December 3, 2014

As announced in October, Counterparty is launching a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the growth and development of the Counterparty project.

Over the last year, Counterparty has evolved into the most advanced and mature Bitcoin 2.0 platform, and we’re ready to start providing a stable foundation and clear directions to projects interested in joining the Counterparty ecosystem.

The Foundation’s mission

The Foundation’s mission is to power the development of innovative, blockchain-based financial technology, facilitate crucial administrative functions, advance the Counterparty protocol and its products, educate the community on the Counterparty technology and its uses, provide consulting services on third party development projects, and drive global Counterparty awareness.

By uniting all community members and building alliances across the globe, the Foundation will strive to ensure that Counterparty remains a successful, thriving and growing financial platform with an increasing number of projects being built on top of its technology. By employing core developers and promoting innovation and collaboration among the community, the Foundation will ensure that the development efforts are being focused towards maintaining and furthering the Counterparty Protocol.

Board of Directors

The Counterparty Foundation’s Board of Directors, consisting of five directors, will govern the work of the Foundation and shape the direction through its strategy, mission, and core functions, ensuring that resources, leadership, and finances are in accordance with the Foundation’s vision.

The members of the Board of Directors will be selected by Founding, Industry and Community members in the following way:

Two Founding Directors will be chosen by the Founding Members (Robby Dermody, Evan Wagner and Adam Krellenstein )

Two Industry Directors will be chosen by Industry Members via instant-runoff voting, with each Industry Member entitled to nominate a single candidate.

One Community Director will be elected by the Community Members, voting as a class during a two-week long voting period (via XCP-based proof of stake voting). Every Community Director candidate must hold at least 50 XCP.

For an initial period of four months, before official elections are held, we have named five interim Directors that will be governing the Foundation: Robby Dermody, Adam Krellenstein, Tom Ding, Jeremy Lam, and Chris Derose. The interim Directors will temporarily hold their positions in order to finalize the industry membership program, prepare the community voting procedure and enable a proper elections process to wrap up by April 2, 2015.

Following this, Robby Dermody and Adam Krellenstein, co-founders of the Counterparty project, will continue their role as Founding Directors and together with the elected community and industry directors manage and oversee foundation’s operation in accordance with the Bylaws.

The remaining three members of the interim Board are as follows:

Tom Ding will take the role of interim Industry Director. Tom is the co-founder of Koinify, a venture-backed cryptofunding platform for dApps, powered by Counterparty. He has been actively involved in US and China’s crypto community since late 2013. Tom holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and MBA, and loves cryptocurrency’s intersection between Economics, Engineering and Philosophy.

Jeremy Lam will fill the second interim Industry Director seat. Jeremy is the creator of Vennd and co-founder of Vennd.io. Prior to founding Vennd.io, Jeremy specialized in the integration and configuration of interest rate and credit derivatives. He has worked in investment banks in Tokyo, Europe, Singapore and Australia. During the last three years, Jeremy worked in regulatory reform projects for the Dodd Frank act in areas such as mandatory clearing, GTR reporting and SEF trading.

Chris DeRose has been selected as the interim Community Director. Chris DeRose is an active member of the South Bitcoin community, a writer, and an evangelist to programmers who wish to write applications with Bitcoin. Chris holds weekly meetups in South Florida’s tri-county area and regularly presents on matters relating to crypto-currencies at universities, conferences, and user groups. When Chris is not travelling the world as a field reporter for “Let’s Talk Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin Magazine”, he is the principal owner and operator of his own software development and IT consulting firm.

Beyond this, Adam Krellenstein will take the role of Chief Scientist and have lead responsibility for maintaining and enhancing the protocol specifications, as well as providing executive level oversight on the maintenance and enhancement of the reference protocol implementation.

The Foundation Website

Together with this announcement we are launching the Counterparty Foundation website, which can be found at http://counterpartyfoundation.org. The website will serve as the main source of information related to the Foundation and its work. By providing weekly news updates, relevant resources, and documentation, we will ensure that organizations and individuals easily navigate the rapidly changing landscape of the Counterparty ecosystem.

The Foundation website is also the place where community members and organizations can join our membership programs and enjoy a wide range of benefits from being a Counterparty Foundation member. For a full list of membership options please visit http://counterpartyfoundation.org/join

Foundation Bylaws Available for Review

In addition to constructing the website, we have put the proposed Foundation Bylaws up on Google Docs for a two week comment period by the community. The link for this document is here. Please feel free to lend your comments, and suggest changes, directly in the document and/or in the dedicated thread we have set up for this purpose, here.

Moving Forward

We are pleased to be working with the rapidly growing Counterparty community and industry to assemble the Counterparty Foundation, and are confident that our collective efforts will help to advance worldwide interest and awareness of not just Counterparty itself, but blockchain based technology in general.