Community governance

As a fully decentralized solution, Particl's Open Marketplace doesn't rely on hired moderators to keep its content clean

It is instead governed by its community of holders rather than a team of staff or a third-parties.

Since it is fully anonymous, it is not unlikely that undesirable items and services would be listed for sale. This is why there has to be a way to moderate the marketplace. This ensures the marketplace preserves its legitimacy and that it doesn’t become an enabler of immoral businesses and activities.

Having a third-party as moderator introduces a whole lot of issues such as legal liability, centralization of power and decision making, lack of scalability, and friction.

Particl’s way to deal with this problem is to allow its own community of users to be the moderators.

In fact, all listings can be flagged by any user. Votes are tallied based on coin weight where one coin equals one vote. The more coins a user holds, the more influence he has over the outcome of a flagging vote.

Once a certain weight threshold is reached, the listing is taken out of the marketplace. This also applies to private listings even though they do not appear on the public interface of the marketplace. Anyone with access to a private market can flag its listings, although it may prove much more difficult to reach the threshold.