First week in 2015 and we already have a lot to share!
From the Team
Last Friday, January 2nd, we celebrated the one year anniversary of the Counterparty project. Thank you everyone for your birthday wishes and support. We are marching confidently into 2015 with big plans and a clear vision: make Counterparty the best, most secure and most advanced platform for smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Moving forward, one of our priorities will be the development of a desktop wallet. The first version is expected to be released this month, with the application framework and basic features already developed. You can monitor the development progress on GitHub in our counterparty-gui repository. As always, we’ll keep you updated on all major milestones.
Another important development item on our to-do list is launching smart contracts on mainnet. Current ETA is Spring.
Our support team is working on developing video and text tutorials for all Counterparty features. First videos are expected to be published next week on our YouTube channel.
Finally, we’ll be employing new developers, enhancing our products, and conducting QA, testing and security audits.
The Counterparty Foundation will be working on its membership programs, electing the official Board of Directors (scheduled for April 2nd), gathering funds for the Counterparty project and working with businesses on their Counterparty implementation projects.
From the Web
Counterparty, together with five innovative projects built on the Counterparty platform, has been named as one of the 19 crypto 2.0 projects to watch in 2015. The fact that one third of all projects listed in that article is built on Counterparty emphasises Counterparty’s dominance in the metacoin ecosystem, and we’re confident that number will increase significantly in 2015.
CryptoCoinNews covered our celebration announcement last week in their post: Happy Birthday Counterparty, while Let’s Talk Bitcoin published an article about a new tool built for the Counterparty platform – a Counterparty Gateway / vending machine service.
From the Community
There has been a lot of movement in our community this week. Let’s start with third-party tools and services:
- Vennd is preparing to relaunch the XCP vending machine in Counterwallet and is looking for non-US testers. For more information about this check out our forum thread: Seeking beta testers outside the US for relaunch of XCP vending machine
- Another Counterparty Gateway / vending machine service is being developed with a new ‘proxy token’ launched on Counterparty for BTC, called BITCOINEX. The token may be used instead of regular Bitcoin for paying dividend payouts on tokens, as well as trading on the DEX, while the code powering the BITCOINEX gateway / vending machine is open source and can be found on Github: https://github.com/tokenly/xcp-gateway . Detailed information about this project is available in our forum threads: BITCOINEX – BTC Proxy Token and Counterparty Gateway Service Proof of Concept
- Our community member mtbitcoin has created a testnet explorer for everyone willing to play with testnet BTC and XCP: http://testnet.blockscan.com
- BraveNewCoin has launched a mobile app which provides in-depth market information for a variety of cryptocurrencies, including Counterparty
This week was also packed with interesting discussions, both on our forums and social media channels. Here are our picks:
- Detect Counterparty transaction – discussion on how to detect Counterparty transactions and add OP_RETURN output
- Howdy from Eris Industries – thread dedicated to Eris Industries (a distributed application platform with smart contract capability) and its cooperation with Counterparty (such as the recent #MarmotAward for XCP Decerver Module)
- Digital goods will be HUGE! – discussion on having digital goods stored in blockchain technology
- Voting using a counterparty asset – how to monitor unconfirmed transactions using https://partychain.com and blockscan (which has updated the address balance api to show unconfirmed balances)
Development Updates
As announced previously, we are working towards increased quality assurance by expanding automated tests, improving the release process and enhancing the automated build system. In that regard, counterblockd (which has been significantly improved) and counterpartyd_build will from now on have their own release tags: counterblockd/releases and counterpartyd_build/releases.
In other news from our development team, Counterwallet has been updated to the latest version of counterpartyd v9.49.3, counterblockd 1.0.0 and counterwallet 1.6.0. This means that manually providing pubkeys for multisig addresses is now available in Counterwallet mainnet.
For more information on new features in Counterwallet read our last week’s development update.