January 2, 2016

Development Updates

We’re finalizing changes in our code and conducting final testing before the v9.53.0 release. Among various improvements and bug fixes, the new version will include the increased OP_RETURN to 80 bytes, a change that was included in the develop branch 2 weeks ago.

For those that might be unfamiliar with this change, here’s a bit of background. In the previous iterations of the protocol, Counterparty used 1-of-3 multi‐signature data outputs for transaction encoding where the first public key is that of the sender, so that the value of the output is redeemable, while the second two public keys encode the data, zero‐padded and prefixed with a length byte. The alternative to this was using the 40-byte OP_RETURN, which was a cheaper method in terms of transaction size (fee) and superior to the mutlisig encoding, however it was insufficient for some transactions and a slower alternative at the time due to mining pools refusing to mine them.

With the new developments in bitcoin, and all major mining pools supporting 40-byte OP_RETURN, one year ago Counterparty switched its default encoding mechanism to OP_RETURN for all transactions that fit into 40-bytes. All other transactions keept using multisig outputs. WIth the mining pools now upgrading to support 80-byte OP_RETURN we are increasing the size of OP_RETURN to support transactions of up to 80-bytes. This change is currently undergoing further testing in the develop branch and is expected to be merged to master soon.

Community Updates

We’re excited to report we’ve received 7 registrations for the Devparty contest so far, meaning we can expect at least 7 new Counterparty implementations in the upcoming weeks. Current project participants include Dan Anderson, Joe Looney, JP, Singularity, Alexei, Stephen Rowlisom and Hydro Production.

We also had some interesting project ideas in our forum thread: https://counterpartytalk.org/t/ann-announcing-devparty-the-first-counterparty-development-contest/1682/7.

The contest will go for 37 more days, when the judging panels will cast their votes and select the winners. For more information on the contest see the official Devparty page.

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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