Horizon 2.0 Announcement Post

TL;DR. Counterparty pioneered NFTs but never had a native, trustless BTC marketplace. Horizon 2.0 changes that with a complete redesign of Horizon Wallet and Market, focused on intuitive UX and Web3 best practices. The new Horizon Wallet simplifies onboarding, streamlines swaps and transactions, and supports legacy users. Horizon Market now centers around assets and collections, removes friction from listing and trading, and introduces royalties for creators. Dispensers are deprecated for creation but still supported for purchases. Upcoming features include a built-in browser, BTC mint fees, collection management tools, and support for other Bitcoin L2 protocols.

Introduction: Origins and Obstacles

The term “NFT” hadn’t been coined at the time of Counterparty’s creation in January 2014. But with the launch of Counterparty collection Spells of Genesis in 2015 and, of course, Rare Pepes a year later, NFTs emerged as a dominant Web3 use case. A wonderfully diverse world of blockchain-native art has since developed and, with it, easier and more sophisticated ways of trading digital assets across an increasing number of cryptocurrency networks.

But Counterparty assets never had a native marketplace like OpenSea to facilitate the sale and exchange of its assets. Instead, users relied on Counterparty’s DEX or dispensers, both of which are difficult to use; or locked assets in Emblem Vaults to sell them for ETH on OpenSea, which is a costly and off-chain workaround.

In spite of their respective challenges, tens of millions of dollars of Counterparty assets were bought and sold through the available methods. The demand was clear, but Counterparty was still stymied by the absence of a simple way to sell assets for BTC trustlessly and on-chain.

The Counterparty community, then, was naturally thrilled when community member Derp Herpenstein described a process by which Counterparty assets could become UTXO-bound like Ordinals, and consequently traded trustlessly for BTC using PSBT atomic swaps on marketplaces like Magic Eden. Following Derp's lead, in October 2024, the Counterparty Core team released an upgrade allowing users to bind assets to and unbind them from UTXOs.

Since then, several PSBT marketplaces for Counterparty have emerged—but they all, including Horizon Market, have had limited traction. Instead, users have continued to rely on legacy methods to get BTC liquidity, which has led to thinner markets and a smaller user base.

Old habits are hard to break, and we realized it was on us to provide a product that would make users want to switch. We spent months listening to user feedback and digging into existing marketplaces in the Ordinals ecosystem and elsewhere. As a result, we came to understand that Horizon’s unintuitive swaps interface was symptomatic of a more general problem: we had not appreciated the importance of abstracting away the rough edges of crypto protocols for a smoother user experience, and we had failed to grasp the wisdom in many of the best practices already established in Web3.

With all of this in mind, we set about a first-principles redesign of Horizon Market and Wallet. This redesign is a radical departure from the current Horizon application suite and other Counterparty tooling, but it will feel familiar to users from other ecosystems and will, we hope, onboard the broader Web3 community to the protocol where NFTs began.

Horizon Wallet Redesign

Unlike the current Horizon Wallet, which prioritized continuity with existing Counterparty tooling, the new Horizon Wallet is heavily inspired by wallets from the Ordinals ecosystem. It’s still a few weeks from release, but the changes are significant and were instrumental in motivating Horizon 2.0’s overall design.

Onboarding

Horizon Wallet allows users to import their seed phrase. As part of the import process, a user selects the wallet type. This adds needless friction and confusion. The new onboarding workflow removes this step. When a user imports their seed, the import format will default to the native Horizon BIP84 wallet format. If a user is importing a non-native seed (from Counterwallet or Freewallet, for example), they can change the wallet format in their settings.

Features: Back to Basics

Transaction Types

The current version of Horizon Wallet aims for parity with the Counterparty protocol but lacks a clear hierarchy or visual grouping among its features. Most importantly, you cannot do a swap from Horizon Wallet.

The new version of Horizon Wallet embodies a meticulous design and includes a pared-down set of features. The following transaction types will be available in Horizon Wallet:

• Send
  • Address balance transfer
  • UTXO balance transfer
• Receive
• Swap
  • PSBT atomic swap
    • Attach asset balance to UTXO
  • DEX order
• View Asset
  • Delist swap
  • Cancel order
  • Close dispenser

We’ve exposed functionality around the user’s intent, not protocol internals. There is only one send button, which corresponds to two Counterparty transaction types; and there is only one swap button, which will trigger either a PSBT swap (where attaching an asset balance to a UTXO is merely a step) or a DEX order composition, depending on whether the user is swapping against BTC or another Counterparty asset. Finally, users will have a unified interface to manage all Counterparty trades for each asset.

Legacy Wallet Support

We know that the new Horizon Wallet is quite different from what users are familiar with and that some users may find these changes unsettling. In order to smooth the transition, for the next few months, the legacy Horizon Wallet will remain available as a Web wallet at the same domain: wallet.unspendablelabs.com. Users who would prefer to use the legacy wallet as an extension may download an old release from the Horizon Wallet GitHub repository.

Horizon Market Redesign

Horizon Market was an outgrowth of our efforts to build a Counterparty block explorer. As the development of the latter progressed, we started breaking the boundary between explorer and application platform, for example by allowing users to trigger dispensers or orders from their respective transaction and transaction type pages. We quickly realized, however, that this provided poor discoverability of applications, themselves, and forced the user to be aware of the protocol-level idiosyncrasies. Not wanting to repeat mistakes made in Horizon Wallet’s design, we consolidated the explorer and application platform under the Horizon Market umbrella, and aggressively scoped Horizon Market’s functionality to creating, minting and trading assets. Thus, while Horizon Market 2.0 has some new features, the bulk of our development effort was concentrated on refining the existing UI and UX.

Simplified Pricing

Horizon Market previously used a credit system for listings—users could purchase credits individually or in bulk, or subscribe monthly. While functional, this added unnecessary friction.

With Horizon Market 2.0, we’ve simplified the flow. Users can now either purchase a monthly subscription or pay a one-time listing fee directly during the listing process—no pre-purchased credits required, and no account setup just to list an asset.

Trading

Below is a quick summary of Counterparty trading to help readers understand our design decisions regarding the new Horizon Market trading interface.

Background

Counterparty had the first DEX ever, with a two-sided limit orderbook enabling trades between assets or against BTC. Asset-to-asset trades are seamless, but BTC trades require a two-step process: first matching, then executing a BTCPay transaction to complete the trade. This separation mitigates counterparty risk but often leaves matched orders unexecuted.

Several years later, dispensers were introduced to couple matching and execution, improving BTC liquidity. But they carry downsides: if two transactions attempt to buy from a dispenser in the same block, the higher-fee transaction gets the asset, and the other user loses their BTC unless the operator decides to manually refund it. Operators, too, take on risk: if multiple dispensers exist at the same address, any priced at or below the buyer’s BTC amount will be triggered.

Despite these issues, dispensers have outpaced the DEX for BTC trades, becoming the de facto method. This naturally limits adoption: only users familiar with their pitfalls are comfortable using dispensers.

PSBT swaps are the solution to providing BTC liquidity for Counterparty assets: because they are atomic, order matching and execution are coupled without introducing counterparty risk—resolving the limitations of both the DEX and dispensers.

Asset Trading and Collections

Since its launch, PSBT swaps have been Horizon Market’s core feature. However, the original interface was minimalistic to a fault. Swaps were visually siloed—not just from the rest of Horizon, but from the Counterparty ecosystem itself.

In Horizon Market 2.0, assets and collections are now central to the experience. Users can easily view, list, and trade assets. We also aggregate historical market activity—across DEX, dispensers, and swaps—and present it in a unified trading interface for buying and selling Counterparty assets with Bitcoin.

When viewing an asset, users can now:

• List an asset for BTC
  • Attach the desired asset balance to a UTXO and list it on the market.
• Buy an asset with BTC
  • Match with one or more open swap listings.
  • Optionally detach the acquired asset from its UTXO after purchase.
  • Trigger a dispenser (if available).

Note: Horizon Market does not support creating new dispensers. This decision was not made lightly. After extensive testing, we couldn’t design a dispenser creation flow that addressed user and operator risks without compromising the experience.

We recognize that dispensers still handle most BTC trading volume. That’s why Horizon Market continues to support buying from existing dispensers. And since we know UX improvements alone may not be enough to change behavior, we’ve added features around swapping that we believe will make sell-side adoption more compelling.

Asset Creation and Royalties

A great marketplace depends on great assets—and Counterparty has some of the most iconic digital assets in crypto. Yet those assets have long struggled with liquidity. And even where there is trading activity, creators often miss out on upside from secondary sales.

Horizon Market 2.0 changes that. In addition to a redesigned asset creation flow, we now support royalties: when a user creates an asset on Horizon Market, they can specify a percentage fee that is automatically paid to them whenever their asset is resold via a swap on Horizon Market.

Minting

Minting was the last feature we added to the original Horizon Market, and as such it benefited most from the lessons we’d learned since launching the market. Therefore, Horizon Market 2.0’s minting interface is essentially unchanged, but has been skinned to match the rest of the marketplace.

Upcoming Features

So far we’ve covered the initial Horizon 2.0 release. In the upcoming weeks and months, we will be adding even more features, some of which are described below.

Royalties for Existing Assets

Royalties will be able to be applied retroactively—not just to new assets created on Horizon, but to any Counterparty asset, regardless of whether it was created on Horizon Market.

DEX Support

In addition to BTC markets, we will be adding support for asset-to-XCP trades using Counterparty's DEX. Although a different transaction type, XCP markets will be available through existing interfaces.

Built-in Browser in Wallet and Market Apps Page

Wallets need to stay simple, yet smart contracts have a tendency to proliferate. To resolve this tension, Horizon Wallet will have a built-in browser, from which users can access Horizon Market, where a broader set of Counterparty transaction types will be available.

BTC Mint Fees

Through Horizon, users can deploy a BRC-20-like asset minter. Currently, users may charge an XCP-denominated fee to mint, but in the future, Horizon will allow users to get paid for mints done on minters they have deployed.

Asset Collection Management

Counterparty collections are unusual in that they are often group efforts, rather than the product of a specific individual or company. This organic, community-centric approach to asset creation has been essential to Counterparty’s longevity, and we want to see it continue. That’s why we’ll be releasing a collection management platform with a bilateral request-submission workflow, so that collection managers and creators each request or approve the addition of an asset to a collection.

New Networks!

Horizon currently supports Counterparty, but its UI and UX were designed to be network-agnostic. The Bitcoin L2 ecosystem is vibrant and growing, and we’ll be actively watching its development to see which other protocols we’d like to support.

Wrapping Up

We’re excited to share what we’ve built—and even more excited to see how the community uses it. Horizon 2.0 reflects months of thoughtful iteration, and while there’s plenty more to come, we think it’s a big step forward for the Counterparty ecosystem. Thanks for being part of it.