Tag Archives: Storj

Counterparty Update 06/06/16

June 6, 2016

Ecosystem News

On June 1st, Storj attended Decentralized and Encrypted in Berlin, Germany. The Blueyard Capital event was self-described as “The mission to upgrade the internet & an open conversation with Edward Snowden”. Storj’s Shawn Wilkinson gave a presentation titled “A decentralized vision of object storage”. A video of the presentation will be made available by the event in about a week.

Over the next two days Storj held their Open Beta Launch Party in Berlin followed by a Global Open Beta Launch for those who were unable to make it to Germany. The Global Open Beta Launch was held via Slack and Google Hangouts to answer questions in real-time. Watch a recording of the hangout here.

Storj put an update out on June 2nd titled “How Storj is increasing security exponentially”. It is an important piece from the Storj team and I recommend reading it in full.

Map of Storj Nodes

Congratulations to the GetGems project on reaching their final funding milestone. GetGems upgraded to Android version 3.0 to comply with Telegram 3.8.1. This update added a “Hide Message Read” function and the ability to change the color theme among other chat and GetGems settings improvements.

GetGems is closing their BitcoinTalk forum in favor of a Telegram channel for general discussion.

GetGems defined a roadmap going forward and added bounties for GetGems translations.

“The overall direction for GetGems is to leverage the Telegram ecosystem.”

Read the full GetGems update here.

The Counterparty DEx (Decentralized Exchange) removes the need for Counterparty assets to be listed on centralized exchanges. Being on a centralized exchange can be a benefit to some projects for the sake of visibility, if you support GetGems open a ticket on Poloniex to demonstrate your support for the project.

“Yes, if we receive enough requests from the GEMZ community there is a chance we won’t delist it, ” – Poloniex support

CoinDaddy.io is a service that will be increasingly important as Counterparty gains popularity. CoinDaddy, a company run by Counterparty director Jeremy Johnson (widely known as J-Dog), is similar to GoDaddy with a stated goal as follows: “CoinDaddy is a crypto 2.0 services company that makes blockchain technologies easier to understand and use. Our goal is to help users understand the power of blockchain technologies and provide tools to help them use it today to benefit their lives.”

Coindaddy Cropped

CoinDaddy is a project that will be covered in detail in a future update.

Several weeks ago Let’s Talk Bitcoin and Tokenly made a podcast titled “Putting the Pieces Together with Tokenly”.

Tokenly is service that offers modular, open-source, server-based tools with the goal of making features facilitated by Counterparty tokens more accessible to non-technical users. The project is led by long-time Counterparty community member Adam B. Levine and former community director Devon Weller.   

Counterparty Content

Long-time Counterparty community members Dan Anderson and Dante made a highly entertaining podcast on domains and ventured into domain discussion related to Counterparty for the majority of the podcast. The podcast is titled “Raiders of the Lost Episode” on account of the episode being recorded in April and released weeks later.

Counterparty coverage starts at 16:15 but I recommend listening to the entire episode if you are interested in domains.

The full release of Spells of Genesis is coming in Fall of 2016. Bitcoinist.com went into detail on the full release here.

Christian Moss wrote an article on Medium about Counterparty tokens leading the digital asset revolution by making in-game assets fungible in the real world and transferrable between distinct games.

Counterparty News

Counterparty held a community meeting on June 1st. There are several points of interest from community directors.

Koji Higashi had some thoughts to share about expanding Counterparty’s growing presence in Japan.

“As a quick update from me, my main focus as a community director is to expand the community to more countries and areas in the world, most notably Japan and China. I’m in close communication with some Japanese exchanges for example for CP assets listed and beyond and I’m hoping to report some good news in the near future.”

Matt Young talked about his ecosystem outreach and stated his goals as the following:

1) To get any feedback and feature requests available to us from folks that are using the platform/protocol so that we may improve it.

2) To enlist help from companies in the development of the features they’d most like to see.

3) Keep an open avenue of communication for the projects/businesses built on Counterparty.

Matt can be contacted at matt.young@counterparty.io with any relevant ecosystem or project information.

Trevor Altpeter shared some general information of interest to the Counterparty community.

“I’ll kick it off by addressing Poloniex withdrawal problems. It is something we are aware of but ultimately a problem on their end. Bittrex is an alternative option that is having very few reported problems.”

Trevor continued on to explain Counterparty outreach efforts.

“We have made an outreach group to improve distribution of Counterparty content to our community and primarily to assist in the creation of new Counterparty content. Whether that means writing it ourselves or helping other journalists learn about Counterparty we are going to do what it takes.”

“We are also pursuing language translations for Counterparty content as that is likely the best way to expand the use of Counterparty globally”

The Counterparty Slack added a new public channel called “assets-and-domains” in response to requests from several domain specialists in our community.

Counterparty recently passed 50k created assets and we are nearing 500k transactions! An update on this significant milestone will be forthcoming.

Core Development Updates

Additional information regarding the EVM will be available this week.

Progress continues on P2SH. Ruben De Vries’ P2SH branch has recently been merged into the counterparty-lib develop branch, where it is undergoing some additional testing.

Since the code in develop changes the Counterparty protocol in several spaces, Counterparty will be setting a block number for the changes to go active in the next few weeks. Under ideal circumstances P2SH should be live on mainnet within the month.

Another exciting development update that is close to being finished is a revamped build system that is based on Docker and Docker Compose. The changes do away with the old linux setup script, and make it much easier to get started running the Counterparty software. Full documentation is almost complete and will be released shortly. For a sneak peek, see here.

Ruben has created a demo project to compose P2SH transactions, for testing purposes. Impressively, it also contains the basic components to demonstrate an atomic swap between BTC and XCP! This is an incredibly exciting development that will have more news forthcoming soon. Check out the project here.

In addition, Storj’s @f483 has created a library to implement unidirectional micropayment channels. His work can be found here.

Join the Counterparty XCP group on Telegram for breaking news and real-time Counterparty conversation.



Counterparty Update 05/23/16

May 23, 2016

Ecosystem News

Spells of Genesis is a popular Android and iOS game that makes use of Counterparty to create in-game assets. Spells of Genesis posted a project roadmap that outlines the steps needed to complete the game by the estimated full release in September 2016. Project lead, Shaban Shaame, posted a project update on Youtube as well.

Storj is having a launch party on June 2nd in Berlin, Germany. The purpose of the launch party is to announce the open beta of the Storj network.

Storj is one of nine partners in Microsoft Azure’s BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) program. Robert Tiger gave a short description of Storj’s offering in a recent Bitcoin.com article:

“Storj nodes sell resources to store and transfer data. In the process, nodes earn Storjcoin X or other select cryptocurrencies in exchange for services. In short, an individual could earn an income by leasing or renting hard drive space or extra bandwidth. Storj has created a data storage system that can not be censored, and is cheaper, faster, and more secure than traditional cloud storage platforms.”

The rest of the article about the BaaS ecosystem can be read here and an earlier CoinTelegraph article on the subject can be read here.

MandelDuck recently released an Android version of their popular iOS game known as “SaruTobi”. According to Jon Southurst of Bitcoin.com:

“MandelDuck also produces the iOS ‘geocaching’ app Takara, in which users ‘drop’ small amounts of bitcoin in specific locations for others to pick up if they visit that location. It has seen users travel physically to coffee shops, houses, bridges and even islands to collect the dropped ‘treasure’.

SaruTobi (which means ‘monkey fly’ in Japanese) uses Counterparty tokens as in-game items, and connects to the IndieSquare Counterparty Wallet. This allows users to receive bitcoin tips and even share items from different games.”

Read more of Jon’s article here.

SaruTobi features a collaboration with the IndieSquare wallet to facilitate the use of Counterparty tokens within the game. Indiesquare shared some thoughts on the partnership in a Medium post:

“The more intriguing addition, however, is the ability to connect to IndieSquare Wallet not only to receive bitcoin tips, but also to use some of the Spells of Genesis blockchain cards as powerups in SaruTobi. Players who hold SoG cards in their IndieSquare Wallet accounts can connect the wallet with SaruTobi easily and enjoy using the game items across the two games seamlessly.”

An interesting aspect of this partnership is the ability to use in-game items across different games. In-game items created as Counterparty tokens exist autonomously allowing for their use on different platforms. Spells of Genesis and SaruTobi are leading the way for this rapidly developing trend in gaming. Counterparty, and by extension Bitcoin, is the technology best positioned to accommodate this niche.

“This kind of cross-game collaboration is possible through the use of Counterparty tokens as game items due to blockchain’s open nature. The SaruTobi and SoG are spearheading this new and exciting field of tokenized game items on the blockchain.”

The full IndieSquare post can be read here.

The SaruTobi game features a Counterparty token called NINJASUIT. The token can be viewed on the Blockchain here.

Adam B Levine’s Let’s Talk Bitcoin continues to create some of the best Bitcoin content available. Jonathan Mohan interviewed York Rhodes of Microsoft to discuss blockchains, technology and the growth in enterprise adoption. Microsoft Azure has nine partners in its BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) Ecosystem, one of which is Counterparty’s Storj project. Listen to Episode 294 here.

Counterparty Content

Counterparty Director Koji Higashi wrote a blog post on the state of Bitcoin and Counterparty in Japan.

A follow-up article to Koji’s blog post was published on Bitcoin.com several days later.

“Not only are we seeing a massive growth of Bitcoin adoption and media coverage here but also Japan has turned into a very interesting place for Bitcoin 2.0 experiments and the token economy.” – Koji Higashi, Counterparty Foundation

CryptoHustle published a speculative blog post on their belief that XCP is primed for a ”Bull Run”.

The Counterparty Foundation published a piece titled “Proposal for Ethereum Smart Contracts on Counterparty Mainnet”.

Counterparty News

A Counterparty Group has recently started on Telegram. It is a public group and all Counterparty users are encouraged to join. The group will remain public for at least the first 200 users. Check it out here.

The Counterparty Foundation released an update several days ago.

The first Counterparty Community Meeting is coming up on June 1st. Community meetings are held once per month on the first Wednesday of the month. Meetings are conducted via Google Hangouts with real-time input from Slack. An agenda for the June 1st meeting will be posted to Slack a few days before.

Core Development Updates

P2SH will be live on Counterparty within 6 weeks!

“We are looking forward to merging P2SH which will facilitate the use of Bitcoin multisig addresses (which start with a ‘3’ instead of a ‘1’) following the industry standard while laying the groundwork for more complex scripts and payment channels.” – Counterparty Core Developer Ruben de Vries