NOTICE: The Counterparty ledger experienced a ledger fork at block #866,000 and now 2 ledgers exist.
This site is showing the "Counterparty Classic" ledger. You may also view the "Counterparty 2.0" ledger.
About Ledger Forks

A ledger is a list of all transactions that occour on a blockchain, or in the case of Counterparty on a metaprotocol. Typically all transactions are interpreted the exact same by all versions of the software and all nodes write the same data to the ledger to maintain ledger integrity and avoid what is known as a ledger fork.

A Ledger fork occurs when 2 different versions of software interpret the same transaction differently, and different data interpretations are written to each ledger in different states. This different data being written to each ledger is referred to as a ledger fork.

About Software Forks

A software fork is when a new version of software is released. The new version of software with the changes is always referred to as the "fork" or "forked" version, as it has made changes from how the software operated in the past, and "forked" away from how things used to operate.

In Counterparty great efforts have been made over its history to ensure that any "software forks" do not result in a "ledger fork". This has been achieved by extensive testing of features in the new "forked" version of software, before release, to ensure that transactions are interpreted in a reverse-compatible way.

Ledger Fork at block #866,000

Recently the Counterparty core devs released a new version of the counterparty-core software 10.4.0, which added some exciting new features (fair minting, atomic swaps, etc.) as well as some controversial changes that changed the way dispensers (vending machines) worked. While some of these changes were controversial, they were supposed to be fully backwards-compatible with the way previous versions of counterparty software operated to ensure ledger integrity.

These new changes went into effect at block #866,000, after which point, counterparty-core immediately went down due to an issue with some of the new UTXO functionality not working as expected. Additional issues continued to be found throughout the following weeks, and "hotfix" releases continued to be released in rapid succession in an attempt to deal with all of these regressions, bugs, scaling issues, and functionality loss.

Unfortunately, during this time a number of websites, services, and wallets failed to update to the newest versions of counterparty-core 10.4.XX, and continued generating transactions which were only see on one ledger. In addition, a specific regression inside counterparty-core release related to BTC Sends not automatically converting to dispense transactions, resulted in a number of transactions which were generated on the latest version of "Counterparty 2.0", but failed to trigger dispenses on dispensers (vending machines). As a result, a number of users lost funds, and chaos ensued as dispenser operators had to try and coordinate returning funds to buyers who used "Counterparty 2.0" to buy from dispeners, sent BTC funds to the dispensers, but never received a token from the dispenser as expected.

Due to all of these factors, the Counterparty network experienced a ledger fork at block #866,000 and the ledgers continued to diverge for over 3 weeks as the core developers struggled to rectify the situation.

Contributing to the frustrations of a ledger fork and unstable software, was the loss of functionality on Dispensers (vending machines), where previously users were able to open up a dispenser on a new/empty address using only a single transaction, as well as close the dispenser in a single transaction and return funds to the `origin` address. In the new "Counterparty 2.0" versions, this functionality now required 3 transactions instead of 1, making dispensers much more expensive to operate and further frustrating many in the community who had come to rely on this simple functionality.

How does this effect me?

Due to the ledger fork continuing for so long, a number of wallets, explorers, and services have decided the best thing to do in this unfortunate ledger fork situation, is to provide tools to allow users to choose which version of the ledger they would like to interact with.

These ledgers have been named differently so that it is clear to users what ledger they are viewing and interacting with. The ledger forks are :

It is suggested that users stay on the latest version of Counterparty which is currently "Counterparty 2.0". However, if you are an advanced counterparty user and prefer to interact with the older version of the ledger, and are aware of the risks associated with doing so, you have the option to do so.