December 1, 2017

We begin the last newsletter of 2017 with several updates from projects in the Counterparty community. Regardless of the swaying back and forth of forks, improvements to the Counterparty protocol continue, and the innovative community continues to grow.

We look forward to 2018 and continued growth and success for Counterparty. Updates from existing projects developed by the community are as follows:

Ecosystem Updates:

Sarutobi Island continues to provide updates this month as lead developer Christian Moss announces that he’ll be adding two special characters to the game, that can be summoned by special tokens.

The tokens will support charities in both New Zealand and Japan as ‘Save the Children’ and ‘Kizuna’ will be represented via these two new characters. Christian has described the concept behind the launch of these new characters as separate from his crowdfunding campaign. Instead, users who will purchase the token will find that proceeds are given to the charities.

In regards to Chapter 2 of Sarutobi Island, Mandel Duck has given a sneak peek of new scenes, as well as new puzzles and battles from the game via their Twitter channel.

Book of Orbs shares some exciting news this month. Soon, the app will be updated so that users who experience stuck transactions; particularly in instances where they have set too low of a custom fee, will now find that they can increase the fee with an RBF (replace by fee) function (this will only apply to transactions made following the implementation of this function). Furthermore, a beta version of the web-app is due to be released imminently.

Augumentors announced the next phase in the development of their game, “the birth of Solar and Rhule” and “the Third Age”. These developments continue the open narration of the game, alongside an expansion of the game’s deck-building capabilities.

The Augmentors team has also recently updated their website to illustrate the more visual lures of the project as well as, introduce the community to the members of their team.

More prominently, Augmentors have most recently published a whitepaper on the Databits economy. The Whitepaper expands upon the Augmentors network (DTB) and the in-game currency (DTBT).

A key talking point of the whitepaper reminds alpha testers that they have the opportunity to test the core gameplay this month. More details and updates from the Augmentors team can be found via their medium publication.

Spells of Genesis’ parent company Everdreamsoft publicly announced support in recent weeks, for the LordCoin ICO. The coin, which would fund a multiplayer mobile, role-play game (Lordmancer 2) initially allocated 15,000 LordCoins in a specially designed scheme to benefit BitCrystal holders. BitCrystals are the key in-game currency for players of Spells of Genesis – a mobile strategy and trading card game – that can also be used to purchase tokenized items on the bitcoin blockchain.

Though LordCoin is an ERC20 token, this scheme allowed EverdreamSoft to issue ‘DROPLORDCOINs’ – a Counterparty asset issued to supporters to match their BCY amounts. The scheme proved so successful that an additional 10% of purchased LordCoins/DROPLORDCOINS were issued to BitCrystal holders.

Through this collaboration, Spells of Genesis players were also able to purchase a newly designed card dubbed; Dracomancer, in a limited supply of 800 units. Dracomancer is available to use in-game and trade within the Book of Orbs environment. Spells of Genesis also issued a mini-series of 5 cards as part of their 2017 Black Friday campaign, featuring a spell to be used in-game.

At the beginning of November, Spells of Genesis also released version 1.2.8. of their game following feedback from their public roadmap. The update included digital wallet linkage that expanded user choices outside of Book of Orbs to also include IndieSquare Wallet. Spells of Genesis will also implement their highly anticipated ‘Blockchainization’ feature on a global level as of December 6th.

Age of Rust recently introduced the hire of a new developer to public forums this past October. In an effort to speed up production of the game, the developer has been brought on to assist in coding the game framework – namely card-based gameplay – that was lacking in previous alpha versions of the game.

In the same announcement, as released via Space Pirate’s medium publication, Book of Orbs was also mentioned as a hosting environment for 10 new Age of Rust cards, available to be bought, sold or traded for Rustbits.

Space Pirate Games, Age of Rust’s Parent developer, has also been continuing efforts to get Rustbits added to exchanges supporting Counterparty. Community support is encouraged to continue these efforts.

Age of Rust has also recently created a Discord server for its community to interact.

While more updates regarding the beta release of Age of Rust are expected to be published soon via the medium publication, Space Pirate Games recently announced via its twitter handle that more cards would be released this month.

A new second set of cards will be released in December, with 3 ultra rare gold series cards ONLY for #rustbits. #counterparty #indiegame pic.twitter.com/WYDjnpJA91 — SpacePirate Games (@SpacePirate_io) November 6, 2017

FoldingCoin discussed the barriers of entry to merged folding in their latest November hangout, citing the implementation of CIP 10 as a benefit to the project.

FoldingCoin is a token operating on the Counterparty protocol, issued as a rewards scheme to those who sign on to contribute power towards Stanford’s ‘Folding@home’ distributed computing project. The project, targeted towards disease research, also hosts merged folding; a process allowing other Counterparty tokens to be distributed via its system.

CIP 10 aka multi-send will aim to lower fees and allow FoldingCoin to issue distributions in fewer transactions.

To learn more about Folding Coin please check out their whitepaper.

FreeWallet, an open-source browser and Desktop based wallet established by Counterparty member J-dog, continues to develop beyond its initial capabilities, as J-dog works to develop a market interface for users to utilize alongside the project’s send/receive options. FreeWallet also allows users to create and issue tokens, as well as sign and broadcast messages, to name a few.

Coval, a project utilizing side-chain technology to enable to mass verification of multiple transactions, continues on from last month’s newsletter, with the news that it has finally launched its Emblem Vault. Providing more details, Emblem is thus described as an app offering users the capabilities to access crypto wallets, chat rooms, and a file manager, among other features.

Blocksafe, a project partially utilizing the Counterparty protocol via its $Triggers tokens to facilitate its functionality, has recently published a roadmap in offering to reform smart gun technology.

These cryptographically enforced enhancements include a bounty program for content creation, community contests, and a more direct path ahead.

Blocksafe have also recently relaunched their newly designed website.

With rumors of the fork suspended. We will be releasing some updates, first is the Community Development roadmap update. pic.twitter.com/3oVtoW1QaR — Blocksafe Foundation (@blocksafe) November 8, 2017

Indiesquare will be releasing software developer kits next week. Predominantly aimed at developers, the toolkits are designed to make it easier for developers to implement bitcoin and Counterparty functionalities into applications. Suggested use cases are wallet linkage to allow users to use tokenized items as in-game items. The software developer kits have been designed to streamline difficult processes in a simpler, ease-of-use kit for developers to access.

Tokenly has recently collaborated with clothing brand Malan Breton in a first for the Fashion Industry. Available via the Sohomuse platform, the partnership between Tokenly – a token-based consumer products solutions service – and Malan Breton, will seek to launch the ‘MALAN’ token on the bitcoin blockchain via the Counterparty protocol.

With a limited supply of 1000 tokens, the collaboration will afford holders with exclusives such as priority purchasing to fashion week events and exclusive access to Malan Breton events.

Rarepepe.party has released an exciting update this month. While the combined role-play and trading card game, designed to function atop of blockchain technology continues development, the game offered the first look at its nonfungible tokens recently. The first of its kind in the Counterparty protocol, the tokens will take the form of various Rare Pepe avatars to be used in-game.

Rare Pepe Wallet has enabled enhanced sends and with them, the ability to buy Featured Card spots via the ‘GETFEATURED’ token. This allows Rare Pepe artists and collectors to advertise their Rare Pepes on the wallet home page.

Counterparty in the News:

In Counterparty news, Rare Pepe garnered a couple of mentions in recent weeks. The first mention – an article in the Financial Review, discusses Rare Pepe memes and the success they’ve had in the global exchange. With direct mentions of the Pepe directory and nods to the scarcity of tokenization via the Counterparty protocol, the piece is a worthwhile read for the Counterparty community and, a great explainer piece for those just starting in the community.

The second mention of Rare Pepe in the news continues to discuss the meme’s continuously growing values as its headline highlights how Rare Pepe blockchain cards have exceeded most ICOs in value.

This article outlines the framework behind Rare Pepe blockchain cards utilizing the Counterparty protocol, noting Spells of Genesis as a frame of reference for its readers. The piece goes on to mention the dedicated community behind the meme highlighting its foundation, wallet, and unique trading card directory before referring back to its main talking point, that, as mentioned, it has accrued more value than most ICOs. Offering some specifics, the article goes on to detail a timeline of Rare Pepe’s growing value, highlighting 2017 as a significant year for growth.

Also in the news, Counterparty Foundation member John Villar has been in talks to discuss blockchain technology in Venezuela, where capital is scarce. The article draws attention to the scalability and privacy afforded by the Counterparty protocol, to potential companies in Venezuela in payment methods when utilizing blockchain applications.

Similar to Token.FM, British startup Blockpool has collaborated with musician Bjork to release her latest album ‘Utopia’ using cryptocurrency via the Counterparty protocol. Preordering of the album will afford customers with crypto rewards. While customers can preorder the album using credit/debit and Paypal alongside bitcoin, Audiocoin, Litecoin, and Dashcoin, all customers will receive 100 audiocoins as a reward. The coins are then tradable for other cryptocurrencies on the exchange.

Lastly, Counterparty has been mentioned in a book “Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond” by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar, available on Amazon now in both Kindle and hardcover editions.

Developer Updates:

To aid in the processes of adoption and engagement, Counterparty is working towards, switching to using an external addrindex implementation indexd.

Some advantages of the new approach made possible by an indexd approach are:

1) No need to maintain, review, test, install and update Bitcoin Core addrindex.

2) Makes it possible to rely on a shared, up-to-date Bitcoin Core instance (with txindex).

3) Lets developers take advantage of latest Bitcoin Core improvements in features such as fee estimates, or performance.

Indexd currently maintains only addrindex, so Bitcoin Core still needs to have txindex enabled. A future version of indexd may add txindex and eliminate this requirement.

Existing users will need to migrate their setup to Bitcoin Core 0.15 with indexd. For in-place upgrades, users will have to schedule approximately 10 hours of downtime required for indexd to build an address index. In order to minimize downtime, exchanges can build a new instance of Counterparty Federated Node (or Counterparty-lib) and switch to it soon after next version is released. Detailed migration documentation will be available in the usual place.

Interested parties can evaluate and test an indexd-compatible non-production version of Counterparty effective immediately. Help is available in Dev channel of the Counterparty Slack and Counterparty Talk.

As a result, it is expected that Counterparty will become easier and more accessible to developers, application operators, and exchanges.

Another important update to note this month is that we have implemented a hotfix to our Counterparty-Lib. As a result, Counterparty-lib 9.55.4 is now live. The fix resolves an uncaught exception that could cause a Counterparty server to stop operating as expected.

The following CIPs will hopefully be released before the end of the year, following the fulfillment of bounty amounts. We have updated our donation page to reflect the status of this. CIP 10 is still in development, a CIP is pending for CIP 6 and we are still collecting donations for CIP 15. Your donations are much appreciated.

CIP 6 – P2SH data encoding

P2SH data encoding will allow Counterparty to utilize more space for transactions. CIP 6 will be beneficial to large transactions and is a prerequisite in supporting some of the more advanced send types, such as multi-peer-multi-asset (MPMA) and Multiparty Counterparty Aggregate Transactions (MCAT).

CIP 10 – Multi-Peer Multi-Asset Sends (MPMA)

Multi-Peer Multi-Assets sends will allow many assets to be sent to many peers in a single transaction, simplifying batch transactions, and reducing transaction fees even further.

CIP 15 – Segwit Support

Enabling Segwit support within Counterparty will enable users to spend less on transaction fees and enables potential future enhancements. Updating Counterwallet will allow users to choose if they want to send assets to a segwit enabled address or a traditional address.

CIPs planned for release at the beginning of 2018:

CIP 13 – Multiparty Counterparty Aggregate Transactions (MCAT)

MCAT will allow Counterparty users to group their transactions with those of other Counterparty users, to reduce their sends costs considerably. Most users will be able to utilize this feature to send transactions for less than the cost of a single bitcoin transaction.

CIP 13 will also allow Counterparty users to utilize MCAT nodes to send assets across the Counterparty Network, and pay for the transaction fees in an asset other than BTC.

Counterparty is a community funded project which progresses solely through the generous time and monetary donations of others.

Again, please visit our donations page to stay up to date on the current bounty and development status of any CIPS, and consider making a donation to support their continued development. Alternatively, please share or RT Counterparty CIPs on social media so we can help fulfill them faster!

In more exciting news, our Counterparty hangouts are scheduled to happen more regularly. Our next hangout will be happening this Saturday (December 2nd) and will be posted on Counterparty.io shortly after if you’re unable to join us.

We have also recently opened up a press channel for any media inquiries and would ask any media outlets to contact press@counterparty.io.

If you have a project that utilizes the Counterparty protocol that you’d like to let us know about, please email projects@counterparty.io.

Please join the @Counterparty_XCP group on Telegram for breaking news and real-time Counterparty conversation!

Disclaimer: This newsletter is sent as an informational piece, and no part of it should be taken as financial advice.