Community Update 4— development progress, merchant signups, and HitBTC update

In an effort to better streamline our development, we will commit to doing a better job of posting our outstanding pull requests and issues to the public for their review. As in the past, we also believe this is a great way to encourage outside developers to learn more about our work and join our development initiative.

Moving forward, we will be publishing these “formal” type of community updates on a bi-weekly basis. We may have more “informal” updates on Twitter, Medium, Reddit, etc. in between. Now on with the updates!

Core blockchain:

We have multiple pull requests out for review which allow for things such as SegWit support for claiming BTCP. We ask our extended developer community to review our outstanding pull requests and comment if needed.

https://github.com/BTCPrivate/BitcoinPrivate/pulls

We are investigating a few potential enhancements to our blockchain development and will update accordingly as we further progress.

Official Wallets & Payment solution:

• Pull requests for both Trezor and Nano are still pending
• Working on desktop wallet UX enhancements
• We are investigating and working on shielded electrum transactions

As part of our merchant solution beta release expected for mid April, we have made significant progress. For more information on the architecture behind how we are approaching this first phase, please check out our last community update. Correction: last week we mentioned Friday, April 13th as a hard deadline. Due to increased merchant demand, we would like to make this a “loose” deadline for mid-late April.

• Integrating with Bitcore library and conducting QA on it
• Continuing to work towards the multi-platform wallets
• Experimenting and designing various UI elements

Marketing, Support, & Public Relations:

Our networking event / meet-up this past Saturday in San Francisco was a success and we will have video clips / photos from it uploaded to our official YouTube channel when possible.

The ambassador community will be running their first official contest this week. Will update this article with information on that contest once it is published.

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. We are looking to discuss our mission and strategy with anyone and everyone and would love to spread the word on Bitcoin Private across the world!

Exchanges:

When we first announced in February that HitBTC would be listing us, we were told that the approximate date for this would be in late March. As said in our tweet from earlier today, we are in close contact with their team and are awaiting updated, precise information on when exactly this will be.

We have no further updates at this time regarding any other major exchanges.

Vendor & payment gateway partnerships:

As mentioned earlier, the merchant demand for a BTCP payment integration continues to exceed our early expectations. Since last week, we have grown our pre-signups by over 100%. We have yet to begin any pro-active strategies in signing up merchant vendors.

We will have more specific details on our merchant partners once we release our phase 1 beta. If you are a merchant who wants to accept BTCP or know of any merchants who want to accept BTCP, please fill out / have them fill out our merchant vendor form.

Closing thoughts:

It has been less than a month since our mainnet launch and we are very thankful for how strong our community has grown to be. We will let our accomplishments, progress, and data speak for itself over the coming several weeks and months. In doing so, we are confident that prospective partners, of all kinds, will continue to see the value Bitcoin Private is bringing to this world and how genuine of a mission we support.

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