Adam’s official statement on July 30
“We’d like to give a quick update where things are at regarding offering the full Ethereum smart contracts functionality on Counterparty mainnet:
Currently we’re in a bit of a holding pattern in finishing up the implementation, due to the fact that Ethereum itself is still under heavy testing and development, and its consensus system is still rather centralized. On top of this, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which provides the execution environment for the smart contracts, is not ready for prime-time from both a security and maturity of features standpoint. Before we add the EVM into Counterparty mainnet, we’d like to see much more security testing around it, as putting an insecure and still-rapidly-evolving EVM implementation live into mainnet would have severe consequences to the existing Counterparty ecosystem.
Once Ethereum’s own implementations are more mature, stable and tested (with at least a few formal security audits behind it), we will be able to complete the Counterparty implementation. At that point, porting it over to Counterparty should be very straightforward.”
Adam on Reddit on Aug 4 (after the news)
The article left out the important point that it not proof of existence or even a token system, but a complete smart contracts (‘smart securities’) platform. If it were anything else, there’d be no automatic dividend payments, conversions, cap table management, etc.