News for the week 42.2013.

We would like to welcome you to the first issue of the Mastercoin blog.

Each week, right here, rather than having to wade through hundreds of forum posts you will find a summary of the most relevant developments related to Mastercoin.  The focus of the blog initially will be on summarizing project developments, service announcements, exchange market updates, and Mastercoin Foundation financials and developments.  If you have any important news scroll down to the form at the bottom and let us know about what you are working on.

The first two weeks of October brought us some exciting news with more code releases coming out for the $25,000 Code Contest and the final awards going to four developers.  Check the repositories out on GitHub, install them and test them so our community of developers can get your feedback and thoughts!

We also have a proposal for a voting mechanism for changes to Mastercoin, a fund ledger is now tracking expenses, we have an opening for a Communications Officer.  The current BID price for MSC is 0.02 BTC.

$25k Code Contest Complete!

On October 15, 2013 the final awards were announced on bitcointalk.org for the contest participants.  The winners will share in a prize of 180 BTC. Click on each name to take you to a list of each of their contributions.

Tachikoma: 48% Grazcoin: 26% Zathras: 24% Bitoy: 2%

A big congratulations to everyone who participated!

Repo Updates & Announcements

• Grazcoin provides an update to mastercoin-tools on GitHub introducing MSC send transactions, multi-signature support, JSON API and so on. Install and check it out for yourself, see the mastercoin-tools install instructions.

• Zathras announces the alpha release of Masterchest Engine on GitHub – new functionality in this release enables the scanning of the Bitcoin blockchain to check for MSC transactions, the validation of transactions, and the updating of balances for MSC addresses. Check out a live instance at masterchest.info.

• Zathras announces the alpha release of Masterchest Wallet available on GitHub, download the binaries to test and help find bugs! Please use small amounts as this is very alpha!

• Bitoy recently announced the availability of the BMX Wallet – Blockchain Mastercoin-eXplorer Wallet available on Github.  Functionality includes the ability to send MSC and Test MSC via blockchain.ino accounts, show MSC and BTC balances, as well as show MSC and BTC transactions.  The wallet leverages both blockchain.info and Mastercoin-Exploreer API’s.

• Tachikoma has provided updates to his Mastercoin-ruby library to parse Mastercoin data. Mastercoin-ruby is available on Github.

Market Update

17-OCT-2013:

BID MSC 500 * 0.0300 BTC || ASK MSC 270 MSC * 0.0200 BTC

Note that trading is manual at this time, therefore bids may be higher then some asks. Market depth is available at Maxmint’s Google Doc: Mastercoin Order Book

Protocol & Proposals

Proposal: Voting

Join the discussion about formalizing a distributed voting mechanism for changes in the Mastercoin protocol.

Protocol 1.1

Last month, J.R. Willet published the latest update to the Mastercoin protocol which includes a new section on Smart Property, improvements for easier parsing and better escrow fund health.

Mastercoin Foundation Financials

A Google Drive ledger of expenses, Mastercoin Fund Ledger, has been created.

Current Balance: 4549.5710979 BTC

Job Openings

Mastercoin is seeking a Communications Officer, see details on the Bitcointalk.org thread.

Have something exciting to talk about?

Use this form to tell us what you are working on related to Mastercoin. We will include it in the next weekly update.