March 13, 2015

Over the last couple of months we’ve made significant progress in terms of code refactoring, testing and dependency management in order to enable easier development of alternative GUIs and light wallets. With these changes we made a big step forward in making Counterparty the standard framework for developing Bitcoin 2.0 applications. However, besides enabling third party developers easier development of their own wallet versions through our new and improved API, we wanted to provide our end users with a stable, user friendly desktop wallet they can start using immediately. On Wednesday, the first beta version of the wallet, the counterparty-gui, has been released in public with a prettier interface soon to come.

As we mentioned in our last update, the desktop wallet can be used with a local Counterparty server and blockchain, or trustlessly with a light wallet and a remote server.

The GUI comes with a standalone installer for Windows and a MacOS installer coming soon, and will be configured to run in ‘light’ mode by default, meaning that users will no longer have to run a local instance of bitcoin/counterparty clients or download the blockchain to get started. To download the files, go to counterparty-gui releases on GitHub.

We designed the desktop wallet keeping in mind not only the needs of our end users, but also those of third party developers. That is why we made the wallet fully open, providing all the necessary API methods to enable easier development of alternative Counterparty wallets. In addition, we made the wallet extensible with the implementation of plugins which can be written in QML/Javascript and in the near future HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Next steps for the GUI development are to add unit tests in counterparty-lib for all RPC calls, put all RPC calls in a separate thread and make the BIP32 wallet compatible with Counterwallet. As always, we will keep you updated on the progress and new version releases.

That concludes our update for this week. If you have any questions you can contact us via our support channel, gitter, forum or github.

Don’t forget to follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter to receive weekly updates via email.