TWIB 3/8/23

[00:00:00] what is up? You beautiful =people-. Welcome back to the Built On Bitcoin podcast, where we cover everything going on across the Bitcoin ecosystem, focused on innovation. So we're talking to the builders. No price talk, none of that. Not number go up, just who's building. Cool shit. And I'm your humble host, Jacob Brown, which will see me around as Jake Blockchain.

And this is this week in Bitcoin episode. So we're covering everything I saw in the past week or so across Bitcoin, Lightning, Stacks, Rootstock, and Blockstream when I see stuff. So without further ado, we've got a jam packed one this week.

There's a bunch of ordinal stuff, not just the regular kind of art inscriptions, but some potential new use cases Coming to Ordinals, some stacks wallet updates, and some interesting lightning news, as well as a big update from RSK.. So without further ado, let's jump in and starting with.

Main [00:01:00] chain. So what did I see this week in Bitcoin Main chain, which a lot of this is ordinances related. The biggest part by far is Yu launched a collection called Twelvefold. So if you don't know Yuga, they are the owners of the board API Yacht Club brand. Biggest entity in NFTs by far. Huge, huge, huge on Ethereum really pushing the space forward.

And, uh, they wanted to test the waters with Bitcoin and this new ordinals thing. So they slapped together a pretty rudimentary, uh, website effort. And a lot of people had some beef around the way that they took custody, you know, understandable. But I think that the fact that they got a M V P out so fast and people bitted.

The end result was about 16 million in winning auctions for this 288 piece. Collection [00:02:00] is super, super bullish for Ordinals and this future of moving NFTs onto Bitcoin to be stored forever. So, People have all kinds of opinions. I think this is super net net positive. Uh, people are just thinking short term, but really cool to see.

You could get into the space and move so quickly. All right, next up. On the topic of Ordinals, but not in the art space. Uh, John Light, who you might know, I've covered him in the past. He's been on the show. Uh, he wrote a fantastic research paper on the state of Rollups on Bitcoin, and he put together a tweet thread showing how you could potentially have rollups on Bitcoin via ordinals.

So you can use Bitcoin as a data layer through inscriptions. Link it in the description below, but pretty interesting. And then within a week and a half or so of him tweeting that tweet [00:03:00] thread the team behind Celestia, which is a modular blockchain. I haven't looked into it, so I can't tell you too much about what Celestia is, but that team announced something called Roll Kit, which is a research MVP of bringing Rollups to Bitcoin in a real way.

So, Highly recommend if you wanna be at the forefront of Holly, what's gonna be the next like big exploration in Bitcoin over the next 12 months. That might be it. . All right. Next up, uh, Bitcoin Optech, which is like the newsletter if you want to be involved in what's going on at the lower levels of Bitcoin, Bitcoin core, this kind of thing.

Uh, it's very in the weeds, very nerdy, but it's the place to be if you wanna be watching about op codes and this kind of thing. Uh, , they're dropping a podcast, so they'll do more covering the same topics they already do with their weekly newsletter, but they'll be able to go more in depth and more nuanced with this podcast, and you can listen [00:04:00] on the go.

So, super. Uh, somebody, a Twitter account named Coin 360 put together a Bitcoin ecosystem map. You see these around Ethereum stacks, you know, whatever about all the different entities that exist on defi, NFTs trading, whatever it is. Bitcoin ecosystem is growing very fast, and they posted a ecosystem map about a week ago.

Looks pretty good, and then he posted one, two days ago and it's like three times the size. So, so much popping up. Uh, very, very, very exciting. All right, continuing on. It's all ordinals all day, baby. Uh, there's a new site called inscribe.news, which is what they're pushing forward as the Ordinal News standard, where you'll be able to, with a simple website, type in a title outta url, some description, and you can.

[00:05:00] Piece of news forever inscribed on the blockchain, which is kind of following in the same footsteps of the Genesis block where Satoshi put, uh, chancellor something, some, something, banks on the brink of failure. And it's like a time stamp. , which the chain already has, but also with the headline news to, you know, combine those two and make it vividly clear that this block happened on this day.

So inscribe.news can do that in the same way where you can post something that you think is noteworthy and no one cen, it's on nodes across the world. All right, two more big ones for, uh, Bitcoin main chain. Actually, one more, I'm gonna move one of these to the Stacks area, uh, ordinals Wallet. , which is one of the first ordinance wallets that launched, and they're also first now to creating the first trustless marketplace.

If we don't know, because Ordinals is so new, we're like 45 days into it really popping. [00:06:00] Uh, it's still super cumbersome to use. A lot of wallets still don't allow transfers. They're coming online in the past week or so, and marketplaces are super, super new. There's oros.market if you wanna put your ornal into an emblem.

and then you can trade it on eth. But doing it strictly on Bitcoin has been tricky without some kind of, uh, trusted third party. And so now, uh, there's these new things called psb ts. Actually, I'm not sure how new they are, but they're, they're coming to fruition and being used. These PSB ts are partially signed Bitcoin transac.

And so with the combo of these PSP Ts and Taproot, uh, you'll be able to create fully trusted marketplaces where you can list your ordinal and get paid in Bitcoin and it's, it's fully, uh, safe to use. So Ordinals Wallet was the first to market site looks pretty good too. So you could check it out@ordinalswallet.com.

Uh, use that wallet if you want, but also you can [00:07:00] hop into the marketplace and trade you some ordinal.

All right. Next up. Moving on to the stack side of things, which really is still largely Ordinals focused, but because these teams started as stack based teams, I give them their little section in the stack side. So Megapont. Which has been building NFT collections since October, 2021. They're pretty Stacks OGs. Kind of the blue chip on Stacks, super cool looking pixel. But what I think is so interesting about this is that they're a dev heavy team, and so they're not just launching an NFT collection.

They've been building some in-house tooling called Apollo behind the scenes. And with it, they used it to wallet capture, but also to make it as easy as possible for you to take custody of your Ordinal. And so if you go to Megapunks.com, they have this thing called Magic Bitcoin box, where when you own an [00:08:00] Ordinal and you minted it through ETH in this case. It gave you a PoP or a proof of purchase.

And with that proof of purchase NFT, you can then take it into the Megapunks Magic Bitcoin Box and you can choose, do you want, put it in an emblem vault, which is where. kind of like a multisig wallet where the private key of your ordinal is stored there, but it's in the emblem vault. You can't control it anymore.

You can go sell that emblem vault and then someone can open it and then get access to their ordinal. So you can choose to do that, or you can unwrap it if you will, and have the Ordinal sent directly to the Taproot-enabled wallet of your choice. So far it's the best experience I've seen to balance the friction that currently exists with Ordinals and making it as easy as possible, but also getting access to the state of liquidity that is across the different [00:09:00] ecosystems.

So, If you're trying to launch a collection, I might get in touch with the Megapont team cause they're building some pretty cool shit. All right, next up, I'm gonna take a quick break from Ordinals and jump into some defi stuff. So Arkadiko is a defi protocol on stacks. They allow you to lock up your stacks or xBTC and mint a stable.

and you can also tie in that locked collateral and put it into the stacking protocol. So it pays itself back. Super cool protocol. They released their 2023 roadmap things. They're working on top priority right now is being ready for the new Stacks upgrade, launching in less than two weeks. It changes the way stacking works a little bit.

So currently you a cycle is two weeks, but if once your amount of cycles is up, you're have to cool down for one cycle. So you can't be stacked for that cycle. With the new [00:10:00] upgrade, you can stack continuously, so they have to adjust the protocol and make that work. Uh, they're also working on updating a stable swap between USDA, which is their stablecoin and xUSD, which is a wrapped form of USDC.

There's a Stacks Bridge coming line pretty soon to be able to flow back and forth between stacks and eth for stablecoin, USDC in particular. So they wanna rework that swap to make it as efficient as possible, but also helps maintain the peg between USDA and USDC, and then one other thing they're working on is some kind of Oracle solution called the MPC Oracle, or a multi-party computation Oracle.

I don't know what that means, but if you wanna know more about that roadmap, it's in the description below. All right. back to Ordinals for a little bit. Xverse released an update. They now support ordinal transfers, so that's super exciting. The Hiro [00:11:00] Wallet also released and updated the same feature, so very, very cool.

It's crazy to see how teams went from, there was like almost no way to send your Ordinals three weeks ago to now. There's three or four walls to support it. and the Hiro Wallet team also announced bns name support in the Hiro wallet. So now you can send BTC or stacks, whatever assets directly to a .BTC name.

So if you hold, you know, builtonbitcoin.Btc, then you can type in that receipt, that send address, and it'll send the BTC to the correct wallet by querying. Bns name system, so very, very cool. You know, this is a big issue in Noster right now where you have to find someone's public key to make them a friend.

So discovery is super, super difficult. This makes it so much easier to send assets to the correct person.[00:12:00]

Next up, continuing on the b n s side, there's been a work in progress between Jeff and Hank from Mechanism. They're a team in stacks working on extending the use cases and functionality of the BNS name system. And they just dropped something called BNSx, which is allows you to hold more than.

BTC name or b n s name in a wallet. Currently it's one name per wallet. So if you wanna hold a bunch, you have to create a bunch of sub-accounts, which is annoying. With this B N S X upgrade, you can store a bunch in one wallet and you can also interact with contracts in a more interactive way, is my understanding.

Super early on this. Curious to see how it plays out, but if you wanna check it out, it's at dots.so so, uh, and you can check it out. All right. Last but not least, I think the biggest ordinals update that [00:13:00] I saw was from the Gamma team. So they launched a huge, huge, huge update with ordinals and collections.

So what does this let you do? You can launch your own collection from the Gamma Ordinals portal, and the way they're doing it is super, super smart. So what you'll do is you'll launch your collection. So you upload all your files, your, you know, thousand images, and then you set the criteria, metadata, title, price, whatever.

And then you launch the collection and you can have a mint page. And then the way it works is that the people paying for that piece, , they pay the Bitcoin at that time, and they're also paying the inscription fee at that time, so you don't have to frontload the collection by paying a bunch of money up front to make sure that those thousand pieces are inscribed and hopefully you get your money back.

This is a, you know, just in time kind delivery, so obviously it'll be slower for the person [00:14:00] buying. They won't get it immediately. But if there's a thousand pieces in that collection and you mint one of those thousand, you'll pay the the cost of the N F T. You'll pay the inscription fee, and then it will get sent to the blockchain at that time and then stored forever and you'll get custody of it.

So super cool. Super low, low lift way for collection creators to launch a collection with very little cost up front. You don't have to spin up a node or anything, so it's dead simple. Other cool thing is the usability side, so, mm-hmm. , the storing data on Blit Bitcoin is obviously super expensive.

They charge you per bite, so as the image gets bigger, it gets massively expensive. And so what they're doing is when you upload your collection, it'll create two files. It'll compress. One size and that will get sent when you're inscribing to keep your cost low. And then they'll keep the high-res file so that when [00:15:00] someone is viewing their ordinal on gamma, they'll see the high-res collection.

So on gamma.com you'll see the, the sexy image and in its full glory. But on the ordinal side, you'll still have a, you know, a pro, the provenance and this digital artifact on Bitcoin forever. And this is, , it'll be compressed to save the cost down, uh, for you as the scriber. So, huge, huge, huge. I'm very excited to see how this plays out as Als mature, especially when their marketplace comes out.

So, haven't heard any hard dates yet. Uh, they're hard at work, but word in the street is they're launching a fully trustless marketplace. That absent to everything that's happening on Ordinals, but also these collections that they now allow, you'll be able to trade those collections on day one with this new marketplace that's coming out and be fully trustless.

So TB D on that, we'll see. [00:16:00] All right, next up we've got lightning, but first quick word, my sponsor.

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thank you as always to my sponsor. All right. I got a couple lightning updates for you, which is actually interesting cuz in the past few months it's been lightning as like the majority of these update sections. And now with Ordinals going crazy, it's harder to find news. I don't know if the Lightning devs moved all all over to Ordinals, but there was a, a couple big updates.

So the first is Light Spark announced its first product, which is a, they partnered with a bank called Zappo, X A P O, and they're integrating Lightning with that bank's backend. So they're one of the first banks in the world to directly integrate with the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Pretty cool. If you haven't been following light speed.

Uh, a lot of it's from this guy David [00:18:00] Marcus, who's an OG in the payment space. He was in. He handled payments in crypto at Meta, and before that he was at PayPal. . So when he announced he was getting into the Bitcoin space with this new company called Lights Spark, uh, people kind of freaked out because apparently he, his name holds a lot of weight.

Uh, so people have been watching and seeing what he builds. And also he was able to hire, uh, traj, Girija Deja, obviously get his name wrong, but he is the, one of the co-creators of Lightning as well as submarine swaps. So this guy created some very pivotal tech that people use every day in Bitcoin.

And, uh, pretty early on he was scooped up to work inside Light Spark. So I think a lot of people are very bullish on what might come from this company and they're watching closely, and this is the first example of something they're, they've been working on, uh, behind the scenes. So very. And then next [00:19:00] T B D, which is one of the Bitcoin focused companies underneath the umbrella.

That is Jack Dorsey's Block announced another company, kind of like side company they're calling C equals, which is gonna be a lightning service provider, making it easier for businesses to integrate with the Lightning Network. They also announced that they'll be using Blocks balance sheet. to fund Bitcoin coming onto the Latin network.

So that's very, very bullish. Uh, it seems like the current capacity isn't causing too much headaches for the Latin network, but as it scales, we'll need more and more people to bring in big chunks of Bitcoin to make this thing work. So now we've got one big commitment from a heavily funded company in.

All right.

Last but not least, rsk, One small update, but big in its impact. Uh, RSK had [00:20:00] a hard cap limit up until recently on how much B T C could be pegged into the system via their proof of work peg, and that has since been lifted. So I, I'm assuming it was a security measure to make sure that people aren't sending in a huge amount of, of B T C and there was some kind of hack or something that would happen and it, it would just be catastrophic in its impact.

So, They had a cap for a while, uh, I'm assuming, to make sure the system was rock solid. They feel that it, it is now, and so that cap has been lifted, so you can deploy as much b c as you want into R S K and put it across all the defi protocols and whatnot that exist over there. So that is this week in Bitcoin.

It's mostly Ordinals, ordinals, ordinals, Bitcoin build it. Culture is back, baby. It feels good. It also feels weird to say that since I've only been in Bitcoin for like a year and a half, two years, but uh, , this feels like a big change. So [00:21:00] super fun to, to cover these things. I think we're just getting started.

Uh, as far as the energy goes, it feels like we're in a bull run right now. Like I'm just super hyped every day to watch all this stuff going on. So that's it for this week. I love y'all. See you allall. Peace.

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