Glossary
Counterparty-native terminology you'll meet on CounterTools and across the broader ecosystem.
Asset
A named token issued on Counterparty (e.g. RAREPEPE, PEPECASH, BITCRYSTALS). Assets can be divisible (subdivide like dollars and cents) or indivisible (whole units only). Asset names are unique on the protocol.
Sub-asset
A child asset namespaced under a parent asset (e.g. RAREPEPE.PEPECASH). Sub-asset names are namespaced — multiple parents can have a sub-asset of the same short name.
XCP
Counterparty's native protocol currency. Created via Proof-of-Burn in 2014 with a fixed supply of 2,648,755 XCP. Required for asset creation and powers the on-chain DEX.
Collection currency
An asset that serves as the de-facto money for a Counterparty collection — e.g. PEPECASH for Rare Pepes, BITCRYSTALS for Spells of Genesis. Tracked specially on CounterTools because they're used to price their own collections.
DEX (Counterparty DEX)
Counterparty's on-chain decentralised exchange. Trades happen between addresses via order matching, settled on Bitcoin blocks. Pairs include any asset against XCP, PEPECASH, BTC, or any other asset.
Order match
When two compatible DEX orders pair up. Settles when both sides deliver their funds. For non-BTC pairs, funds are escrowed at order time. For BTC pairs, the BTC side must be delivered before completion.
Dispenser
A posted-price BTC vending machine for an asset. The issuer deploys a dispenser locked to an asset and a satoshirate (BTC price per dispense). Anyone can buy by sending BTC to the dispenser address. Continues dispensing until inventory runs out or the dispenser is closed.
Satoshirate
The BTC price (in satoshis) per dispense, set when a dispenser is deployed. 1 BTC = 100,000,000 satoshis. Combined with the dispense quantity, this determines the BTC-per-unit price.
Escrow (DEX escrow)
When a non-BTC DEX order is placed, the asset on the give-side is moved into protocol escrow until the order matches or is cancelled. The address's wallet balance reflects this — a 0 balance with an open order means the funds are escrowed, not missing.
Floor price
The lowest qualifying current asking price for an asset across all venues we track (DEX, dispensers, OpenSea). We filter dust orders worth less than $10 on the buyer's side so the displayed floor reflects real liquidity.
Multi-hop pricing
Deriving an asset's XCP price by routing through another asset that has a fresh anchor. E.g. BITCORN doesn't trade against XCP this week, but it does trade against PEPECASH — and PEPECASH has a recent XCP price — so we compute BITCORN/XCP via PEPECASH.
MAD (Median Absolute Deviation)
A statistical outlier-rejection method we use to filter wildly-priced dispensers. Take all recent dispenser prices, find the middle value, measure how far each price is from that middle, ignore anything more than about 3× the typical distance. The remaining majority is the trusted population.
Anchor (price anchor)
An asset with a known recent XCP price that can serve as a routing point for multi-hop pricing of other assets. An anchor can come from a direct XCP-DEX trade or a MAD-filtered dispenser sale converted via the live BTC/XCP rate.
Confidence (HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW / STALE)
Every stored price carries a confidence label reflecting the source, recency, and underlying volume. HIGH is direct fresh trade data; MEDIUM is 1-hop or sparse-sample anchors; LOW is stretched-tolerance or thin data; STALE is anything older than 30 days.
Floor cap
When summing collection asset values into a market cap, we apply tiered floor-cap rules to prevent unsold-issued assets from inflating the headline figure. Each tier defines what counts as "real" supply for market-cap purposes.
Last sale price
The USD price of the most recent recorded sale of an asset. We surface this alongside floor when no current floor exists, but we flag it with the year if it's older than 3 years (e.g. "$3.82 (’17)") because old prices aren't representative of current market.
Snapshot (holder snapshot)
A point-in-time capture of which addresses hold which assets and in what quantities. CounterTools snapshots all holders every 6 hours from the latest Counterparty SQLite balances state.
Issuance
The act of creating an asset on Counterparty (or expanding its supply, or locking it). Each issuance is a Bitcoin transaction. We index every issuance to track supply history.
Fairminter
A Counterparty mechanism for fair asset distribution — minting is open to anyone for a configured period and pricing curve. Most modern Counterparty asset launches use fairminters rather than instant-issue.
Emblem Vault
A wrapper that locks a Counterparty asset inside an Ethereum NFT, enabling trading on OpenSea. CounterTools tracks active Emblem Vault listings as a fourth pricing venue alongside DEX, dispensers, and the native order book.
OTC (over-the-counter)
A negotiated trade that happens off the orderbook, typically through Telegram or the CounterTrader bot's escrow service. We track resolved OTC deals when settlement is verifiable on-chain.
Tokenscan
The legacy block explorer for Counterparty (formerly xchain.io). CounterTools links out to tokenscan.io for raw transaction inspection. Tokenscan is the source-of-truth explorer; we add analytics on top.