November 5, 2014

As announced in the last community post, we’ll be publishing regular development updates to bring you up to speed on recent and upcoming changes in our products.

Let’s take a look at the most important changes implemented during the last sprint.

Disabled web-wallet BTC trading

Trading Counterparty assets for Bitcoin, as currently implemented in the protocol, is a two-step process requiring settlement transactions (‘BTCpay’) to be made soon after any orders match. Unfortunately, such a system doesn’t work well with Counterwallet, because the Counterwallet servers (by design) don’t have any control over user private keys, and so can’t make the settlement transaction automatically on behalf of users. The workaround so far has been to require users to stay logged in to Counterwallet indefinitely while their trades are open, but this has proven unreliable.

After consulting with the community on this topic, on November 5th 9:50 EST, we have disabled BTC trading in Counterwallet to better focus our efforts on developing a novel trading system that should dramatically improve usability, settlement times and reliability of BTC trading in Counterparty. Please note that this is a change with Counterwallet only, not with the Counterparty protocol itself — BTC trading will still be entirely possible using counterpartyd and any other Counterparty software. Counterwallet users that still have open trades to buy or sell BTC in Counterwallet are still able to cancel these trades from within the interface, by going to Exchange, then clicking on Open Orders, and clicking the Cancel button next to the appropriate order.

For the relevant discussion on GitHub, see Counterwallet issue #560.

Removed Buy XBTC option from Counterwallet

As requested by vennd.io, we have disabled Buy XBTC option in Counterwallet. Here’s the explanation provided by the vennd team on our forum thread:

“Due to recent rulings by FinCEN and other regulatory bodies in the US, we have decided to temporarily disable vending machine functionality for XCP and XBTC until our legal obligations are a little more clear. Please note we have only disabled one side of the XBTC gateway – you can still redeem your XBTC into BTC (minimum amounts still apply)! You are simply unable to exchange BTC into XBTC at this time and for the foreseeable future. Rest assured, we are working with our lawyers to resolve the questions raised by these recent rulings, and will be reaching out to the relevant agencies in due course. We hope to have good news for you soon – watch this space!”

Other changes and fixes

There have been a lot of minor changes and fixes implemented in the last few weeks, including updating the Counterparty build system, improving the multisignature address implementation, and resolving issues with block chain reorganization in counterpartyd. Here’s a list of most recent changes across all repositories:

Added coveralls support in counterpartyd for test coverage and statistics

Improved initial synchronization of counterpartyd, issue #362

Fixed a bug with blockchain reorganization in counterpartyd, issue #382

Implemented new multisignature address handling in counterpartyd-develop

Reorganized consensus checks (using tx_info instead of txlist_hash ) in counterpartyd, issue #386.

instead of ) in counterpartyd, issue #386. Updated windows dependencies in Counterparty Build System, issue #117

Updated windows batch file in Counterparty build system to reference python 3.4, issue #116

Fixed first block for dividend fee in Counterwallet, issue #564

Planned development for next sprint

In the upcoming weeks our focus will be on implementing a class of ‘human-unreadable’ asset names whose registration is free. In other words, we will enable creation of cost-free numeric assets. You can find out more about this implementation on our GitHub discussion.

We will also be implementing Chinese and Danish language support in Counterwallet which was submitted as a bounty on the Counterwallet Transifex page. There are currently 9 other partial Counterwallet translations that need completion and/or review, so you might want to check those out and help Counterwallet support your language.

That summarizes the development updates for this week. If you have any questions regarding recent or upcoming changes you can contact us via our support channel, forum or github.