TWIB 2/22

[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 the Bitcoin ecosystem. I am your humble host, as usual, Jacob Brown, which you'll see me around, mostly on Twitter, at Jake blockchain. And this is a this week in Bitcoin episode.

So we're talking about everything I saw across Bitcoin main chain, lightning stacks, and R S K. Nothing on blockchain this week. So without further ado, let's just jump right in. Starting with Bitcoin main chain, which the biggest topic of the week continues to be ordinals and uh, it's weird because I've been following stacks for so long and seeing the builders there, it's hard to tell where a Stacks startup.

Ends and an ordinal Bitcoin startup begins. So the ones I'm choosing here have no history on stacks. They're just focused on Bitcoin [00:01:00] and I dropped some more stacks, updates in the stack section. So what happened with Ordinals and Bitcoin? Uh, or swap? I haven't. Shouted them out on the podcast yet, and they've been building a marketplace and a way to trustless swap your ordinals between people.

So if we go to or swap.io, uh, you could check it out. They're one of the first places that I've seen that has, uh, marketplace like functionality. Haven't used it myself, but uh, It's crazy that we've only been in here for like maybe three, four weeks tops, and there's so much already happening. So check out or swap to IO if you want to buy some sweet or sell some sweet descriptions.

Uh, next up. , we got our first ordinal startup that's been acquired. So Ordinal Hub was acquired by Luxor Mining, which is one decently sized miner. And uh, if you looked at any of the Twitter spaces that were going [00:02:00] on over the past couple weeks, you might have saw a guy named Nick in there. He works at Luxor and he's been super heads down building and helping people.

Do this description thing, doing bulk descriptions, this kind of thing. Uh, and between him and Luxor, uh, they've been really trying to find this as a new revenue stream. And so over the weekend they acquired Ordinal Hub, which currently is an explorer, and they have a whole roadmap they're building out.

You can check out ordinal hub.com. There's a change log, uh, to see what, what they're working on. But, uh, cool to see, I mean, less than a month that we have our first ordinal focus startup being acquired. So props to that team. Uh, that's super cool. Next up, there was a new report that came out on Bitcoin mining, which showed that the current mix of sustainable energy that's used by the hash rate is sitting around 52% is what they showed.

So, um, yeah, [00:03:00] always a good sign to see that number trend upward.

on that same note of Bitcoin mining, we saw a new all-time high hash rate of 345 million Tara Hashes as of February 21st. So that number continues to just skyrocket, which again shows that there's a long lead time between building to getting infrastructure on the network, but also, uh, technology is getting better and better.

Less energy for more hashes. It's just gonna go up. And then a couple more small updates. For Bitcoin main chain, there is now 440,000 addresses that hold a non-zero amount of Bitcoin. So probably a good chunk of that's driven by ordinances. I wonder if, because of the taper addresses and they're holding one sat, that's gonna make that number sky rocket.

It doesn't really represent people, but just [00:04:00] wallets, uh, but still worth with noting. And then last but not least, for Bitcoin main chain, uh, there's a new web wallet that connects to your Nostra pub key called N os ft. XYZ site looks super simple. Uh, they're working on that, but allows you to connect your Nasr key with the Albe extension and you can receive your descriptions, store them and send them from this wet wallet, which that's from one of the big blockers right now is that nobody's quite locked in with the sending feature yet, so very.

so that's why I saw for Bitcoin main chain. now we'll jump into stacks, but first a quick word from our sponsor.

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All right. Thank you to my sponsor as always. So, jumping into stacks, uh, quite a bit, going on a lot of the stacks. Billers have jumped on the Ordinals train super, [00:06:00] super aggressively, and some of the biggest innovations have come on the Waller front. So experts now has ordinal support. on both mobile and desktop, which is fantastic.

I think that they're one of the first ones to have mobile, uh, functionality. So from your phone, you can now create a wallet. You can receive your inscriptions, you can go to gamma or ordinal spot, and you can mint do the, that whole description side from your phone. So super, super great for that. Uh, team has been crushing it.

You can't send yet, but that's coming very soon. On that same note, the hero team integrated Bitcoin into the wallet, and they also added ordinal support. So you can now receive and you can pay your inscription fees with a minting service like Gamma or Ordinals bot from the Hero Wallet. And again, sending is coming soon, but not quite ready yet.

And then one of the big innovations, uh, Neos Swap, which has started on stacks, [00:07:00] went to Polygon and then Solana, which they've been innovating super fast. The roadmap is super aggressive, and that team is top, top, top tier. Uh, they have been jumping on the Ordinals train as well, so they're doing this kind of, uh, not trustless.

but they're doing Ordinals auctions on the stack side where it gives you some kind of token, I believe, currently. And then with that token, it's a claim on an inscription on the Bitcoin main chain side, but they're also working on solutions to try and make that more trustless. But if you haven't used Neos Swap highly, they highly recommend, uh, probably the future of how we trade.

If I'm, if I'm being honest, it's such a weird new experience, but it's so much better than. Not better. It's different, but it, it has a lot of efficiencies that are better than a regular marketplace, like open C or whatever. So check that out. Links are always in the description below. And then last but not least, uh, one of the [00:08:00] big things happening on stack right now is this Bitcoin peg in peg out solution, which they call Sbtc.

And so the target is somewhere around September for a main net. and it's already, that's gonna come up real quick. It's February now, almost. , and if you wanna follow the GitHub, you can see just how much work is going into the engineering side. So I'll drop that below if you wanna be on the bleeding edge, see what's going on with that.

Um, I'll be following that super closely. I think it's one of the biggest unlocks to come, not just the stacks, but to Bitcoin more broadly, because the ecosystem inside stacks is by far the most mature in the Bitcoin, Bitcoin ecosystem. So if they figured this out, could. Very, very, very big, so super excited for Stack Builders who've pivoted so quickly and they're just absolutely crushing.

All right, moving on to lightning. Uh, a few things that I [00:09:00] saw pop up. One super big one, Zion launched V2 of their messaging social network platform. So Zion is powered by Lightning and they're trying to build a truly decentralized and censorship resistant social media network. So, I don't know. I used the V1 product and it was a little clunky.

You had to spin up your own lightning server and then you could tip, sat some, these kind of things. But it felt very, there was a, uh, a lot of friction on the front end to get into the service. So I haven't used V2 yet. Uh, It looks fantastic on the website. It also uses the web five d i D standard. So this new decentralized identity is not connected to a blockchain like a B n S name.

It's some other different standard that you can claim. Uh, they're one of the first ones to use this new standard. So if you're curious about that, highly recommend check out Zion v2, [00:10:00] which again links below. And then another big innovation that happened just this morning, uh, voltage, which is a infrastructure provider for lightning nodes.

They announced something called Flow 2.0, which is a new so solution, pardon me, to solve the issue of. Liquidity inside different lightning channels. So I haven't deep dived into lightning, but there's this process of opening and closing channels and they get routed across the network, and that's how you're able to have this super frictionless and cheap way to get payments from one place to another.

But something happens where liquidity will get low in a channel. You'll have to get more liquidity into it by paying someone off and then them sending you stats to that channel. So this new Flow 2.0 is what they're calling just in time liquidity, where if it rolls out perfectly, which it's on Testnet right now, uh, you [00:11:00] will never have to think about liquidity again.

It just says send it, forget it feature, and it'll be watching your channel. And whenever we do more liquidity, it'll send it to you just in time and you're after the races. So again, there's a lot of nuance there and I'm pretty ignorant of the nuances of lightning. watching crypto Twitter, especially lightning Twitter.

Uh, they're going crazy for it, so I assume this is a pretty big deal. And then last but not least, on the lightning front, if you want to see how lightning and Noster are kind of playing nice together in your board, you got some free time, you can check out Zap life.lol. , which is a site that just has a running tally of all the zaps flowing across the Noster network in real time.

So just a single page and it shows this person sent that person that many sets. So pretty simple, simple site. Not that useful, but you get to see how, uh, noster is being used in like a real activity sense. [00:12:00] All right. And then last but certainly not least, R S K released a new B T C bridge protocol called the RIF F Flyover Protocol.

And this is a new trust minimized bridge that allows you to peg in B T C onto rootstock in a super, super fast way. So basically the protocol acts like a liquidity provider and you can peg in B T C and get it on R S K. The post said about 12 minutes, which is super, super fast. So, uh, I'm not a bridge expert.

I didn't deep dive into the article, but, you know, all these things are good for Bitcoin. The more tech and the easier it is to use your Bitcoin, especially in Defi where currently R s K holds the crown for biggest bitcoin defi platform. If you're not using Ethereum as a, as a. Acceptable answer has to be in the Bitcoin [00:13:00] ecosystem.

Sovereign is currently the biggest platform. And so now you have, if you wanna use sovereign solutions, you have one more bridge option coming online to Trustless Bridge in your btc. So that is what I saw this week. Uh, super, super exciting. It really feels like the bear market is pretty much over, at least on the Bitcoin side.

I wonder how the East people feel, but. That's it for this week. I love y'all. I'll see you next week. Peace.

Welcome to Built on Bitcoin. I know the things going on with, I'll be right. Wait now trying to figure out a way to make it out. Make it out. Cause I don't think about everything going.