting amounts and participants of any transaction made using the protocol and makes financial data mining ineffective. RingCT provides very strong privacy and plausible deniability that is supported by cryptography.
Unlike Monero and other RingCT-based cryptocurrencies, however, Particl’s implementation is compatible with the Bitcoin codebase, which is much more flexible and programmable than the more rigid Cryptonote codebase. As a result, Particl is enabling the RingCT protocol to reach its full potential, not only making currency transactions untraceable, but also bringing RingCT’s strong privacy capabilities to decentralized applications and atomic swaps, as well as the Lightning Network, which is now running on Particl’s testnet.
The other item making its way onto Particl’s mainnet, Bulletproofs, is a new generation of range proofs that makes transactions less costly to send. Also referred to as non-interactive zero-knowledge short proofs, Bulletproofs offer a groundbreaking improvement over regular range proofs, reducing their size by approximately 70%. This in turn reduces transaction fees and the space they take on the blockchain by the same ratio.
Paul Schmitzer, the Head of Marketing for Particl, said: “This release sets the stage for our upcoming mainnet release of the Open Marketplace. We really look forward to bringing this completely decentralized and near-zero cost marketplace to the world so that anyone can buy and sell products and services for cryptocurrencies while keeping their shopping habits, financial data, and sales data private.”
