Don't forget, when this Eth "Merge" hype ends and POS isn't very promising without all the leveraged platforms and VC loans, XCP will have a very promising use of its own that it will do on a better blockchain and network than "ETH" ever has:
https://counterparty.io/docs/faq-smartcontracts/
Is there currently development going on somewhere? I would be interested to follow the code progression, as I'm interested in the concept of turing complete smart contracts on the BTC chain. https://counterparty.io/docs/faq-smartcontracts/
They mention the following in the FAQ:
Quote from: Counterparty FAQ
A new proposal is being built for a specific Counterparty VM.
I however don't know when this part was added to the FAQ site, and if it's also outdated.
Another concept I'm interested on is Picopayments - which would be Counterparty tokens on Lightning:
https://github.com/CounterpartyXCP/picopayments-hub
But it seems to have been abandoned in 2017, albeit there are a few forks (this one seems however be the only one which has some own commits ...). Anyone has an idea if there is someone working on this still? Just because of the fee issue some of you mentioned this would be very useful, although of course there's also OmniBOLT in this niche.
The problem is all the Counterparty development was from volunteers and the main developer sadly passed away a few years ago. There is no one being paid the big bucks from ICOs or companies to create or develop it further.
Whats tragic is this Picopayments looks like it would be a solid development in the furthering of a Bitcoin layer DEX that would remove the biggest issues of waiting for new blocks and fees.
super cheap (40K sats). 
and Counterparty as it was meant to be, cheaper txns, and not bottlenecked by Bitcoin Core devs slashing you out of the 0.9.x version -- F*ck Jeff Garzik! jk lol)...