May 1, 2015

Instead of our regular weekly update, today we’re bringing you a monthly recap of everything we accomplished as a community in April. We had some exciting news and updates published over the last 30 days, here’s a short summary:

From the Team

Robby on Epicenter Bitcoin – Counterparty co-founder Robby Dermody gave an interview on Epicenter Bitcoin discussing the features and evolution of the Counterparty project, including proof of burn, smart contracts, the technology behind the Counterparty platform, Symbiont and much more. If you missed the episode you can listen to the podcast on SoundCloud or watch the video on YouTube.

Counterparty-Ripple Gateway – Symbiont.io created a Counterparty Ripple gateway which enables Counterparty users to transfer XCP and user tokens in a low cost and near real-time manner. You can read the official press release on PR NewsWire.

XCP on ShapeShift.io – Another big event in April was the addition of Counterparty’s native token to ShapeShift.io. Counterparty users can now exchange their XCPs with Bitcoin or 25+ other cryptocurrencies instantly, without registration, on the ShapeShift.io exhange platform. ShapeShift recently partnered with Purse.io, which means users can now purchase items on Amazon and pay for them in XCP.

CounterpartyTalk.org – We moved the official Counterparty forum to counterpartytalk.org which has since seen an increased number of interesting discussions and new users, and has become the central place for the community to talk about all things Counterparty and Bitcoin.

200K Transactions Milestone – In April we reached a major milestone – 200,000 transactions on the Counterparty network (since then that number has climbed to 230K). The amount of transactions published on the network has more than doubled in just 4 months, and at this pace we can expect to hit half a million by the end of the year.

From the Foundation

New Community Directors – The blockchain-based election for three Counterparty Foundation community director seats ended in April, with the community choosing Robert Ross, Devon Weller and Chris Derose as their representatives.

Future Goals – Next week the new board will hold its first meeting and discuss next steps for the foundation. Meeting minutes will be made publicly available and all decisions explained in the upcoming foundation’s blog posts.

From the Community

New Counterwallet and Development Servers – CoinDaddy, the crypto 2.0 services company behind the CounterpartyChain blockchain explorer released public Counterwallet and Development servers which will be kept up to date with the latest versions of Counterwallet, Counterparty and Counterblock.

New Version of Counterparty-ruby Gem – Community director Chris DeRose released a new version of his counterparty-ruby gem, v1.1 which no longer requires a counterparty server and uses vennd.io servers by default.

New Video Tutorials – Robert Ross and the FoldingCoin team started a video series on Counterwallet explaining all of the available features, as well as a Counterparty Guides series with tutorials on XCP paper wallet and the new XCP Wallet from Chrome.

Counterparty Specification – Devon Weller, the co-founder and CTO of Tokenly and the Counterparty Foundation community director started writing a developer-level specification for the Counterparty protocol. So far the specification includes decoding and encoding transactions, as well as broadcast and send examples.

XCP Wallet for Chrome – Another important update from the community in April was the release of the XCP wallet for Chrome developed by our community member Joe Looney. The wallet is a Chrome browser extension that stores your secret passphrase locally in the browser with the option of client-side password encryption. The code is completely open source and available on Github, while the extension can be downloaded from the Chrome Web Store. If you want to learn more about the development of the wallet, check out Chris’s video interview with Joe Looney.

Development Updates

New version of Counterblock – In April our development team released a new version of Counterblock, v1.2.0-BETA2 and new documentation that explains how to write counterblock Modules (Plugins).

New Versions of counterparty-lib and CLI – We also released new versions of counterparty-lib, v9.51.2, counterparty-cli, v1.1.1 with bug fixes and performance optimizations.

New Version of Counterwallet – Besides bug fixes, the new version of Counterwallet v 1.6.3 released in April, includes using OP_RETURN and removed chat. A better alternative to the Counterwallet chat is to use the support channel for any issues and the forum for discussions.

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

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