July 19, 2016

Ecosystem News

Storj kicked off Test Group C on July 8th. This is a major announcement for the Storj team as it signifies the beginning of their final testing period before the full launch later this summer.

“We’re thrilled to announce the start of our final testing stage before a full launch later this summer – Test Group C (TGC). TGC will be the first to test real world network conditions, and participants have a chance to get a portion of the rewards totaling 1,000,000 SJCX. Rewards will be distributed for telemetry reports, storing data, and transferring data on the network over the next few months.”

Do you want to get involved in Test Group C?

“To participate in TGC, please download the Storj Share application:

During the course of TGC you will be required to upgrade to new versions as they are released. These will include bug fixes and improvements. Remember that this is beta software and there will be issues along the way. Thanks for your patience and support!”

The full announcement for Test Group C can be read here.

In related news, Storj Labs added three high profile members to their technical advisory board.

“We’re extremely pleased to have Michael, Tyler and Warren join our team as we launch operations this month. Storj was built specifically for software developers and we are excited to allow them to start seeing the benefits of a distributed, end-to-end encrypted object storage network: higher security, better performance at half the cost of the big guys,” said CEO Shawn Wilkinson.

The announcement has detailed information about the new members and it can be read here.

FoldingCoin held their monthly meeting on July 3rd. Catch up with Robert, Jona and Helene here.

The Counterparty Foundation is offering bounties for site and content translation! In addition to Chinese and Japanese bounties, there are 50 XCP available for German and French translations. Take a look at all available translation bounties here.

Counterparty and Storj charts were added to ethereumwisdom.com and can be viewed here.

Counterparty Content

Storj released part 2 of the 3 part “What is Storj” series. This post was titled “The Storj Toolset”.

“StorjShare is the reference farming client. It allows users to easily setup and run a farm on any machine. StorjShare is available as a command-line interface (CLI) for more advanced users and to enable automation. The CLI allows the user to set parameters like the amount of storage space to share, storage location, and a payment address. It also handles contract negotiation, audit responses, and all other network communications.”

“To help renters use the network, we’ve also created Bridge. Bridge is designed to be deployed to a production server to handle contract negotiation, auditing, payments, availability, and a number of other needs. Bridge exposes these services and, by extension, storage resources via an Application Programming Interface (API) and client. The client is designed to be integrated into other apps, so that any application can use a Bridge server to store data on the Storj network without having to be a part of the network.”

The full article can be found here.

“You might want to keep your SJCX (or XCP) in Armory (or another ordinary BTC wallet) if you don’t fancy using a web wallet like Counterwallet for storing larger amounts that you’re not going to use immediately. Only, beware that Armory, etc., cannot show the SJCX amount, but will instead only show a small BTC amount. The small BTC amount will not reflect the amount of SJCX nor any changes to the amount of SJCX.”

Read the full article here for information on storing your XCP and Counterparty assets in Armory.

Spells of Genesis has been in the news frequently due to the rising popularity of in-game assets. In-game assets are trending across all platforms lately but in-game assets in traditional games are not fungible! Counterparty will improve this aspect of gaming. Spells of Genesis is the game farthest along with fungible in-game assets, read about the evolution of their platform here.

Spells of Genesis received coverage due to BitCrystal price movement ahead of the full release of the game. The brief article can be read here.

Scotcoin was covered in a CoinTelegraph article that explored how to get mainstream society interested in cryptocurrency.

“We have actively gone out and searched for suppliers outside the normal geek spectrum. So already you can buy beer, get a hotel room, your car serviced, your chimney swept for Scotcoin. Add in T-shirt printing, office/hot desk rental, car hire, football and pro basketball tickets, web design and hosting, server colo and coming soon also flights to/from Glasgow Prestwick. Start-up loans in Scotcoin are now available for young companies who agree to accept Scotcoin for their goods and services. Also within the month, the first residential property in the UK will be offered for crypto – though to be honest I think the deal will eventually be done in BTC rather than SCOT but it will certainly be listed for SCOT anyway.” – Willie Fleming, Director of the Scotcoin Project

Read the full article here.

Counterparty News

Counterparty and Storj were in the news extensively as of late due to the recent payment channel announcement. Catch up on any articles you missed!

Storj & Counterparty Testing Instant Micropayments Channel – Bitcoin.com

Bitcoin Blockchain Proof-of-concept: Storj and Counterparty Partner to Add Support for Payment Channels – CoinTelegraph

Storj and Counterparty Test Near Instantaneous Bitcoin Micropayments – FinanceMagnates

Counterparty and Storj Unveil Payment Channel Technology – LiveBitcoinNews

Storj and Counterparty partner to add support for payment channels – EconoTimes

Bitcoin Weekly 2016 July 13: Ubiquity real estate proof-of-transfer on blockchain, Storj and Counterparty “picopayments,” Coinbase outage, and more – SiliconAngle

Developer Updates

Earlier this week Counterparty released a major new update for its reference client software. The new version of counterparty-lib, 9.55.0, brings numerous enhancements such as P2SH support, Docker builds, several protocol-level updates, as well as dozens of bug fixes. The included P2SH capabilities enable support in Counterparty for multisig addresses (which start with a ‘3’), as well as opening the door to the release of payment channels (micropayments) and Lightning Network capabilities.

If you are running counterparty-server, please update to this new version ASAP. The protocol changes will take effect at block 423888 (around August 4) and your software must be updated by that time.

Read more information about this update here.

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