Hello my name is Trevor Altpeter and I am here with the most recent edition of the Counterparty Update.
Ecosystem News
Spells of Genesis was featured in a piece by Brave New Coin where several updates were announced:
“Shaban Shaame, founder of EverdreamSoft and the conceiver of Moonga, one of the first online trading card games, was excited to announce three significant additions to SoG, two of which, guilds and custom level creation, will be arriving this month, while the third, blockchainization, is slated to arrive with the September release.”
Guilds are a concept similar to teams or clans where players can join with other players or friends to play a game together for mutual benefit. An interesting aspect of the addition of guilds is the ability to conduct “guild battles” where gold, SOG cards, or other Counterparty based in-game assets can be used as a stake in a battle and awarded to the winners. This is the first iteration of the groundbreaking concept of fungible in-game assets and in time this will likely be a catalyst for a revolution in gaming.
“When you feel that you belong to a group then you have social liabilities to other people. You are more likely to come back and see your friends.” – Shaban Shaame
The second update that is expected to be completed within the month is a “custom level creator” which will provide tools for creating levels and campaigns to be used by other players.
“The vision is to have a full campaign creation system so any game creator good enough will be able to create a set of levels, chock full of customized enemies that could feature the creator’s own face if they wanted. That’s the level of customization SoG is aiming to allow.” said Shamme
Shamme also added, “Players who create their own levels will potentially earn gold if others play their levels and lose. [Conversely,] they won’t earn anything if [the challenger] wins. The gold will go to the winner.”
Spells of Genesis makes use of Tokenly swapbots as a method of creating a marketplace for SOG cards. There are currently three different Askian merchants with varying wares and stipulations for doing business. Interact with the Public Merchant here.
FoldingCoin is a Counterparty project run by former Counterparty community director Robert Ross and Jona Derks. The project is described as follows:
“FoldingCoin (FLDC) helps battle diseases like cancer and Alzheimer by contributing to the Stanford’s Folding@Home network. FLDC is a token that rewards volunteers for contributing to this initiative. FoldingCoin is distributed on a monthly basis, based on the individual contributions. This new currency can be transferred from person to person using the Bitcoin blockchain and the Counterparty protocol.”
The FoldingCoin team released an update with significant announcements. FoldingCoin Inc. has created a $1500 bounty, payable in BTC or via PayPal, for a PHP developer to complete a new distribution platform. This is a great opportunity for a PHP developer to make some money while helping a project you can feel good about! More information on what is required to claim the $1500 bounty can be located here.
During the last FoldingCoin board meeting the following actions were taken:
Merged folding will commence immediately
Token distribution will occur on a monthly basis
$1500 bounty was created for a PHP developer that finishes the distribution platform
100,000,000 FLDC budget was created to reward volunteers for their hard work
Encourage the community to join the Slack at http://slack.foldingcoin.net/
The FoldingCoin team also announced their intention to expand the size and scope of their team by making use of 100 million FLDC set aside for project improvements.
“Volunteers will now be paid in FLDC for their work to help further the mission of FoldingCoin. Of the 1 billion FLDC in existence, 100 million of those are assigned to be distributed to those that help the FoldingCoin team with tasks such as Social Media, Forum Administration, ext. For jobs we are currently looking to fill please visit http://foldingcoin.net/resources/fldc-dev-team/ or send an email to rross@foldingcoin.net with your interest in helping the team. Even if you wish to contribute something else not on that list we would be more than open to hear what you can bring to the team.”
Robert and Jona are a lot of fun to work with! Check out video of their most recent board meeting here. A FLDC distribution timer can be viewed here.
IndieSquare Wallet released an update on June 9th with UI improvements and bug fixes among other things.
For iOS (0.9.0.8)
Generate and manage multiple addresses within the same account (HD wallet)
The dex order history and cancel order feature added
UI improvements
Other minor bug fixes
For Android (0.9.4)
The dex order history and cancel order feature added
Other minor bug fixes
IndieSquare’s updates significantly improved the user experience for the iOS wallet. The UI improvements are impressive and I recommend updating your wallet immediately to take advantage of the benefits.
“Lastly, an ability to connect with other apps and services through system linkage was also added on IndieSquare wallet. We will have more exciting news about this in the future.” – The IndieSquare Team
Counterparty Content
Storj was mentioned in a recent Economist article as one of “A slew of startups trying to decentralise the online world”. The article comes to some ambitious conclusions but in regard to Storj the anonymous author said, “And Storj offers a form of collaborative cloud storage: data are spread over the computers that have signed up to the service.” It’s encouraging to witness Counterparty projects, particularly Storj, attracting consistent mainstream media coverage.
Counterparty News
Counterparty was in the news extensively following our announcement to implement the EVM on Bitcoin. A few of my favorite articles on the subject were written by CoinJournal, CCN, Finance Magnates and Roger Ver’s Bitcoin.com.
Counterparty recently passed 50k created assets and we are rapidly approaching 500k transactions! An update on this significant milestone will be forthcoming.
Core Development Updates
Lead Developer Ruben de Vries wrote a post titled EVMParty Progress Update. The progress update includes information on EVM implementation so far, code review and discussion on what is left to accomplish. The code review in the form of four pull requests can be viewed below:
https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterparty-lib/pull/878 – small changes to be able to update the hardcoded checkpoints in the codebase.
https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterparty-lib/pull/879 – removing the old testnet-only implentation.
https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterparty-lib/pull/881 – importing the untouched pyethereum code.
https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/counterparty-lib/pull/882 – removing everything from the pyethereum code that we don’t need (mining, bloom filters, etc).
Ruben also added several Counterparty development updates not specific to EVM implementation:
creating docs and a demo for P2SH.
making it possible to run a Counterparty node without processing 0 confirmation transactions, because about 80% of the memory and CPU required to run a node is used for this, without it people can run a node on a small VPS easily.
Redoing the federated node build system to be built on Docker and Docker Compose.
Moving and consolidating our IT infrastructure.
Counterparty has a new build system available for beta testing! The goal is to make the experience of installing and running the Counterparty software as simple as possible. A guide with instructions can be viewed here and the Github repository can be viewed here. Please try it out and let the team know your experiences.
The build system is described as follows:
“Allows one to easily build a counterparty-server, counterblock and/or Counterwallet system, with all required components. Uses Docker and Docker compose.”
“A Federated Node is a self-contained system that runs some or all of the Counterparty software stack, via Docker. Each system operates as a Bitcoin and Counterparty ‘full node’.”
The guide describes how one can set up their own Federated Node system, and is primarily intended for power users and developers. It is currently written for Linux-based installations, but will be enhanced in the future to work with Windows and Mac OS-based hosts.
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Share your thoughts or anything I missed at Trevor.Altpeter@counterparty.io