TWIB 2/14

Jake: [00:00:00] What is up you beautiful people? Welcome back to the Built on Bitcoin podcast, where we cover all the innovation happening across Bitcoin, talking to directly to the builders and the founders building the future on Bitcoin. I am your humble host. Jacob Brown because see me around Just Jake blockchain, and this is this week in Bitcoin episode.

You know what it is. So we're covered in everything I saw over the past week or so across Bitcoin, stacks, lightning, R s, K, and Blockstream. So there's a ton to cover in these past 10 days or so that I saw. Most of it is around Ordinals. , but that's the big topic of the week. There's a ton of other stuff going on, so let's just jump right in.

And first, just to hit you with some stats, uh, ordinals, as of when I recorded this, there's over 91,000 inscriptions done so we're closely hitting that a hundred K [00:01:00] number. It felt like it was only like three, four days ago that it was less than 10 K, so it just exploded. There's been a ton of innovation happening so, so fast.

Uh, I got some numbers from the two bigger platforms I've seen to mint them. If you don't want to run your own node, These are two days old, so take it with a grain of salt. Two, three days old, uh, ordinals bot has over 6,000 inscriptions done through their service, and Gamma has over 2000. But again, take that with a grain of salt.

This is 3, 2, 3 days old. Also Max's angered 1069. So I think that's pretty much all of them. So they're all pissed off and crying in a corner. People are still gonna innovate. Great stuff. So if you haven't seen yet ordinals is this new, crazy thing where you can inscribe data onto the Bitcoin blockchain by attaching it to a single Satoshi.

And with that, that Satoshi becomes [00:02:00] forever holding that piece of data. And so a Satoshi is one, 1000000th of a Bitcoin and since there's roughly 21 million Bitcoin in existence, minus something that got lost and locked in Satoshi's wallet, there's a gaggle of Satoshi's to be used for inscriptions. So a lot of room to, to build off of this from.

But the thing that we've seen the most is that Stax builders, specifically Stax dev teams, have jumped on the opportunity to build tooling for Ordinals. So the two big ones I saw was the Satos team built ordinals bot.com, which was a, the first one to hit the market, made it dead simple. You don't have to run your lightning node, know a bunch of code, you just upload a picture, pay the fee, and it ends up in the wallet.

You. and then a couple days later, gamma came out with their own thing. If you go to gamma.io/ordinals, you'll see it. And their workflow is super nice. It comes with [00:03:00] compression, takes a lot of the legwork off of this. So shout out to those stacks teams, uh, innovating. On that note, I've seen a ton of wallet infrastructure and marketplace stuff kind of bubbl.

but none of it's really hit the market yet. So I'm not gonna drop any names of stuff that I've seen until next week when I expect some of that to ship. But, uh, builders are going super, super hard on Ordinals and they're building incredibly fast. So it's, it's pretty exciting to see. So that's kind of in the, in the Bitcoin main chain camp, continuing down that line.

This isn't exactly. Directly Bitcoin related, but it is big news. The s e c has been going hard in the past week, and the main one they did was they find Kraken, which is one of the oldest exchanges in the game for having a product that was an unregistered security spec, specifically their staking product.

Uh, I guess the way they were managing funds behind the scenes [00:04:00] made it security. So they said, we're not gonna fight it, and they got fined. There's been some stuff today going on potentially, so it's hard to keep up. But the s e c is really going hard on staking and stablecoin it looks like. So something to be aware of.

And then one more in the Bitcoin main chain space. Interlay release their V2 white paper for their new V2 of their bridging platform. So I haven't been following this super closely. Uh, I've been aware of inter. You know, over the past few months, they have a V1 product that's been out for a while. They build decentralized trustless.

Bridge Tech, uh, mostly on Kosama, which is like a extension of the polka dot blockchain. But, as far as I know, they have some of the best decentralized trustless tech in the game, and they're super focused on Bitcoin specifically. So with this new white paper, they're laying out their spec [00:05:00] for v2, which brings a m m kind of unis swap style swapping.

Also lending and borrowing attached to, uh, deep liquidity protocol. So much more full featured. So if they can do that and keep it decentralized and trustless, that sounds super incredible. So I'm gonna try and get the, uh, founder on the podcast soon. But, that just dropped today, that white paper. So if you wanna check it out, see where some of the latest tech is on Bridging and Trustless, it'll be down below in the des.

All right. Moving right on. We're gonna jump in to stacks, but first a quick word from our sponsor.

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Jake: thank you to my sponsor as always. So, jumping into what's, what's going on in stacks? A lot of it has come around b n s and Ordinals. So the first one is ORI Swap, which is a. [00:07:00] Stacks developer named Hank created a trustless way to swap ordinals between two users with the currency as stacks. So this is a flip on the, uh, Ellen Swap, which allows you to swap tokens, trustless the um, but now you can do it with Ordinals.

The thing to note here is that STX is the current currency, but with s sptc coming in the next six to 12 months, swapping STX out for s sptc is trivial. So really, Look at the way that you could use that tech and then swap out S Stx for S Sptc. That's how you would really see this be, uh, a powerful use case.

So really cool to see this in action. And again, like the Stacks, builders are shipping super, super fast. Ordinances have been a thing for really a week and a half, two weeks tops, so it's crazy to see how much stuff's already been built. All right, next up, [00:08:00] B and s names. . So you know the dot bgc names we see everywhere.

It's this global d i d attached to a global ledger. Uh, they've been working behind the scenes to make it easier to connect lightning addresses to your dot bgc. So there's a standard that's been coming online called Lightning Address. You can go to lightning address.com and check it out. And basically what allows you to do is you connect your lightning.

Your long, kinda like ugly key that you can't even decipher and you can attach it to a basic, uh, well it looks like an email address, so it might be for me, it might be Jake blockchain fountain.fm, which is the lightning powered, uh, podcasting app. Or it could be, uh, Atlas zb. , that's one of the other lightning gaming as a service, uh, providers.

So a person can use that domain and they can offer, uh, you can add your prefix to it, and all they do is type in that address and then it sends lightning [00:09:00] to the right person. The lightning invoice or payment. Makes it dead simple. So bns BTC US now allows you to do that same thing with a btc. So it could be Jake blockchain at BTC us, which is huge.

So if you wanna check it out, it's still early. It's working. It works for me, but they're working out some kinks to make the front end, uh, super locked in. It, it, it was a little wonky when I first. Uh, to hit, hit support for some help. But, uh, if you go to btc.us/lightning, you can, you can check it. All right, next up, there's a ton of startups coming out of the Web three startup lab or what's now called the BTC Startup Lab.

And uh, but also just builders coming in, in general and just kind of popping up because this is the potential in stacks. and one of those is Herm Medica, which just hit Testnet today, and they're building a Bitcoin focused yield [00:10:00] product focused around covered calls, which I don't know what that means exactly.

I'm not a finance guy, but it's some kind of strategy to create against. And you can, you can, with their product, you lock up your stacks and then for a certain amount of time it'll do their trading strategy, and then you can get a benefit on the premium as a yield in b t. That's my understanding of it.

So that's on Testament today. Uh, looks like a strong team, so someone to. . And then last but not least, for the stacks, this is probably the most exciting for me. The hero team announced some big updates coming later this week. Some of them might be a little longer, but the big ones are coming. They're on Testnet right now, and they should be lost on maiden net by the end of the week.

So they're integrating Bitcoin, native Bitcoin into the hero wallet. So now you can send and receive Bitcoin from all supported Bitcoin addresses. There's like three or four main varieties and they're all supported Hero [00:11:00] Testnet right now may net coming soon. Second, they're gonna allow sending BTC to your dot btc, so you can use your Bs b n S name to send him receive Bitcoin and not have to copy and paste and send, and hopefully it's going to the right wallet.

You'll just. . And then finally they're adding Ordinals support directly in the wallet. So you'll be able to spin out a tap root address, inscribe something, and then have it sent in that little collection. And you can see your stacks and fts and your ordinals all in one place. And one more thing they announced is something they call Bitcoin Web three, which is a portal that will showcase all the things in your wallet on a nice clean webinar.

So kind of like how you might go to gamma io and they have the showcase section where you can put certain NFTs on your page. And if you go to gamma io slash a username, I think that's how [00:12:00] it works. Uh, you'll see the ones that that person put as their favorite NFTs. So we, something like that where you'll go to a certain domain and it, it'll showcase your Ordinals and your Stacks NFTs side by side and a beautiful layout.

So, Huge. Huge, huge. Uh, finally, finally, you know, I've been in stacks for a year and a half now. It's really starting to feel like a Bitcoin layer and not just, uh, you know, alternative coin that is attached to Bitcoin in a unique way. So I always believed in the vision, but uh, now it's really coming to life, so it's exciting to see.

So shout out to all the Stack Debs working super hard behind the scenes to bring it all to. . All right. Jumping into lightning, which is crazy cuz lightning has been the thing I talked the most about for the past few months. Really. Cause that's where most of the action's been happening. And now it's more on stacks and Bitcoin, so let's fucking go.

Um, but yeah, some interesting things on lightning capacity [00:13:00] hitting all time high, a new, all-time high. So there was 5,507 BTC is the latest peak I saw. Uh, so that's exciting. And then some other things I saw across the board, mash, which is a browser extension that lets you, it's a wallet for one, but two, it allows builders to add a small piece of JavaScript code and they can token gate or block certain things unless you pay.

A lightning invoice. So if I wanna hide my email, unless you pay 5 cents or lock a whole page of content, um, unless you pay, you know, 25 cents, like go see with the New York Times or Business Insider, they'll say, you can't read this article unless you pay us, you know, 10 bucks a month for a BS subscription.

It's like, I don't wanna pay 10 bucks for your subscription. I want the one article, let me pay 25 cents and just read it. So mash. allowed you to block certain parts of content, but they didn't have a full [00:14:00] page, uh, product that you can like lock a whole page and have it unlock. Now they do so with this new functionality.

Uh, and when you have the browser extension, it's dead simple. You don't gotta pull your phone out, you're not scanning anything, you're just clicking a button and it's gonna pull some stats out of your wallet that you've stored. You just treat it like a hot wallet. You know, you put five bucks in there that can treat you for a while because these things are so cheap and the transaction fees are so low.

Mash what they call, uh, page revealers. That was just announced. So super, super hype. I'm very excited for lightning, really as an extension in the browser. I think that's where it's gonna be very useful, uh, in the real world for payments. But a button that can click connected to a hot wallet, that to throwaway money, I think it's gonna be huge.

All right, uh, next up dams, which is the Noster Twitter cl. , they have been continuing heavy lightning integration inside the app. They're, they're really kind of buddy-buddy. [00:15:00] And soon they'll allow tipping stats directly on posts inside dams. So you're just scrolling through Twitter and if you wanna tip someone a penny for that cool post.

that that'll be there. So I think there's uh, some very interesting things going on between dams and Twitter. Cause dams is doing the things that really could set Twitter apart when it comes to these macro payments and integrating lightning. All right. On that same, on that same tip, kind of typing lightning to something that's already existing.

Wordle was that game that went crazy last year. Uh, they now have a version with Noster and Lightning called cattle. where you can earn some B T C for playing this game that I've never played, but everyone goes crazy for. All right, and then last on the lightning list. Breeze is a startup that raised a bunch of money recently and they're trying to build lightning as a service.

So they're making it dead simple to [00:16:00] offer lightning across. Like entity or product you might need. They just launched their SDK to, for de developers to make it dead simple, to integrate lightning in a non-custodial way into your application. . So it's powered by block stream's green light behind the scenes.

And I believe this is a hosting service that abstracts most of the hard parts with running a lightning node and allows you to just connect some API endpoints and, uh, but it's still run in a non-custodial way as far as the end user goes. So pretty cool balance of, you know, both things that people want.

Um, so yeah, that's, that's super cool to see. I'm excited to see more of this stuff get taken off the shoulders of developers as far as like learning new tech and they can just plug in things and make the payment rails better and better and better. So, very, very cool. Alright, last two r s k and Blockstream.

Uh, R s k Sovereign. [00:17:00] Had a huge rebrand. So if you haven't been following my, my, uh, podcast for too long, sovereign, I talk about a lot with rsk cuz it's really the biggest thing on R S K. It's the biggest defi protocol across the Bitcoin ecosystem. And, uh, they just announced their huge rebrand, so the website's been totally revamped.

And with that rebrand, they announced a new Bitcoin backed stablecoin called Dollar. D l l r. And so it's decentralized censorship resistant, backed by Bitcoin. Uh, it's over collateralized, so it's, it's safe in that way. Uh, they have a whole blog post about it. I won't go into too much detail here. You can check that below if you're interested.

All right. And then last but not least, Blockstream. So couple updates from Blockstream. Uh, Adam back posted a Twitter thread laying out some of his thinking and some math on how he believes that Bitcoin could get to a 200 trillion market [00:18:00] cap by 2032, which if that's not bullish, I don't know what the heck is.

Uh, so you can check out that Twitter thread. and then the Jade Wallet, which is their hardware wallet. It's also very cheap. It's like $70. Uh, they have a new firm firmware upgrade, which brings some small to medium sized kind of quality of life upgrades. Um, things like faster passphrase entry, a new wallet login sequence.

So you can switch wallets much faster if you wanna hold multiple. Some new workflow to sign messages with QR codes and a few others. So cool to see all this good, good stuff on Bitcoin. I'm starting to get winded, so I'm gonna jump off now, but let me hear your thoughts. Drop. Drop the comments below if you're on YouTube or hit me up on Twitter at jake blockchain.

Uh, if you're listening to this on the podcast format and you're not listening on Fountain, [00:19:00] what the heck are you doing? Just do it. If you're a coiner, you gotta be using fountain. Integrates with lightning, you can send me some love. You want to, no pressure, but please do it. And yeah, so, or Noosa is crazy.

Bitcoin is popping again, the maxes are dead and uh, yeah. So we'll just keep on building the, starting to feel like it's not a bear market anymore. So super exciting times. Yeah. That's all I got. Love y'all. Till next time.