Over the last year and a half, Counterparty has evolved into the most advanced platform for creating financial instruments on top of Bitcoin, used by an increasing number of innovative projects. During the last couple of months, our goal was to wrap up the large scale improvements to the Counterparty software suite, complete comprehensive security audits, and once the protocol reaches a mature state start focusing on and building tools and services around it. Symbiont is a step in that direction, developing products that will be utilizing this technology, and were very excited to see it be put into use in systems that power modern finance.
I don't understand the emphasis. The Counterparty Protocol is a purpose-built financial services layer on top of Bitcoin. XCP tokens are the necessary analogue of BTC (wrt. transaction fees) to prevent abuse of the upcoming smart contract system. Symbiont was founded in part by the founders of the Counterparty Project. Of course the emphasised sentence holds true.