Why People Will Love the Particl Market

On March 17 20:00 UTC, Ryno Mathee and his team announced their departure from Shadow Project in order to transition to a new one called Particl. The new project aims to:

1. Hire full time developers

2. Foster inclusion of other coins

3. Update code base

4. Self-govern the upcoming marketplace

5. Completely legitimize the project

This has caused a lot of mixed emotions within the community as they were expecting different news, and the sudden volatility of privacy coins did not do anyone any favor. But now that we are roughly a week in and have cooled our heads, a lot more people are starting to love the Particl Project approach. In fact, the team has successfully obtained more than 50% of the total SDC supply, as well as secured more than 75% of their third and final milestone (again, within a week of announcement).

Here are some of the fundamental reasons why the community has realized Particl Project will prove to be a big success.

Funding

Let’s start with the obvious reason. As Ryno has pointed out, Shadow Project has and always will be a hobby; something that he and his team would work on their free time. As much as I respect them for continuing to be as passionate about this project till now, that means the entire team has to finish their actual jobs first before they can start working on this. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why some of the releases were delayed is because a few of the devs were involved on a different crypto project.

After a lot of discussions, most of the devs (one of them is still studying) have finally agreed to work on this full time. This will equal to better collaborations, timelines and more possibilities to add more items in the roadmap.

Also, funding is not just limited to the devs. The team is also planning to use this for PR, legitimization of Particl, third party audit, etc. You can just imagine how much publicity the project can receive from this.

Self-Governance

The most common stereotype of a privacy coin would be its association with the darknet markets (DNM), and there are obviously some truth to that. A person would be able to buy illegal items online anonymously. The unfortunate association of Shadow Project is good for the dark market community, but bad for the developers who will release the marketplace. The authorities would have no problems tracking and filing lawsuits against them, while everyone else runs free. Remember, SDC was originally a simple privacy coin, until the community adamantly requested the developers to create a marketplace. I would personally hate the fact that Ryno and the team would have to answer a lawsuit for that.

In an answer to this, the team has cleverly come up with a self-governance model, where they leave it to the public to decide what to and not to sell. As the legality of an item would depend per location, it would be extremely difficult for the team to govern an international marketplace. Things such as child pornography, terrorism-related items and others obvious listings will of course be banned, but there are some grey areas. A classic example of this would be weed and hemp. This is legal in some states in America and more than 30 countries, but is prohibited elsewhere. (Note that this is simply an example of what is legal/illegal on different countries, and is by no means an encouragement to buy and sell on the upcoming marketplace.) This transfers the governance burden to the community as they would be more familiar with their local regulation.

Opportunities

One of the reasons why some investors would stay away from buying ShadowCash is because of its name. Let’s admit, even though it sounds perfect for other people (anarchists, DNM etc), it gives a shady impression for most as stated above. In fact, the project has been approached several times by columnist, investors and others in the past requesting to change their name.

Now that the team has successfully transitioned to Particl, this opens up a lot of possibilities in the future. Legitimate businesses can comfortably sell their items without being worried about DNM association.

Now why would legitimate sellers use Particl market? Apart from knowing there are a lot of winners in the crypto world who are willing to purchase items on crypto platforms, a lot of people don’t know that popular sites such as Amazon would charge as much as 20% of sales to the seller for a standard self-fulfillment order. Ebay would also automatically report sales to the government for tax purpose (nothing wrong with this, but hear me out). On top of that, sales records will be analyzed and potentially used against them in the future.

Selling items on the Particl market not only means zero sales fee and zero sales records kept, this also means that sellers receive a crypto-currency, and this is legally not a sale, but a commodity exchange. This means you only need to pay tax when you decide to convert to fiat (note that tax laws would differ each location).

Strategy

This is perhaps the most important reason why I’m quite excited about this project. As the team has announced Particl will become a currency-agnostic platform, this will spark the interest of the ETH, XMR, DASH, ZEC, etc. community to download our marketplace. Why? Because there is currently little or no real-life use for these coins. Fostering these coins would finally let them purchase items without transferring to fiat for tax purposes.

In order to optimize the platform, the sellers would automatically receive Particl coins. That means any other coin used will automatically be converted into Particl by indirectly exchanging from the crypto exchanges. This will increase the demand of Particl, which should go higher proportionate to the amount of sales the marketplace has, not to mention the increase in staking rewards due to transaction fees. Again, as the sellers realize this, there would be more upside for them to hold, or even stake Particl coins.

Knowing these facts, the Particl team should be able to increase PR budget to in order to make this a reality, especially after the marketplace release.

Conclusion

It is unfortunate that a lot of people, especially the ones who were looking forward to the Shadowcash marketplace as a DNM would leave the community, but selling illicit items was never the intention of the team in the first place. This is a bitter pill we needed to take in order to bring Particl Project to greater heights. With a better funded team, a legitimate presence, and a sound strategy, Particl would definitely be one of the coins to unite the crypto-currency community.