E96: This Week in Bitcoin for October 21st, 2022 (Bitcoin, Lightning, Stacks, RSK, Liquid)

[00:00:00] :  what happened this week in Bitcoin, that's the question. We've got some Bitcoin mining related news, a couple of interesting things and lightning a prominent company startup in rsk got some pretty good funding and a bunch of stack stuff went down so without further ado what is up you beautiful people welcome back to the built on Bitcoin podcast will recover everything going on in the stacks ecosystem. I am your humble host, Jacob Brown, but just see me on the interwebs as jake Blockchain and this is this week in Bitcoin episode. So as the name suggests, I'm going to talk about what I saw across Bitcoin and the four or five major players Bitcoin main chain lightning stacks Rsk liquid and break it down for you. So without further ado let's jump right in starting with Bitcoin proper. First things up, the Guinness Book of World Records now has a crypto section titled Crypto Mania. In the 2023 edition of the book, they have some stuff led to crypto bit corners in there. It's now recognized as the first globally decentralized crypto asset so that's a flex uh and also in there as the first country to accept crypto as legal tender so that's pretty tight. Alright, next up in Bitcoin land, the C. T. O of walmart was on an interview and mentioned that crypto payments will play a major role in the way that consumers transaction in the future so some of the biggest retailers companies in the world are looking at the infrastructure change that's gonna happen as crypto walls over time. So more and more bullish on Bitcoin and then the last thing I saw in Bitcoin land is the Bitcoin Mining Council released their report. So this is a collective sailors part of it. But it's a bunch of big mining companies and industry people that break down and kind of dispel myths about Bitcoin mining and so they dropped their quarter three report some notable stats. 59% Of the power comes from a sustainable power mix, so pretty sustainable. And that's up. Mining efficiency is up 23% year over year. And now that he has gone to 2.0 and the merge, Bitcoin accounts for 99% of all hashing power globally. So it's really the only player in the game. Although I will say Eric Wall posted a tweet thread talking about how this this stat is kind of misleading because hashing algorithms are not apples to apples comparisons. So makes sense. Like the basic idea is if a hashing algorithm is addition, like five plus 5, 10 plus 10, that's much easier than if you're doing multiplication or maybe multiple uh derivations of that. So it's like this number of times that number divided by two. Each hashing algorithm is actually more and more energy intensive. So the algorithm does matter. So just something to know. All right, next up we're gonna jump into stacks and before I jump in a quick word from my sponsor, We all know Bitcoin is for the innovators. 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Start building on Bitcoin today, go to start dot stacks dot org to start learning and building today. All right, thank you to the Foundation as always, let's jump in to what happened to stacks and there was a ton going on right now, stack was absolutely on fire right now. So the big 11 of the first big ones is Alex, which is the biggest defy player on stacks, announced their stacks, bridge. It's live now on test net. And this allows you to bridge us dc from two stacks or vice versa. So there's currently not a ton of influence capital into stacks, mainly because most of it revolves around the stx token and if you don't want to hold that token for whatever reason, then it's really hard to get other sources into it unless you're gonna buy an exchange. But even then, most of the exchanges don't carry anything besides the stx token. So most of the stables currently on stacks and even the BtC derivative, it's really hard to find other exchanges. So now, just through the simple bridge, you can connect your meta mask, wallet or wallet connect and your hero wallet and bridge U S D C, which is the biggest stable coin into stacks and they're starting with US D. C. But the bridge is a primitive, so they're going to bring more and more assets in overtime. So super, super bullish for stacks to get more inflow into the ecosystem, which is good for everything. So that's huge. Um, can't be understated. Next up another Test net, it's definitely a building market right now. But zest protocol is now live on Test net if you haven't been following zest there inside the trust machines company, which is a company that is funding and building Bitcoin applications in house also doing some open source funding as far as I know, but this is one of the first applications now coming out to the public and it is under collateralized Bitcoin lending and borrowing protocol mainly for institutional buyers. So if you're a Bitcoin holder you can provide your Bitcoin for uh yield and if you want to borrow for mining purposes or some other reason you can go in and get underwritten and there'll be some kind of a process that happens there, you can get under collateralized loans on Bitcoin and it's pretty much, I think as far as I know, it's not custodial on the entire process. So it uses a DLC for part of it or hash time locked contract. Um and then smart contracts on the clarity side and stack side that can read liquid state. So using some of the stuff has been development for stacks for awhile is now starting to come to fruition and used in the actual production. So that's pretty dope. And then last on the stack side, Mark Hendrickson, who was one of the product leads at Hero. Um he announced the twitter thread saying the hero team is now officially working on adding Bitcoin integration into the hero wallet. So for all this time stacks has been talking about how it's built on Bitcoin connected to Bitcoin trying to unleash Bitcoin but the Hero wallet can only hold stacks and all this kind of like sip 10 sip nine uh digital assets. Bitcoin is not gonna become a first class citizen in stacks with the hero wallet. So that's super exciting and they're talking about being able to make it super easy to do swaps inside the wallet. So big ec, two stacks or from different assets into a stable coin. That's coming to alright. And then actually last but not last last, last least is the stacks pre accelerator. The Web three startup Lab is currently accepting applications. So if you want to build a stack startup and early in the process, you're not ready to go fundraise just yet. Maybe it's still an idea or you're very early or you need some help. Maybe your design guy and you need technical help or vice versa. The Web startup lab is a pretty good place to get the help you need. Um, so yeah, applications are open. You can check it out at Web three startup lab dot IO now let's jump in to lightning. There's a couple things I saw in lighting this week. Z B D is a company that is building lightning integrations for gamers. They're building like a whole suite of SDK tools to make it super, super easy to integrate lightning into your games and kind of bring in Bitcoin and Web three, uh, this amazing, super fast lightning payment rail. And as they've been building, I guess they've been finding parts of the kind of like tech stack that they wish existed, but don't. And so they've been building stuff in their spare time and they don't really fit into the CBD full suite of things. And so they're just releasing a bunch of tools as open source and so it's called no big deal nbD dot wtf. You can go there and check out some of the nuanced tools they've been building across Bitcoin and a heavy emphasis on lightning. So it could be some stuff you find useful if you're a dev. Uh, they're mostly lightning lightning focused, but they're all open source. So pretty cool to see a giant company uh, you know, trying to execute bring lightning forward and build their business. Also give back by paying, you know, these are employees on the clock, they're getting paid, they got their salary and they're going to open source stuff in their spare time. So it's kind of like the google 80 20 time looks like that, but open source. So pretty dope. Alright. And the last for lightning I saw there's something called Ln spite, which is a tool, it's now on git hub. I'll drop the links to most of the stuff in the description below, but it's a tool meant to exploit an attack lightning network. So it gives you tools to find avenues where Attackers could potentially uh, you know, cause havoc and make the network stronger last but not least Rsk sovereign sovereign raised a pretty big round $5.4 million from investors to bring defi to Bitcoin that much faster. They've been questioning lately with their zero protocol, which is you lock up Bitcoin and you take out a zero interest alone meant a stable coin and you can go spend it as you wish. Uh so they raise some money to bring out some more functionality through this bear market. So that's it. There's, I don't see anything on liquid. Uh I still haven't found a good source to get in the weeds about what's going on over there. Their twitter account is mostly just add them back and different people who blocks from going to conferences and giving talks. So it's hard to tell what they've been working on. There's some in the weed stuff that kind of feels almost like a bit coin op tech newsletter, which I just don't understand what it means. So I'll just point you to the Bitcoin object newsletter or their twitter if you want to check out what blocks was working on. But yeah that is it for this week in Bitcoin. I am your host, Jacob Brown and uh yeah, if you, if you want to support the podcast listening to this on fountain. If you don't know, fountain is it's a lightning and enabled podcast player and in the app you can send lightning btc to your wallet in the app and then stream sats by the minute to me or send me a boost which is just like a one time tip, I appreciate it. And uh yeah, so that's it. I'll see you guys in the next episode piece. Welcome to build on Bitcoin things on, but I'll be figure out a way to make it out, make it out.