March 27, 2015

It’s time for another community update, and this week we have a lot to share.

From the Team

Last Thursday marked the start of the Counterparty Foundation Community Director election, and we’re very excited to see such quality candidates apply for these positions. The official nomination thread is at https://forums.counterparty.io/t/counterparty-foundation-election-2015-march-19th-april-16th/951, with four candidates currently listed. We’ll take this opportunity to briefly introduce each one.

Devon Weller – full time internet applications developer with over 15 years’ experience. Devon served as the project manager for the launch of LTBCoin and is the co-founder and CTO of Tokenly, a project dedicated to building fully open source tools and services on top of Counterparty.

Robert Ross – Founder and director of FoldingCoin Inc, a project whose native token FLDC is the second most traded asset on the Counterparty protocol. Robert and his team successfully converted 2 traditional Altcoins, OCTO and POWC, over to the Counterparty protocol, developed a voting system in which participants to the FoldingCoin project can vote on major upcoming implementations, held a 3.4 hour interview on DogeCoinRadio explaining Counterparty, and are looking to create an Ebay style Marketplace for Counterparty tokens.

Chris Derose – Currently acting as the interim Community Director of the Counterparty Foundation, Chris published a number of articles on Counterparty public journals, wrote a counterparty_ruby gem for interfacing with counterpartyd server in Ruby, delivered numerous talks on Counterparty at conferences, started a YouTube channel dedicated to educating the public about Counterparty, and won the Miami Bitcoin Hackathon with a solution designed around the Counterparty software.

JP Janssen – MSc in Economic Analysis with five years’ experience in finance, with trading and programming. As a community director, JP intends to contribute to the foundation by making instructional videos, posting in forums, documenting the protocol and talking with media.

Besides the nomination thread, we’ve opened a Q&A topic where candidates can answer questions from the community on Counterparty future, development, XCP price, exchange integrations and more. This is a great place for the community to discuss Counterparty opportunities, challenges and future goals with candidates, and based on their answers, pick the person whose views best align with the community interests.

The nomination period will stay open till April 2nd, 12 AM EST, when we’ll close the nomination thread and mark the beginning of the two-week voting period. The executive director will issue the CFELECTION2015 voting token and distribute it to all holders of XCP as dividend payment. Everyone holding a CFELECTION2015 token will then be able to send it to the address belonging to the candidate they wish to vote for. Addresses and names of all qualifying candidates will be displayed on the public Blockscan scoreboard.

From the Community

Exciting news from the community this week! Our community member developed a Chrome browser extension wallet for Counterparty that stores your secret passphrase locally in the browser with the option of client-side password encryption. The wallet is open source and available on Github and the Chrome Web Store.

In other news from the community, GoUrl – the cryptocurrency payment gateway that works with WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP and more, published a voting scoreboard where users can vote for the implementation of coins. This would be a good opportunity to see XCP supported on WordPress (and the Counterparty Foundation site), so we invite everyone interested to send small amounts of BTC to the XCP voting address.

Demo of the GoUrl gateway can be accessed here.

Development Updates

This week we had two major updates: new version of counterparty-lib, v9.50.0 and new version of counterblock v1.1.1. The new counterparty-lib release contains a hotfix for an integer overflow error that affected all clients parsing mainnet block 348076. For this reason, this is a mandatory upgrade. The counterblock release contains a bug fix for some (uncaught) runtime errors that can cause significant stability problems in Counterblock in certain cases. It also properly implements logging of uncaught errors to the counterblock log files. It is highly recommended that all users running counterblock upgrade to this version.

We released new documentation that explains how to write counterblock Modules (Plugins). The documentation is hosted on GitHub and can be accessed on our official Docs https://counterparty.io/docs/counterblock_modules/

Finally, we’d like to take this opportunity to outline a few important points regarding Counterparty’s recent developments and future plans which were originally posted in our forum thread:

Currently, the development of counterparty-server is starting to slow overall, and focusing on the smart contracts functionality. Building on smart contracts allows developers to accomplish virtually anything, without layering in features into the Counterparty protocol itself.

The counterparty-server test coverage continues to grow, and is now almost 70%. Our goal is to get this to be as close to 100% as possible.

For the last couple of months we’ve been working on simplifying the complexity of the Counterparty protocol as much as possible by removing certain unused features, such as callbacks, CFDs, and more. All of this functionality is now possible via smart contracts. By removing them (as they were hardcoded into the protocol itself), we further simplified the core protocol and reduced the space for error.

counterblock has undergone a reorganization as well, and the upcoming version moves Counterwallet specific functionality into its own plugin, allowing the core counterblock to be more minimal, and thus decreasing the chance of bugs and issues in the long run.

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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