August 22, 2016

Ecosystem Updates

IndieSquare and Spells of Genesis have teamed up with TCG Force of Will to innovate using Counterparty. Force of Will has a growing community with over 100,000 players that will soon be able to utilize game items on the Bitcoin blockchain.

For greater context about the popularity of Force of Will, I quote SiliconAngle writer Kyt Dotson, “The game developer sells cards in over 30 countries and boasts a ranking of 4th in sales volume in North America for collectable hobby games.”

According to the Hobby Channel rankings, Force of Will only trails Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic: The Gathering in terms of popularity.

FoW is working to release their upcoming game “Force of Will Battle Simulator,” scheduled to be released in September.

The online game will feature tokenized game items on the Bitcoin blockchain via Counterparty in a similar manner to Spells of Genesis. Alongside this release, FoW has been working with the Counterparty projects mentioned to create a platform that easily allows future mobile and game developers to tokenize their items using Counterparty. FoW will be the first project to demonstrate use of the platform by issuing items for “Force of Will Battle Simulator.”

In addition to decentralized game item trading on the blockchain, the new joint venture between IndieSquare and EverdreamSoft will allow interoperability of game items between different games

“By providing secure and stable Counterparty infrastructure and token management interface for game developers as well as other blockchain-based tools, we are hoping to significantly lower the entry barrier for both small indie game devs and bigger game companies. When there are more blockchain games out there, that’s when the network effect kicks in and the whole concept becomes even more powerful and valuable,” said Koji Higashi, Counterparty Community Director and Co-Founder of IndieSquare.

Eiji Shishido, CEO of Force of Will, explained the decision to use Counterparty protocol saying, “The borderless nature of blockchain technology inspired us…FoW is not an online game currently but we wanted to bring in a new value to the game industry. We wanted to offer FoW players a whole new experience and the new value proposition based on the cutting edge technology.”

The formal announcements can be read here and here.

Longtime Counterparty community member Joe Looney has created a new service called BTCPayMarket.com

BTCPAYMarket.com utilizes the Counterparty DEX (decentralized exchange). The site does not maintain any databases and all information is queried from publicly available blockchain APIs.

All encryption is handled client-side. Neither your passphrase nor any of your private information ever leaves your browser. Transactions are assembled and signed in your browser then pushed to the Bitcoin network.

How it Works

Buying assets with BTC requires two transactions. First, click on an Active Order in the Asset Market table (highlighted in yellow) to send an Order transaction. After the Order transaction has confirmed, a Pending Order Match will appear in the Order Matches table. Click on the Pending Order Match to send an Order Match transaction (BTCPAY) to complete your order.

Selling assets for BTC only requires one transaction. Click on the asset you wish to sell in the Assets menu then click the Sell button. Sell orders expire after 1000 blocks (about 1 week) and appear in the Asset Market table highlighted in green.

If you have questions or comments you can reach Joe by sending an email to info@btcpaymarket.com

Another longtime Counterparty community member, JP Jansen, has been running a useful Counterparty service called “CounterTools.”

The service has several rare tools such as bulk token registration, the ability to create vanity addresses, a password repair/recovery tool, the ability to export keys using your 12 word password and more.

Check out JP’s site here.

Storj is successfully moving forward with Test Group C. Usage of the network continues to grow and it took only two weeks to pass through the first milestone of 1 TB of data stored on the Storj network. Storj reported the following stats in this update from earlier in the month.

Over 3,800 active users

Over 78,500 bucket entries

Over 700,000 shards

Over 33,000 Storj Share downloads

Over 20,000 command line tool downloads

Spells of Genesis recently had a card known as SatoshiCard sold on the secondary market for 1,280 XCP, valued at 6.66 Bitcoins or $3,700 USD at the time of sale. Information on this milestone in gaming history can be read here and here.

Counterparty Content

“Let’s assume you are a Counterparty user: Over time a lot of small outputs like this or this are created due to the nature of XCP transactions. Unfortunately these coins are not spendable by most wallets out of the box and it appears as if those tiny amounts are simply subtracted from your balance and gone, but this is where this tool comes into play: it helps to locate any unspent output and prepares a raw transaction which collects and combines all dust.” – redeem.bitwatch.co

Check out the tool here.

New Counterparty community member Matthew Reichardt of the upcoming project GearVault™ and Julian Smith of Blockfreight™ discussed some information related to subasset implementation. Read the details here.

Counterparty News

Takara’s integration of Counterparty tokens has continued to receive coverage in the media. Bitcoin Magazine put out an article on the subject that was later syndicated by Nasdaq. Finance Magnates also wrote a great piece that can be read here.

The Force of Will partnership with IndieSquare and Spells of Genesis has started to receive media attention but I expect more coverage to come. This story has received some preliminary coverage from Bitcoin News, The Merkle and EconoTimes.

Zaif’s recent integration of XCP and Counterparty based assets was written about by Fintechist and that article can be read here. Zaif Exchange makes use of a Counterparty token known as ZAIF.

EconoTimes also covered Zaif’s Counterparty integration from the context of BCY. Notably, Zaif’s BCY addition has created the first BitCrystals fiat pair in BCY/JPY.

Developer Updates

Progress continues on Counterparty’s EVM implementation. Some recent work for EVMparty can be viewed on GitHub here.

“I’m working with the docker stuff to create an easy way for people to test [the EVM] on testnet.” – Ruben de Vries

Join the Counterparty XCP group on Telegram for breaking news and real-time Counterparty conversation.

An unofficial Storj group was started on Telegram recently. If you are a Telegram user you can check it out here.