Community Update 3 — Wallets and Merchant Platform Phase 1 Roadmap!
The Bitcoin Private contribution team has been heads down for another week and continue to press forward toward its goals. There has been immense progress with specific regard to product development (wallets & payment solution), partnerships (merchant vendors), and our various marketing initiatives (re-launch of our ambassadors / localized communities program). Additionally, one of our top priorities continues to be to make BTCP as accessible as possible via exchange partners and we understand that this is something our community cares very deeply about.
Core blockchain:
- Continue to work towards finalizing SegWit support at the full node layer and adding our first use of the BIP 9 network. Given how important of an action item these are, we are taking our time with pushing the changes out.
- We launched a research grant initiative with the end goal of adding highly motivated, passionate, and talented individuals to our core blockchain / cryptography team. This underscores one of our core principles of believing in advancing our blockchain and cryptographic efforts.
Official Wallets & Payment solution:
Hardware wallet support code is completed on our end and we have made incredible headway on our own internal official wallets. There has also been progress on both our Electrum frontend and backends, iOS Electrum, and we begun development on a suite of Copay wallets, for convenience (includes a Chrome extension!), with relation to our merchant-vendor payment solution.
More specifically on the payment solution, the contribution team has conceived of a four phase roadmap for the roll-out of our merchant payment platform. We are still finalizing what the long-term roadmap will look like, but we have settled on the architecture, specs, and development of the first phase. More details on this below.
- Trezor pull request is still pending and we are waiting for response.
- We have successfully tested signing and broadcasting transactions from a custom build of Electrum-BTCP with success and have submitted a pull request supporting the Nano S app
- We are beginning the testing phase of the Electrum 1.2 protocol and we plan on rolling out a pre-release of it this week. This will be an integral component of our merchant payment solution product.
- One of our community members already built a BTCP iOS wallet that will function on the Electrum protocol. This will also be an integral component of our merchant payment solution product. Progress on this can be followed here: https://github.com/BTCPrivate/bitcoin-private-iOS-wallet
- Following the initial phase 1 beta proposal that one of our team members brought forward this past week, the contribution team has already concluded on V1 specs and architecture (graphic below). We will be rolling out Copay wallets this week, and as a part of this phase 1 we will be adhering to BIP-0070 in our integrations, so our users will be leveraging the complete security that the BTCP Protocol inherited from Bitcoin.
Phase 1 of the merchant platform roadmap is definitely quite ambitious. It’s important to keep in mind that we didn’t initially expect to deliver a payment solution this soon, however, given how quickly business vendors across the world are beginning to accept BTCP as payment we decided to expedite our internal planning and development process so that these vendors would have something safe and user friendly to use for now. The current ETA for phase 1 roll-out is Friday, April 13th. This timeline is something we are confident our team can achieve.
Marketing, Support, & Public Relations:
Our ambassador program re-launch this past weekend went as planned. This is the beginning of better formalizing BTCP localized communities across the world. In addition to the official BTCP Ambassadors Telegram, there are 17 countries currently represented via formal groups and our focus moving forward will be to further grow these deeply rooted communities. We believe this program will play an instrumental role in our merchant partnerships initiative.
On the support side we have noticed that it is difficult to keep up with all of the chat requests that come into our website, so we are looking to enhance the user experience with guiding our users from our support chat to other resources of support, e.g. our public discord server.
We plan on more aggressively advertising our research initiative as the month of March continues.
As always, If you have any media contacts or have a media inquiry yourself, feel free to put them in touch with us at press@btcprivate.org.
Exchanges:
There are no new updates at this time regarding exchange listings as we continue to try and make progress with our discussions and ongoing communication with exchanges. HitBTC has confirmed with us that BTCP will be listed by the end of the month. As a refresher, we have included up to date information below with information we have previously made public regarding exchanges.
We do not have any further update on CoinMarketCap’s information on BTCP. To our knowledge, they are going through their internal process with populating information. Since last week, LiveCoinWatch has updated the circulating supply on BTCP.
- Kucoin has given us permission to publicly confirm that we submitted an application in early February and that we are communicating with them.
- HitBTC is continuing to work on BTCP integration and will be listing this month.
- We can confirm we applied to Binance in early February.
- We continue to communicate with other exchanges and continue to be prepared to do whatever necessary to get BTCP listed.
As we have mentioned in the past, we are doing / are prepared to do whatever it may possibly take to make BTCP more accessible to our community.
Vendor & payment gateway partnerships:
It has been a pretty exciting week with new vendors deciding to accept BTCP, without any solicitation from our team. There are online businesses who continue to contact us asking how they can integrate BTCP payments into their site as well as store fronts that have gone out of their way to make a BTCP sticker to place on their door.
We have assembled a partnerships team that will assist with our process of signing up merchant vendors, onboarding them with the first version of our payment solution, and supporting them on any questions they may have. This same team will be assisting with approaching payment gateways who may want to integrate BTCP into their platform.
Our goal is to signup a base of merchant vendors who will serve as beta users of our phase 1 merchant platform. If you are a potential vendor partner or know one that would be interested in accepting a highly secure cryptocurrency such as BTCP, please ask them to fill out this form or to contact us at partners@btcprivate.org.
Closing thoughts:
The speed at which our team continues to execute is important to note. Many often times forget that this is a new contribution team that has mostly come together in early January. There are no members of the original Zclassic team on the current contribution team besides Rhett, and this is a testament to how much the community has rallied together in such a short period of time to create such a powerful open source initiative.
Besides our raw product & technology execution, which can be seen on our GitHub repositories, the data will speak for itself with how quickly we will be growing adoption on the merchant vendor side for accepting BTCP, once when we launch the first version of our payment solution.
As an update regarding our donation pool, it has been maintained in approximate accordance with the composition laid out in our whitepaper.
As always, we remind our community to only trust resources and information shared from our official website, our official Github, our official Twitter account, and this Medium account.
If you would like to join our engineering team, you can apply here. If you would like to contribute on any of our marketing efforts, the best way to start is to join our ambassador program here.
We are excited to continue this community driven, open source journey to bring private transactions, both P2P and commercial, to a mainstream audience. Please leave any feedback you may have in the comments below or feel free to tweet at us!
Bitcoin Private Contribution Team
