Counterparty Newsletter 06-12-2019
June sees some big steps forward in terms of community strengthening, strategically positioning counterparty for a positive future alignment and beginning groundwork to structure the project for longevity.
Ecosystem Updates:
The twelth 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-12#
The easy to use Counterparty Cryptogoods Chrome Extension Wallet, Freeport by has received several further updates, including a bugfix affecting asset divisibility and improved logic for fee estimation
Check it out on the Chrome Extension store or Github at https://freeport.io https://github.com/loon3/Freeport-extension
CounterParty community
A popular thread on CounterParty talk forum was started by community member CryptoAlan where a number of participants discussed a future reboot of a community driven, community comprised foundation in order to more effectively establish soft governance and generally steer CounterParty forward. As counterparty is an open source, grass-roots decentralized project, each individuals voice is important and is listened to. Please feel free to peruse the full thread below, and consider contributing your viewpoint if you haven’t already https://counterpartytalk.org/t/counterparty-foundation-in-2019-new-updates/5446/67
The Counterparty Foundation is a group dedicated to advancing the Counterparty protocol and its products, educating the community on the Counterparty technology, driving global Counterparty awareness, and ensuring Counterparty remains a successful and growing platform.
The Foundation is governed by five Community Directors.
Today, we’re happy to announce the start of the Counterparty Foundation Community Directors 2019 election.
For the next three weeks, from June 10th till July 1st, we are inviting everyone to participate in the election process by nominating candidates to fill five Community Director seats. The only requirement for the nomination is that the candidate hold at least 50 XCP and prove this by broadcasting a message from his or her address with the name of the nominee.
If you would like to nominate yourself or another candidate, please reply to this thread with the following candidate information:
After the two week long voting period, at the voting closing block, the top five addresses that receive the highest number of votes will be announced as winners, and their owners receive Community Director positions for the term of one year.
The forum thread for contributing to the ongoing 2019 election is as follows: https://counterpartytalk.org/t/ann-start-of-the-counterparty-foundation-2019-election-nomination-period-jun-10th-july-1st/5535
Please feel free to chime in with suggestions, votes and nominations. Again, as a grass roots project- there is no costly financial barrier or restriction- anybody is free to nominate themselves.
Community member monkey has also set upon creating a thread that aims to work towards documenting and facilitating a community editable interface for the more efficient outreach to exchanges, with a goal to to improve liquidity and discoverability of the base token. Monkey mentions that as of early June, two exchanges have been contacted and are currently looking into listing counterparty, with further dialogue and dialogue with other exchanges to follow. The thread is as follows
https://counterpartytalk.org/t/exchange-outreach/5514
In meatspace news, The second Rare AF (Rare Art Festival) took place last month during Blockchain week NYC. The digital art festival featured from Ethereum, EOS, and CounterParty community and builders, artists and buyers involved in the nascent NFT (Non fungible token) space. A RAREAF afterparty took place with admission tickets available on the blockchain, and DEX— tokenized via the counterparty protocol
Development news
In development news, counterparty developers, in collaboration with IndieSquare are gearing up for an announcement of a major signature project— HAZAMA.
HAZAMA is a bitcoin side chain technology built using the federated peg model. It allows the 2 way peg of BTC, Counterparty and other blockchain assets such as ERC-20 to a cheaper and faster side chain. HAZAMA has no HAZAMA token nor native asset/ICO, it only supports 1:1 pegging of existing assets (for example XCP and other assets running on top of counterparty).
A current complaint of leveraging main-chain bitcoin/ethereum for asset transfer is high transaction fees and slow confirmation times in periods of peak congestion or spam attacks
Hazama allows dAPPS the ability to let users transfer digital assets & tokens with faster throughput and much lower fees. Peg in and Peg out at anytime.
Due to the instant confirmation property of Lightning and Hazama users will be able to instantly buy and sell HAZAMA assets for BTC. This opens up a world of new use-cases for counterparty assets.
https://www.hazama.indiesquare.me/
Core Counterparty development
Two new CIP’s (CounterParty Improvement Protocols) were publicized, fully funded and are currently in development due to be released on the next development milestone.
CIP 20: Segwit address sweep
CIP 20 Will provide a way for users to easily sweep legacy accounts onto Segwit accounts operating on counterparty protocol.
Counterparty has been receiving multiple fixes and enhancements, Counterparty was one of the few projects that has been updated with Segwit support.
However, moving assets and ownerships between addresses in large batches (e.g to a segwit enabled address) has been cumbersome and expensive in the past due to how Counterparty addresses are encoded.
SegWit adoption has proven to reduce the burden of on-chain transactions by a huge factor on the main chain, and as users of the “commons” we must set forth an example of “good citizenship” on the usage of the limited resource that is blockchain storage. Using and promoting SegWit addresses only prove to be a winning move for lower fees, but it will also show to the main core detractors that we’re well behaved inside the parent blockchain.
This CIP (CIP 20) Provides a simple, fast migration path from legacy accounts to Segwit for counterparty users.
The github repo for the CIP 20 (Segwit address sweep) can be found here: https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/cips/blob/cip21/cip-0020.md
Discussion on CIP 20 (segwit address sweep): Can be found here: https://counterpartytalk.org/t/cip20-address-sweep/5487
CIP 21: BTC Dispenser
CIP 21 details a clever mechanism to swap arbitary tokens for on-chain BTC without the need for a third signed message, unlike the current BTCPay implementation that existing on-chain BTC sends currently use that mandates the counterparty sending BTC must remain online in order to trustlessly sign the transaction authorizing the send of the BTC to the recipient on theother end within a certain timeframe.
This elegant new solution allows the set-up of non interactive ‘offline’ ‘dispensers’ that simply swap amount of a particular asset upon receipt of BTC, avoiding counterparty risk
The github repo for the CIP 21 (BTC Dispenser) can be found here: https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/cips/blob/cip21/cip-0021.md
Discussion on CIP 21 (BTC Dispenser) Can be found here: https://counterpartytalk.org/t/cip21-dispensers/5488
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
Please share or RT 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.