Counterparty Token Price Doubles Year-to-Date thanks to Real World Use-Cases

Counterparty, a blockchain-based and tokenized smart contract platform, has doubled in value since the start of 2017. It achieved this despite spending fourteen hours offline in late 2016.

Also read: Rare Pepe Gets Blockchained, Made Into Tradable Counterparty Tokens

In 2016, alternative blockchains like Ethereum, Dash and Ripple grabbed headlines in both alternative and mainstream media. Meanwhile, Counterparty’s token, XCP, has doubled in value since January 1. On New Year’s Day, as Bitcoin reached the $1,000 mark, Counterparty comprised a $5 million market. Now, the comparably under-the-radar smart contract platform has reached a $10 million market. Counterparty achieved this despite spending fourteen hours offline on December 2, 2016.

Related: Bitcoin and Ethereum: The Crypto-Experiment Rolls On

Counterparty did appear on Shark Tank South Africa alongside Bitcoin thanks to a Vinny Lingham investment in November 2016. The digital asset’s token XCP peaked January 30 at .004 bitcoin (approximately $3.70) for a more than US$11 million market.

Counterparty highlights a project that uses its platform, Storj, which recently updated its white paper. The Storj network recently crossed 1,000 terabytes of data being stored on the network.

“We are the AirBnB of your disk drive,” Storj founder and chief development officer John Quinn tells Bitcoin.com. “With AirBnB, if you have an extra bedroom or apartment or downstairs, you can rent that spare capacity and get paid a somewhat passive income.With Storj, the network takes the excess capacity from your hard drive and contributes it into a distributed cloud. Storj allows people with extra disk drive space to easily monetize their spare capacity. With just a few clicks, people get paid passive income and developers get to push and pull small files of encrypted data across this distributed infrastructure.”

Digital game items are also traded over Counterparty, and the platform could benefit from increased demand for investment in virtual goods. Bitcrystals is a good example of this.

“We’ve come up with a vision of a true ownership of digital assets,” Markéta Korteova, communications director for Bitcrystals, told Bitcoin.com “We want to create not just a game, but a whole game economy, fairer than the classical one, where players really own their cards, or other assets.”

Counterparty allows Bitcrystals to create tokens representing the cards and place them on the Bitcoin blockchain. “Putting our cards on the Bitcoin blockchain allows players to do the same thing with digital assets – give, sell or exchange them independently from the game itself and in a secure and transparent way,” Ms. Korteova added. “We can set a specific token name, define a limited number of each asset and to lock it. This guarantees the asset’s rarity. Since the cards are Counterparty tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain, anyone, at any time, can verify this information.”

In a blog posted early January, Counterparty noted its developers are waiting for Bitcoin to solve its scaling dilemmas (“enable Segwit”) so it can launch already completed payments and atomic swaps features on Counterparty mainnet.

What do you think about the Counterparty smart contract platform? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Counterparty, Coinmarketcap

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