December 24, 2014

As the year is coming to an end, the Counterparty project is entering a new, more mature phase, laying the groundwork for innovation and mass adoption in the upcoming year. This week we made significant progress in that direction.

From the Team

We’re happy to announce we’ve hired a new developer, Karol Pogonowski, to work with our main developers – Adam Krellenstein and Ouziel Slama, on the Counterparty’s reference client, starting from the counterpartyd test suite. Karol is a young engineer and technology enthusiast. His programming background includes several different areas, such as FPS games, 3D printers, security monitoring or GPGPU computing. He graduated in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and since has been living in Poland and UK.

We’re very pleased to have Karol onboard, and look forward to working with him as Counterparty continues to grow.

In other news from the team, we reached another development milestone – over 2000 commits on GitHub. As a very young and small team, we’re proud of our accomplishments so far in terms of developing the Counterparty protocol and software, and would once again like to thank everyone who helped us reach this goal.

Finally, we are in the process of translating our technical documentation and website to other languages, starting from the Chinese. We will implement multi language support on our website counterparty.io and start setting up translation bounties. More about that in our upcoming community posts.

From the Web

Our co-founder and chief developer, Adam Krellenstein, was a guest in the last week’s talk on Evolution Media. Adam discussed the Counterparty technology, including the smart contracts functionality and future plans. In case you missed it, you can watch the entire episode on YouTube.

Recently, we also started getting exposure in foreign media. Once such example is the latest article about Counterparty in the CryptoCurrencyMagazine, the biggest cryptocurrency portal in Japan: Counterparty, the new financial platform. One of the primary goals of the Counterparty Foundation is to spread global Counterparty awareness, and it’s nice to see this effort already bearing fruit.

In other news from the web, the Melotic team published a pie chart illustrating the composition of metacoins. The chart shows clear dominance of Counterparty, with 79% of all metacoin transactions being Counterparty transactions. As stated in their blog post, “Over the past several months – according to Blockscan – Counterparty transactions have sometimes accounted for roughly 3% of all traffic on the Bitcoin network.” This is exciting statistic, which confirms Counterparty’s position as the most advanced peer-to-peer financial platform in operation.

From the Community

The Counterparty community is continuing to grow, both in terms of our supporters and the number of projects being built on top of our technology. We had several interesting discussions in our forums and social media channels this week, such as the discussion about BTC Pay and Receive in Smart Contracts.

Also, we set up two new channels for Counterparty-related discussions on Gitter: https://gitter.im/CounterpartyXCP/General and https://gitter.im/CounterpartyXCP/Technical as a better alternative to Skype, especially for technical conversation.

As the Counterparty project continues to mature, our focus is starting to shift towards increased stability and reliability of our software through quality assurance measures, increased testing, improved release processes, and better technical documentation. In that regard, our new developer, Karol Pogonowski will start working on the counterpartyd test suite, while our documentation team works on the development of the new Counterparty Wiki. As announced in the last development update, our goal is to have all the relevant information about Counterparty and its technology in one place to help developers and those new to Counterparty navigate the rapidly-changing landscape of our project. The new Wiki is being hosted on GitHub in the Community repository.

Further, our release process now includes publishing a Release Document with every new counterpartyd version and sending out SMS and Email notifications to our subscribers.

With security audits, bug bounties, increased testing and improved documentation, we’ll continue to work on the stability, security and the ease of use of our technology.

Our support team is continuing to provide guidance on using Counterparty software, helping identify bugs, and resolve all emerging support tickets. This week they published two short KB articles to address commonly asked questions in our support channel: How to increase asset or token circulation? and Can I pick my own 12-word pass phrase that is not so random?

That concludes our update for this week. In order to stay up to date with our community, subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom of this page and receive weekly updates via email.