How do I participate in crowdfunding of projects issued on Counterparty?

The Counterparty Project does not endorse or provide crowdfunding or crowdsourcing service. This feature used to be available in Counterwallet.io for a short while in 2014, but such services are today available from third party sites.

##3rd Party Services

There are various 3rd party “vending machine” services which make it possible to buy various Counterparty tokens/assets in manner similar to Shapeshift (which also vends some major Counterparty assets).

Currently two popular vending machine services for Counterparty assets are Tokenly (Swapbot) and Coindaddy.

Please note that these services are owned by operated by third parties and not by the Counterparty Project.

##Buying from Counterwallet (archived content)

Note: Below is archived content that was relevant to an old version of Counterwallet.

First and foremost, please perform due diligence prior to purchasing unknown assets and familiarize yourself with of Terms of Use for Counterparty.io, Counterwallet.io and Counterparty software. Our Terms of Use are located at the very bottom of the Counterparty home page (http://counterparty.io). The asset issuer may have their own terms to which you may need to agree.

Second, once you are familiar with Counterparty’s and the issuer’s Terms of Use, prepare your tokens that you want to use to buy (usually BTC) and follow the issuer’s instructions.

Third, it is not always necessary to create a new Counterparty wallet every time you participate in a crowdsale. Normally those projects would advise you to open a wallet on Counterparty.io, but this is for users new to Counterwallet and there is no need to do that multiple times unless for some reason you want to have multiple wallets. If you already have a Counterparty wallet, you can skip that step and do one of the following:

  • Either use one of existing addresses from your Counterwallet and send BTC to the seller from this address.
  • or -
  • Add another address in your Counterwallet (menu is located in top right corner).

Because vending machines used in crowdsourcing normally send assets back to the sending address, you would have to fund this address with a tiny amount of BTC first (send BTC from another account to this new account).
You can send BTC to this new account from any of existing Counterwallet addresses or an external address. It costs about 0.0001 BTC per transaction regardless of the source of BTC (another wallet address or from an outside address).

It is therefore cheaper and more convenient (in terms of less pass phrases to deal with) to use a single wallet with multiple accounts. For obvious reasons you do not want to send BTC to a vending machine directly from a crypto-exchange or any address you do not have under complete and exclusive control.