How is the progress? Project seems to develop terribly slow,
Yes, it have failed to attract a strong team of open source developers. I kinda understand why: people prefer to work on ambitious, beautiful projects (e.g. Ethereum), or on ones which are easy to monetize (alt-coins, startups).
A good example is Vitalik Buterin: he started with colored coins, wrote some code and started the spec, but then switched to Ethereum.
I think there was only one person besides me who had a resolve to make "fully usable" colored coins software, and was able to allocate enough time... But that person died(?) about a year ago...
And I'm fairly good at building prototypes and developing concept, but I'm very reluctant to make final decisions and I hate taking responsibility. So this is unfortunate: I just couldn't finish it without a team.
So the only option to keep the project alive was to commercialize it. ChromaWallet is now being developed by a startup company called ChromaWay, see here:
http://chromaway.comIt is still open source, but priorities are different.
So, about progress: we have been working on web/mobile wallet implemented in JS. It was started in July, now we have a complete wallet core and are integrating UI, I expect that it will be available in a week or two.
You can find source code here:
https://github.com/chromawayAs for the desktop wallet, beta version was released in June. It has few warts, which could have been fixed by now, but finishing it wasn't my priority.
which is sad since issuing and P2P exchange of shares is IMHO one of most important and promising features of blockchain technology.
I'm no longer interested in 'shares'. I've been following Bitcoin capital markets since 2012, and I came to a conclusion that they aren't good. The problem isn't in a lack of a decentralized marketplace, but in the very nature of the companies listed on these markets. There is a lot of scams, and there is also a lot of people doing it in a half-assed way, which is a recipe for a failure. There are almost no companies which are honest and profitable.
There are also legal problems: selling shares without registering a public company is illegal in USA and many other countries.
So I'm not interested in helping this shady market, especially if there is a chance that regulators will go after those who help to facilitate transactions.
On the other hand, I cannot prevent people from issuing shares and bonds.
BTW, while we are at it, I believe there is a better way to do crowdfunding with Bitcoin. Well, there are several ways to do it, the most intriguing is a combination of assurance contracts (like in Lighthouse:
https://github.com/vinumeris/lighthouse/blob/master/README.md) with colored-coin like stuff. But it is more technically complex, so we will do it after we do normal colored coins.
Any ETA on fully usable software?
It depends on what qualifies as a fully usable software...
I keep telling you, if you want to see a hoard of devs, copy-paste or otherwise, lets have a c++ version. I guarantee half the altcoin forum will be on this in a matter of weeks. The incentive of money always drives the fastest development. Look at all the suggested improvements for bitcoin that made it to alts first (some that btc is only incorporating now). Eve the UI designs you see in alts have more functionality and features as well as creative looks.