Announcement: We've added to Counterparty the ability to imbed and parse data in multi-signature outputs, in addition to OP_RETURNs. This means that all message types (not just burns) now work on mainnet, at regular speed. Counterparty is fully operational (like the second Death Star), without Eligius and without Bitcoin 0.9.

When OP_RETURN goes live, the multi-sig method will probably be retired, just because it's not officially supported and is slightly less elegant. However, the Bitcoin developers have (counter-productively) decided to allow only one OP_RETURN output per tx, so without multi-sig we are limited to 80 bytes per tx. With multi-sig, the limit is much higher. (N.B. Both methods may be combined in a single transaction.)

counterpartyd will continue to function as it always has, except now everything will actually work. As always, be careful: this software is still largely untested.