I am exploring the idea to build a peer to peer financial platform. At first it seemed that counterparty would be a good solution. However the rumors are that Symbiont will outperform counterparty by far when it comes to built in functionality. But its homepage is not very informative about how Symbiont works and what it is capable to do. And there is also no reference to any APIs. Can someone please give me some advice on what technology I shout bet on, Counterparty or Symbiont.
Its not that Symbiont will out perform Counterparty, they are going to be used for two very different things.
Symbiont will be used for smart securities on permissioned ledgers and will be for larger companies looking to digitize their securities. This will also be a closed source system in which you will not have access to the source code.
Counterparty will be used for digital assets and the general user/smaller company. Though this is not to say that counterparty could not be used for larger companies, but if you are looking to build a financial platform and need access to the source code, you most likely will want to look into incorporating with Counterparty and not symbiont.
Personally I would like to see whatever you are building on counterparty because in my opinion, having a system that is open sourced and permissionless is the way of the future, i more so see Symbiont as filling the gap between wall street and companies before wall street becomes obsolete and everyone is just using the Bitcoin blockchain for securities, but of course this is IMO
I would love to know more about what you are doing. Post it here, or if it needs to stay confidential for now feel free to email me rross@foldingcoin.net as i am a community director for the counterparty foundation and would love to help you as much as i possibly can.
I wrote you an email.
They are very different products. Symbiont is a private company, Counterparty is an open source project. Symbiont works with institutional clients, whereas CP is for anyone who wants to build on it. Chances are, being as how Symbiont is full of CP devs, they will use CP as part of their offerings.
We don’t actually know that Symbiont does not provide its customers with access to Symbiont’s source code installed on customer’s premises (it would make sense if they did, IMHO), but the licensing may be different (from the liberal MIT license used by Counterparty repos) and support is certainly superior compared to what one can get on this forum for free.
thats true and a good point, I should have stated I assume that it will work that way, not that it will 