What is up you beautiful people!

Welcome to the first edition of the new format for weekly updates. This Week in Bitcoin will aim to be the homebase for staying up on everything happening around Bitcoin, but focused purely on the tech, and builders actually building the shit. No price predictions or philosophy of money.
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I'll experiment with styles to make this as easy to download as possible. I want to get you in, out, and updated as quick as possible.
This week I have 5 sections, covering Bitcoin Proper, Lightning, Stacks, RSK, and Liquid.
If YouTube or Podcast is more your style, hit the respective links.
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Without further ado, let's jump in.
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Bitcoin Mainchain

• The team at Block put on an article on wallet security. More specifically, How to create a wallet that makes it easy for you to access your coins (availability), which make it hard for someone else to get into your wallet (security). The usual ways of storing your seed phrase are necessary but not sufficient to adopt the next billion users to Bitcoin. Check out the blog here.
• ​Blackrock is officially entering the Bitcoin space in a major way. They announced they will offer direct exposure to BTC for their clients in a private trust. For the uninformed, Blackrock is the largest asset manager in the world with 10T dollars worth currently under their watch. Even a percent or two of their portfolio moving to Bitcoin is massive.
• The Houston Texans will be the first NFL team to allow fans to buy tickets to game using Bitcoin. They are starting with suite boxes to start.
• Gloria Zhao becomes the first female to take on the title of Bitcoin Core maintainer. The people that review and push code updates to the main Bitcoin codebase.
• Lastly for Bitcoin proper, I had a great conversation with Paul Sztorc. Paul is the creator of BIP300, An interesting idea to bring sidechains to Bitcoin is a different way then we have seen currently. You can watch that episode here.​

Stacks

• Stacks Hyperchains have been renamed to Subnets. Thanks to a trademark issue.
• The Stacks Ventures pre-accelerator, The Web3 Founders Lab, had their first cohort demo day. You can see a little details on these teams here. Be on the lookout, you'll likely see a lot more of these teams in the near future.
• There was some hub-bub last week when Jasper didn't have his residency with the Stacks Foundation renewed. A few of us, myself included, that this was kinda crazy. Since then some discussions have been had and some proposals put forward. Brittany from the Foundation put out this blog post to give some clarity on the foundations current objectives.
• Ryder Handles are here. Those .btc names you see all over Twitter are decentralized identities powered by the BNS name system on Stacks. Now, Ryder has taken that functionality further with support for a whole new suite of suffix names for web3 communities to identity themselves. Names like .mega, .fren, and .citycoin can be claimed to represent your favorite Web3 community. Claim yours name by going to https://handles.ryder.id/​

Lightning

I really had no idea how much is happening on Lightning. It might be the busiest area of new tech on Bitcoin right now. This is only a small snippet of what I found.

• Taro has the potential to completely change the cross-border payments market. The Lightning Labs team puts out a monthly newsletter and dropped some details on this. The TL:DR is you can attach different currencies to ride along on Lightning as regular BTC transactions. So I could send USD to my friend in Mexico, The Lightning network would handle the transfer for pennies, and then convert to my friends local currency so he can use it easily. Game-changer if this plays out like they say.
• Podcasting 2.0 now enabled on over 8,000 podcasts. This is a new initiative you might see called Value4Value. It's pretty straightforward, With Lightning we can send payments that settle near-instantly for next to nothing. In this new world of Podcasting 2.0, You can stream someone fractions of a penny for every minute you enjoy their podcast. Incentives align as the creator gets more money to create better content, and the listener rewards the creator who they enjoy listening to most.
  ​Fountain.FM is a leader in this space.
• Zebedee closes $35 million dollar series B of funding. Zebedee is a in-game payment integrator. They make it easy for big game studios to attach Bitcoin and Lightning to their games.
• Lightning new all-time high of public capacity at 4799 Bitcoin.

RSK

• Sovryn is a DeFi application built on the RSK blockchain. They recently set some new TVL numbers.
  They hit $60M in total value locked on the protocol, and $3.5M in their newest offering, Zero.
  Zero allows you to take out a zero interest loan against your Bitcoin. Purrrrrty cool.

Liquid

• Blockstream Satellite celebrates its 5th birthday. This is their super cool tech where they offer free services to keep your nodes in sync with the Bitcoin blockchain. You purchase an antenna and connect that to your BTC node, and everything runs in sync without a need for internet access. Bitcoiners are the ultimate doomsday prep-errs and I'm so here for it.

That's it for this first edition of This Week in Bitcoin.

Let me know what you thought by replying to this email. (Haven't tested this, so you might get a dead end. Give it a shot so we can confirm)
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Peace!
-Jake