November 1, 2016

Development Updates

Robby Health Issue

Several months ago, due to increasing complications with a chronic health condition, Robby had to stop working for Symbiont. He is on the road to recovery, and has had to minimize his involvement in Counterparty. We wish him the best of luck and a speedy recovery.

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)

The Ethereum Virtual Machine for Counterparty has been developed and lives in the ‘evmparty’ branch. Any developers interested in testing the EVM on testnet can now do so by visiting the URLS below to get started.

Code – https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterparty-lib/tree/evmparty

Docs – https://gist.github.com/rubensayshi/cc6a776657d5bb88efe8d85c32750132

Recent issues with Ethereum (DAO, multiple hardforks, etc) have demonstrated that the technology still has to experience a lot of growth before it can be considered be stable.

After much consideration, the Counterparty Foundation has decided the responsible route forward for Counterparty is to NOT merge the ‘evmparty’ branch into master at this time. We can re-evaluate the decision in the future when there is additional community and developer support for the EVM on Counterparty.

Counterparty community member Joe Looney gave the following opinion on the EVM:

“Counterparty is, in essence, a handful of hardcoded features. To continue expanding on hardcoded features is the most logical way to proceed.”

First Last added: “This should be emphasized in the next [community update]. Counterparty can expand its capabilities in a safe way. It is safer and more secure than Ethereum.”

The original conversation can be viewed here.

There are currently no plans for the ‘evmparty’ branch to be run on any public Counterparty servers at this time.

Subassets and Bounty Program Update

873 XCP of the 1000 XCP needed have been donated to the subasset bounty located at 12ri2iypq8tMcKXSwycfzWbNvQAyncGpyA.

The general donation address for Counterparty development is 18BfbQ8kXcL8dwjYmX5fhyZs1YefxLFHG9.

Counterparty is run as a non-profit and we rely on community donations to push development forward. Your help is appreciated.

If you have a development plan contact a Counterparty community director for information about constructing a payment plan to fund a future development initiative.

Ecosystem Updates

Storj has made significant progress in the past month.

“We are excited to announce that Storj is in beta testing on Heroku’s Elements marketplace.

Heroku is a cloud platform that lets app developers spend their time on application code, not managing server infrastructure, and it’s one of the largest developer ecosystems in the world.

We invite you to contribute to Storj’s ongoing success by becoming a beta tester on the Heroku platform.

You’ll gain access to Storj’s object store in just 1 click, so you can upload and download files from our Blockchain-based, reliable and blazing-fast cloud.”

Read the full announcement from Storj here.

Heroku had this to say in their announcement on the addition of Storj,

“Storj object storage provider, allowing application developers to store their data quickly, securely, and for half the price.

Some features:

All data is encrypted client side. Unlike other cloud storage providers, Storj has no access to your data.

Storj uses blazing fast P2P technology for uploads and downloads. No more waiting to store/retrieve your data. We can go as fast as you can handle.

Significantly lower cost than the big guys on bandwidth and storage. Transfer in Storj is always free.

Fully open source. Want a feature that doesn’t exist yet? Feel free to fork us on GitHub and hack away. Storj is accessible via an API and has supported client libraries for [[Java|Node.js]]*.”

The full announcement from Heroku can be read here.

Storj released their master plan on October 5th authored by CEO/CTO of Storj Labs Inc., Shawn Wilkinson. The Storj Master Plan is informative and worth reading in full. My favorite quote from the article was the following:

“We should always remember that Storj was named after the futuristic StorJ concept by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell. He described a vision of a cloud storage system that was run by many trustless autonomous AIs. This sparked the vision and name that is Storj today. We want that future now, but we understand that we will get there one building block at a time.”

A Counterparty token faucet was released by satoshinakamoto.jp. Koji translated the faucet into english and the translated site can be viewed here.

Spells of Genesis creator EverdreamSoft has recently partnered with Channel 4 in anticipation of the full launch of SOG. The announcement was best described by Bitcoin.com’s Evan Faggart in the following quotes:

“On October 10, EverdreamSoft announced a partnership with the Channel 4 “All 4 Games” project. Through this, Channel 4 will help EverdreamSoft develop Spells of Genesis as it heads toward full launch.

A press release said All 4 Games will contribute to various game aspects, such as graphics, animations and menus.”

According to Bitcoin.com, All 4 Games executive producer Tone Brennan said: “The blockchain is a ground-breaking and fast moving form of digital economy and I’m excited that we’re going to be an early entrant infusing this in gaming.”

Read Evan’s full article here or read on for additional coverage.

Counterparty community member Matthew Reichardt is working on an upcoming project titled “AuthParty.” More details to come soon.

Book of Orbs is the latest partnership between EverdreamSoft and IndieSquare. The teams behind Book of Orbs gave further details in their formal announcement:

“Book of Orbs(BoO) is unique, in their approach to mobile gaming. Using Book of Orbs affords players complete control and ownership over their digital game items. Allowing for the use of items over multiple apps and within BoO itself, the app facilitates the secure trading of items on the blockchain directly; eliminating fraud and Counterparty risk. With the app’s simple and intuitive interface; BoO provides one of the first practical use cases of digital assets and, P2P decentralized asset trading.”

Read the formal announcement from Book of Orbs here.

Japanese cryptocurrency exchange ZAIF and the IndieSquare team have teamed up to create the Zaif mobile wallet. Read some excerpts from their announcement below:

“IndieSquare announces their new partnership with Tech Bureau, the company behind the popular Japanese cryptocurrency exchange “Zaif”, with the launch of the “Zaif” mobile wallet”

“The launch of the Zaif wallet, further solidifies IndieSquare, as a leading force in the token economy field. With a projected expansion that the reach of their prominent cryptocurrency exchange is expected to have as a result; the “Zaif” mobile wallet will be available on both iOS and Android devices.”

“Zaif’s latest project Bitgirls; a reality TV show airing this fall, that implements Counterparty tokens to gauge the popularity of female contestants’ in a voting context. The partnership with IndieSquare and the use of IndieSquare API will see Zaif welcoming a tighter integration between other services that utilize Counterparty tokens.”

The full announcement from IndieSquare can be read here.

FoldingCoin and the Rare Pepe Foundation made an announcement on October 6th.

“The Rare Pepe Foundation is proud to announce their partnership with FoldingCoin, providing a total of 3,400,000 PEPECASH tokens donated by some of the Rare Pepe project supporters towards the FoldingCoin Merged Folding Platform to assist in the computational development of vital medicines.”

You can read the full announcement from FoldingCoin here.

RarePepe.party is a digital game being built by John Villar and his team. The game intends to build on the Rare Pepe ecosystem and to use certified rares in-game. You can take a look at a teaser for the upcoming game here and see some members of the team here.

Counterparty in the News

Rebecca Campbell wrote an article about ZAIF and BitGirls in Bitcoin Magazine that was later picked up by Nasdaq.

BitGirls was covered by Vice.com, Brave New Coin and on Cryptoverse Episode #96, a podcast that explains the BitGirls concept very well.

BitGirls launched part one of the premier on October 21st with the second half of the premier airing soon. If you are interested in translating the closed captions to english for BitGirls you can contact a member of the Counterparty team or get into contact with BitGirls.

Book of Orbs was written about by AllCoinNews, Bitcoinist, and The Merkle.

Rare Pepe was covered by Bitcoin.com and CoinTelegraph, with the Bitcoin.com article currently over 11k views.

Storj was recently covered by Bitcoin.com and Seeking Alpha.

Shawn Wilkinson presented at The Bridge in Atlanta on October 31st.

Spells of Genesis received mainstream coverage about their partnership with Channel 4. An article by Yahoo Finance can be read here and an IBTimes article is located here.

JP Buntinx wrote an article on the Merkle discussing the rising popularity of Bitcoin based digital assets and Counterparty in particular.

“The Counterparty ecosystem is seeing its fair share of success as of late. Several new projects have launched, all of which make use of this particular platform to issue tokens. Spells of Genesis is perhaps the biggest project, but Force of Will has been doing well so far as well. Plus, there is BitGirls, a new TV show that will bring lots of attention to blockchain and cryptocurrency.

COUNTERPARTY IS FIRING ON ALL CYLINDERS

One of the biggest appeals regarding the Counterparty platform is how it is accessible to anyone. Companies and individuals can create their Bitcoin-based tokens, which are secured by the blockchain. This creates a slew of new opportunities for content creators, producers, artists, and enterprises looking to improve their loyalty points system.”

Read JP’s full article here.

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Share your thoughts or anything I missed at Trevor.Altpeter@counterparty.io.