Currently Peercoin is 0.5.4 but this year, Peercoin v0.6 is about to be released in the next month or so... I can't wait! :)
What is New in Peercoin v0.6?
Checkpoints will no longer be mandatory. You can opt-out of them
This means many people will attempt to run nodes without checkpoints. Even if you are on a fork, and you send your coins, they won't get lost, all you'd have to do is turn checkpoints back on, and retransmit your transaction. So turning checkpoints on or off can be done at your leisure. Eventually checkpoints will no longer be needed at all.
This puts the control into the users hands instead of it being hardcoded into the wallet.
This also means the Peercoin network has matured and has been widely distributed enough not to need checkpoints in the future. :)
Peercoin has been re-based to Bitcoin v0.8.6 and is easier to build from source. Supporting even more Linux build environments and includes BIP65!
BIP65 (OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY) means you could have a Peercoin transaction output to be made unspendable until some point in the future.
This is cool, because it opens up all kinds of neat scenarios to protect your coins. If you don't want to wait to read about this feature, you can always read it at the BIP65 wiki
Autotools-based build process has been backported from Bitcoin v0.9.5. This brings the peercoin-cli command line utility as well.
NEW DNS seed nodes are included for both mainnet and testnet.
This will speed up node discovery, especially for new users with new wallets.
The reference client's GUI now uses QT5 by default (goodbye QT4)
All desired Peerunity features have been ported to the Peercoin official wallet. (Yay!) The official wallet now has coin control and the minting tab. This means that the Peerunity wallet will be depreciated and will no longer receive updates. The development team will focus only on the official Peercoin wallet from now on.
So what needs to be done?
The remainder of the work needed to be done includes forking the testnet to new protocol, further testing and re-skinning the client.
If you are familiar at all with QT5 and wish to help the Peercoin Team, please contact Sentinelrv via PM on the official Peercoin forums at https://talk.peercoin.net
Peercoin continues to be a very attractive coin with growing support. I'm excited to for the 0.6 version release!