Counterparty Newsletter 05-01-2019

It’s been a buzzing couple of weeks all round in the Counterparty space. Check out a snippet of what’s been happening in the past month via the updates below.

Ecosystem Updates:

The eleventh MAFIACASH rewards distribution has been completed - all players of the mafia themed, blockchain based idle accumulation game have been rewarded with MAFIACASH token distributions. A full breakdown of the distribution stats including changes in family membership and current profits can be found here: https://mafiawars.io/news/mafiacash-distribution-11#

Elsewhere, some continued good news for fans of Bitcrystals following last newsletters Gems news. BCY; The native token of the popular Blockchain based card game Bitcrystals has recently been listed on the Alterdice exchange!

Alterdice is a Singaporean cryptocurrency trading platform established in 2018 currently listing 20 cryptocurrencies and 70 trading pairs. It offers relatively low fees (0.2%) mobile and web based trading, and offers clients various crypto and fiat pairings.

Alterdice is listed on CoinMarketCap and other aggregators with healthy reported volumes. And as of today, BYC joins the likes of Ethereum and LTC on the exchange with it’s successful listing. BCY markets are currently available for customers to trade with BTC (with the full range of USD, BTC, and ETH pairings reportedly being rolled out.)

The Bitcrystals team have also been very busy networking with a meeting in Paris with French Gaming Giant Ubisoft as part of the blockchain gaming startup incubator program, Paris Blockchain week summit and a talk by the CEO @ShabanShaame at the Crypto Games Conference in Minsk, Belarus

In other ecosystem news, as mentioned in the April newsletter Augmentors took the step to remove their app from the app stores earlier this year and redesign the game from scratch. The first phase of their redesign was to start by build an MVP (minimum viable product)

The team has been reporting progress on their MVP coming to fruition and is offering a closed Alpha testing. The testing period will run from 14:00 UTC on Friday, 10 May 2019; until Monday, 13 May 2019 14:00 UTC. Those who have registered to be a tester will receive an email on Friday 10 May with instructions on how to install the app for testing. You can find full details of their testing process below.

Freeport updates

The easy to use Cryptogoods Chrome Extension Wallet, Freeportby developer and rockstar CounterParty contributor Joe Looney that was first showcased in last months newsletter has received several updates, minor bugfixes and general improvements— including dust and transaction format fixes (allowing spending from unspent UTXO’s) , the addition of twitter verification (linking a cryptogood address to a twitter handle) and various smaller UI and UX cleanups.

Check it out on the Chrome Extension store or Github at https://freeport.io

CounterParty in the news

The website CardRates, with input from CounterParty contributor and speaker Theo Goodman has published an excellent article on CounterParty entitled “Open-Source Counterparty Pushes Blockchain Capabilities Beyond Money Transfers” where they cover the wide range of applications of Blockchain beyond simply “store of value” and specifically hone in on how CounterParty has, since 2014 enabled transformative token economies by writing in the margin of traditional Bitcoin transactions— citing a number of innovative projects running on the platform and expanding on Counterparty’s vision for the future.

Read the full article here: https://www.cardrates.com/news/open-source-counterparty-pushes-blockchain-beyond-money-transfers/

Theo also speaks at the seminal Consensus NYC blockchain conference (13-15th May) with a talk entitled “Cutesy Cats: Tokens Come to Gaming and Betting”

In more conference news, the second Rare AF (Rare Art Festival) is scheduled to run on May 18th during Blockchain week NYC. The digital art festival features pundits from Ethereum, EOS, and CounterParty community and builders, artists and buyers involved in the nascent NFT (Non fungible token) space

NFT’s designed for digital collectible platforms like counterparty-based farming phenomenon Bitcorn Crops are among some of the artwork that has been accepted in submissions.

A new DEX emerges

Raizer DEX- An new alternate implementation of a Decentralized exchange for CounterParty assets/tokens has been launched, with a view to letting users not just trade tokenized Counterparty assets/assets via an intuitive web-based interface but Bitcoin too via a similar process to wrapped Ethereum (WETH) that various Decentralized exchanges incorporate on the Ethereum ecosystem (albeit more centralized).

The team states in their website their design goal is letting have the same user experience and interface as traditional stock exchanges they may be used to. By incorporating XCP and BTC markets into their online exchange frontend (via a process of exchanging BTC into representative tokens exchangeable for their equivalent Raizer BTC token the stated goal is to facilitate more frictionless trading of the liquid BTC asset). Several pairs are currently active.

The Raizer team has an official twitter account which can be found herewhere they also link to their telegram and discord communities

You can find a link to the Decentralized exchange implementation itself here https://raizer.cc/ (where the answer to several FAQ’s also lie)

editors note: counterparty.io cannot vouch nor endorse for the safety or trustworthiness of alternative implementations of DEX frontend by third parties. We would urge end-users, as they would on any new platform to be cautious about re-using existing seeds or transferring large balances when evaluating wallets published by external sources

CounterParty behind the bar

Avacus is a Purse like system with it’s flagship token, VACUS operating atop of the counterparty protocol. Avacus connects people who want to shop for great deals using cryptocurrency and people who want to get cryptocurrency more conveniently without using an exchange, all through the Amazon wish list. The service primarily caters to the Japanese market segment but has a view of expanding to international markets in future. You can find more info on Avacus here.

In May 2018 Avacus launched it’s own pop-up sake bar concept, AVA-SAKE with a view to providing an avenue for like-minded cryptocurrency enthusiasts to mingle. In addition to payment in Yen (naturally) the bar also accepts Avacus and XCP tokens as payment for it’s range of Sake, whiskey and other potions.

AVA-SAKE’S 1 year anniversary has now been reached, and to mark the occasion a special collaborative event was recently held at Bar the WU in Shibuya Tokyo, Japan, with limited edition beer mats, special brews and other swag available in exchange for various tokens.

Development news

Pebble- IndieSquares latest counterparty supported, lightning wallet - has continued to see developmental updates with the announcement of easy to use channel funds recovery feature (restore from cloud services) as a feature soon to be added.

Elsewhere in other counterparty related development initiatives Developers at Circuits of Value (Coval) have recently developed and published an API that aims to simplify the process of integration and management of XCP and other tokens running on top of the Counterparty protocol. This is especially helpful for those exchanges or other services seeking to integrate CounterParty assets into their ecosystem

The NodeJS API handles transaction construction, transaction signing and wallet management and is purported to be near feature-complete and in continued development
The code has been published on Open source Mecca Github for interested persons to download, inspect and play with at their leisure.

In internal generalized development focus, work continues on the following CIP’s

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 13 - Multiparty Counterparty Aggregate Transactions (MCAT):
MCAT will allow Counterparty users to group their transactions with those of other Counterparty users, to reduce their send 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 an open-source, community-funded project which progresses solely through the generous time and monetary donations of others.

To stay up to date with any pending and currently developing CIPs check out their Github pages and the official Counterparty donate page here.

If you have a project that you’d like included in our newsletter please contact us at projects@counterparty.io

Pleaseshare orRT Counterparty CIPs on social media so we can help fulfill them faster!

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