November 7, 2015

It’s time for the weekly community update, and this week we’re excited to report we’ve released new versions of counterparty-lib and counterblock.

The new version v 9.52.0 of Counterparty’s protocol reference implementation, counterparty-lib, contains added “undolog” functionality to avoid full reparses when encountering a blockchain reorganisation; added getrawtransaction and getrawtransaction_batch methods and optional custom_inputs parameter to API calls which allows for controlling the exact UTXOs to use in transactions; removes the use of the tornado library in the API module and uses flask’s threaded server instead; and finally contains added message_hash, which when displayed on each new block, makes checking for DB-level consensus easier.

Please note that due to the addition of the undolog feature the upgrade requires a reparse (which counterparty-lib will automatically perform upon restarting).

This week we also released the new version of counterblock, v1.3.0. counterblock provides extended API services to Counterwallet as well as any 3rd party services that wish to use it. The new version contains a fix for the periodic blockfeed hanging issue (where counterblock would run but not process new blocks from counterparty-server); more robust block processing; more reliable blockfeed “caught up” checking logic; simplified blockchain module — we call API methods on counterparty-server now, wherever possible, instead of reimplementing them on counterblock. For a full list of changes see the counterblock ChangeLog.

In other news from this week, our community director Devon Weller is continuing the work on the Counterparty Improvement Proposal (CIP) and proposed CIP 2 – Counterparty Payment URI Scheme:

counterparty:<address>[?amount=<amount>&asset=<asset>&label=<label>&message=<message>]

To approve or disapprove the proposed scheme please join our forum discussion.

This week we also made some changes to the counterparty.io website to reflect the latest developments in the community. Instead of featuring Counterwallet as the main and only Counterparty wallet, we’ve added a new page ‘Counterparty Wallets’ to list all three main Counterparty wallets: the web wallet – Counterwallet, the mobile wallets from Indie Square, and the Chrome extension wallet – the Tokenly Pockets and updated other parts of the website accordingly.

Finally, in case you missed our last week’s update, we’ve opened our internal Slack channel to the public and created an official Counterparty Slack channel. To join us visit this link and create a new account.

That concludes our update for this week. If you have any questions you can contact us via our Slack, forum or github.

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