Counterparty Update, Feb 27: Third Foundation Board Meeting, Community & Development Recap

From the Team On Wednesday, February 25th, we held the third Counterparty Foundation Board meeting to discuss the upcoming elections. The board decided that on April 2nd, the community will be able to nominate and elect three Counterparty Foundation Community Directors that will, together with the Founding Directors - Adam Krellenstein and Robby Dermody, govern the work of the Foundation and shape its direction. After a long discussion, the board concluded that the community as a whole should have the right to vote for and elect its representatives regardless of its membership status with the foundation. For this reason, the Industry seats that were supposed to be elected by the Foundation’s Industry members will no longer exist and the Board will consist of three community and 2 founding seats. The election will be held on April 2nd, as scheduled. Two weeks before the election we will open a new thread on our forum with detailed information about the election process. The community will then be able to nominate a candidate by listing his or her name and description and Bitcoin address. 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. At the start of the two-week long voting period, the Executive Director will generate a Bitcoin address for each candidate and issue a voting token of 10 million units (divisible and locked). The Director will then issue a dividend to all XCP holders with this vote token as the dividend asset (meaning that all XCP addresses will receive some quantity vote token in proportion to their XCP balance). All candidates that meet the 50 XCP requirement will be listed on a scoreboard, and the community will be able to vote for their favorite candidate(s). During the voting period, owners of addresses with a vote token balance will be able to send them to one or more of the addresses corresponding to the candidate(s) they wish to vote for. Addresses and names of the candidates, together with their current score, will be publicly displayed on the voting scoreboard. After the election, top three addresses that receive the highest number of vote tokens will be announced as winners, and their owners receive Community Director positions for the term of one year. Details about the nomination thread will be published in our upcoming community posts.

From the Community In February, there was a lot of interesting discussion, new projects and third-party tools developed by the community. Here’s a quick recap:

1. Our community member built a useful tool, designed specifically for Counterparty-related queries, named XCP Search - a Google Chrome browser extension for Windows and Linux desktops that offers Counterparty-related search (code, open issues, support site docs, addresses, assets) straight from your browser. It can be useful to anyone who frequently needs to search Counterparty-related information. The extension can be downloaded from here.

2. Another tool released in February is the Blockscan Generate Key tool which allows you to check, retrieve and generate your Counterwallet addresses and keys using your 12 word passphrase. The tool can be accessed at https://blockscan.com/tool_generatekey, while the source code is available at https://github.com/blockscan/cw_address_key_generator.

3. CoinRepublic have demonstrated the use of Counterparty tokens for voting in their  presentation on Inside Bitcoins.

4. FoldingCoin founders gave an interview in which they thoroughly explain the Counterparty technology and its basic features. You can listen to the entire podcast on MixCloud.

5. Bittrex integrated XCP - besides Poloniex, Counterparty DEX, MasterXchange, Melotic and ALTS.Trade Counterparty users now have the option to trade their XCP on Bittrex.

Development Updates During the last 30 days we’ve made significant development progress, both in terms of new feature development as well as code re-organization, testing and quality assurance. We’ve released new versions of counterparty-lib v.9.49.4 and counterparty-cli v.1.0.0. (previously referred to as counterpartyd), accompanied with new versions of counterblock v1.1.0 and federatednode_build v1.1.1 (previously called counterpartyd_build). counterparty-lib has been completely re-architectured and is now a ‘pure’ Python library and a PyPi package, with no wallet functionality or command-line interface. The command-line interface has been abstracted into a separate package called counterparty-cli. Wallet functionalities are still being developed under counterparty-gui and will become available soon. counterblock has been updated to work with the new architecture of counterparty 9.49.4. Another important development update was the new version of Bitcoin Core with addrindex patch – v0.10.0. The release has been tagged as stable and it is recommended for everyone running the patched version to upgrade to this new release. Downloads are available here. In February, we’ve also implemented defaulting to OP_RETURN encoding when possible. Since the new version of Bitcoin Core will relay transactions with an 80-byte OP_RETURN output (see bitcoin/bitcoin#5286) we decided to switch our default encoding mechanism (multi-sig data outputs) to OP_RETURN for all transactions that fit into 40-bytes (or 80-bytes once the new version of Bitcoin Core is released). All other transactions will keep using multisig outputs. This change is currently scheduled for v9.49.5. You can see our discussion on the topic on GitHub #690. Finally, we’ve added HTTP REST API and updated the API documentation to reflect this implementation. REST API documentation is available on http://docs.counterpartylib.apiary.io/# and in our official API doc. That concludes our update for this week. If you have any questions you can contact us via our support channel, gitter, forum or github. Don’t forget to follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter to receive weekly updates via email.