The Particl team’s anticipated PART token is preparing to be created and distributed following the successful formation of the Particl Foundation. Running in parallel with all the legal guidelines and forms that go along with creating a viable entity to support an open source project, the development team has taken Bitcoin Core 0.14 and turned it on it’s head by adding a host of privacy and governance enhancements to it. 


- TESTNET3 Getting Started Guide: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Particl-Testnet-Getting-Started-d9yhExvCaW6vCp3qLUwuW
- #testing slack channel: http://slack.particl.io

# Private by Design
## What are Confidential Transactions (CT)?

Bitcoin Core developer Adam Beck originally proposed the idea of [“bitcoins with homomorphic value (validatable but encrypted)”](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=305791.0) back in 2013. Gregory Maxwell, a Bitcoin Core developer as well, further expanded on CT in [The Elements Project](https://www.elementsproject.org/) and offered this simplified description

> Confidential Transactions improves the situation by making the transaction amounts private, while preserving the ability of the public network to verify that the ledger entries still add up. It does this without adding any new basic cryptographic assumptions to the Bitcoin system, and with a manageable level of overhead.

**CT in action on Particl Testnet:** https://particl.news/particl-dev-update-june-1st-2017-f736948a338d


## What is RingCT?

Monero Lab researcher Shen Noether has been developing a concept of further obfuscating transaction data on chain by adding ring signatures to the concept of confidential transactions. This lead to the [Ring Signature Confidential Transactions for Monero](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098) which hides amounts and addresses while still remaining verifiable. 

> In this article, a new type of ring signature, A Multi-layered Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group signature is described which allows for hidden amounts, origins and destinations of transactions with reasonable efficiency and verifiable, trustless coin generation.

*RingCT on Particl TESTNET3 is still raw but Hey! isn’t that why we do testnet in the first place?!*

## Why Confidential Transactions?

Much like Particl inclusion of native segwit which provides not only the important malleability fix (which is very important in our use case) but opens the door to other great technologies like Lighting Network, the addition of Confidential Transactions was born from necessity and we were extremely excited at the opportunity when Gregory Maxwell released the concept and white paper. 

Confidential Transactions is part of a multi-pronged solution to privacy within Particl. The combination of being able to create unlinkable and untraceable transactions using RingCT and then spend those outputs using the secure and powerful bitcoin scripting language with CT allows the team to build a very powerful and privacy focused solution. Unlike RingCT, Confidential Transaction (CT) outputs can be spent in multi-signature scripts, bip65 smart contracts and a whole host of other powerful scripts.

# Power to the People

Adapting RingCT and implementing CT on bitcoin’s robust codebase are both firsts in the industry. The Particl team has also created alpha versions of on chain governance and voting mechanisms and foundation donation addresses.

https://d2mxuefqeaa7sj.cloudfront.net/s_DC188A93EF9ED24895215695446A6DAD07DB8BE57A3F24343D961C23E3756686_1498474133952_UnfvyTE.jpg