Yes, the situation is unclear---sorry, we just can't say much at the moment. There'll be some relevant (positive) announcements very soon, though! Suffice it to say that Evan, Robby and I will all be working on Counterparty for the forseeable future.
Thanks for the clarification. We'll have to stay tuned for that announcement.
On a different topic I’ve been wondering recently if there are any plans for how we can drive increased use and adoption of the DEX. I know that the vending service was relaunched recently but haven’t seen much happen beyond that. Granted a lot has happened since XCP was initialized a year ago but one of the selling features initially was the DEX itself and the value that this would provide over centralized exchanges. I don’t personally have any concrete suggestions yet but it’s certainly something that I’ve been thinking about a lot.
Well IMO A big problem now is BTC dragging the whole markets down compared to when it was on a manic rise, despite the fact CounterParty has rightly relegated MasterCoin to the depths of coinmarketcap, CounterParty is still worth dollar denominated 1/10 of what MasterCoin was at it's peak. A lot of people are just getting more and more fed up and feeling like the safest place is back into fiat. The alt-markets are perhaps in the saddest state I've ever seen. A rising or at least horizontal BTC price gives users more comfort in experimenting medium-long term in alternative projects that really do deserve that kind of attention, like this project. I've noticed the quick flips and pump&dumps tend to fare better in bullish markets, people can make a quick buck in a short time with not much exposure and hop back into fiat, offsetting the losses from downtrending btc and driving more funds out of 'legit' projects.
As far as pushing increased adoption of the DEX, one of the biggest hurdles holding back wider scale adoption IMO is working with bitcoin in a secure way. After the recent gox, mintpal & bitstamp debacles now really is a great position for decentralized tech to start getting a little extra limelight but many in the scene seem deathly allergic to altcoins. There are stop-gap almost sidechan-like solutions like Vennd and BITCOINEX which work brilliantly once you're in the CounterParty ecosystem by creating the equivalent counterparty-btc for real btc inserted and allowing users to trade back at any time, but there's this additional mental layer involved for users new to the process and at least initially some users have an automatic block once the process becomes slightly fragmented and they aren't directly working with their BTC but kind of 1:1 IOU tokens, although essentially in a centralized exchange you don't have control over your BTC anyway and are also essentially holding IOU's , not to mention there's often no visible way to audit the sites reserves to be sure they aren't going fractional reserve on the users.
Something you can see starting to come together is the emergence of Blockchain 2.0 projects leveraging the CounterParty protocol. A recent example is GEMZ. Although GEMZ are native CounterParty assets and enjoy secure (albeit not instantaneous) peer-to-peer trading on CounterParty's decentralized order book many users will trade them back and forth for BTC on traditional exchanges, out of convenience,habit, or a desire for BTC. If you imagine a scenario where a user doesn't want to buy or sell GEMZ for another asset, instead they want to use XCP, or SJCX, or whatever other exciting project comes next it might make more sense for them to directly list it on the DEX. SJCZ & GEMZ alone currently have a couple million dollars in market capitalisation which could provide a fair amount of transactional activity should users decide to start trading more on the DEX, but as the old wall street saying goes, liquidity begets liquidity.
Then you have the world of smart contracts on-top of that, not currently deployed mainnet but a lot of exciting possibilities there. It's an idea that's got a lot of coverage yet I think we've barely scratched the surface as to the possibilities. I certainly don't grasp the implications right now.
The whole crypto movement as an evolutionary process, the ecosystem begins to gradually filter out the irrelevant cruft and refine the needed portions. Certain projects begin emerging to fill in a piece of the puzzle. I think CounterParty fills an important part of this puzzle, enabling Bitcoin to fill roles it could of previously never filled in it's current state, without the leap away from the ledger with the already established network effect. Bitcoin purists can get a hard on for Sidechains all day long but all average joe has now to look at is a whitepaper while XCP just put the code out without the hand out and has continued to put code out here and now.
CounterParty itself is in an evolving state too, and there are pieces of the puzzle that could come together at any time. e.g emergence of trusted guarantors (could be as simple as an established exchange allowing fiat withdrawal/deposit to counterparty), external apps directly leveraging xcp instead of a token, fiat onramps, larger otc presence, p2p exchanges, physical-digital asset representation bridges, further research into secure btcpays, etc I have some personal ideas that are a while away from fruition (few months before it's even known whether they'll be possible) and I'm sure there's possibilities potentially years away, slow and steady seems a nice approach compared to a sudden boom and bust.
Then there's things that can happen of their own accord, in a snowball effect purely by a byproduct of CounterParty reaching a certain level of maturity.
Still bear in mind even in this early stage, at the current moment today CounterParty transactions represented 2% of all Bitcoin transactions, not insignificant at all and quite exciting when you realise a 5x increase in usage is not in the completely crazy realm.
