Welcome back to Bitcoin Summer

Hello Bitcoin Fam! Welcome back to the newsletter making sure your not falling behind on all the cool ish happening across Bitcoin.
This week we got light news for Bitcoin L1, and a TON of interesting things on Lightning, Stacks, and Rootstock.

Bitcoin

• Ready Layer 2 Bitcoin Pitch competition was announced. Win yourself some money just for pitching a great Bitcoin idea. Event kicks off August 19th but you can register right now.

• Bitcoin Mining FUD be damned. ESG has been a hot topic over the years as climate change fears intensify. This great report was put out today on the benefits Bitcoin offers to the ESG goals.

Ordinals

• Ordinals are dead.

Stacks

• BitSwap goes live. WTF is that? Awhile back an anonymous team launched something called Magic Protocol, a way to do atomic swaps between Bitcoin $BTC and Stacks $xBTC. But liquidity was a problem and it never launched. BitSwap is the first website with liquidity leveraging this tech. xBTC is a custodial version of Bitcoin that isn’t ideal, this will be very interesting once $sBTC launches.

• Hiro released their development roadmap for Q3. Engineering talent is being focused on the upcoming Nakamoto release of Stacks, Adding new features to platform.hiro.so, and strengthening Ordinals support.

• ALEX DeFi platform announced their decentralized launchpad for new tokens.

• sBTC is shaping up to be a huge release. If you want to track the development efforts in real-time, check out this GitHub board.

Lightning

• Geyser Crowdfunding platform integrated Zaps with Nostr. I still haven’t given Nostr a chance so I dunno what this means 🤷 Apparently its super easy to send Lightning BTC. You can more direct from the source.

• Mutiny Wallet released an update that makes multi-device access better and payments more reliable. We like.

Rootstock

• Sovryn announced a 7-day trading challenge. Win some cash monnnay just for using Bitcoin DeFi. (Caveat, you must be a $SOV staker)

• Sovyrn’s decentralized voting mechanism passed a controversial improvement proposal. Titled SIP-66. This SIP puts a pause on the Sovryn Zero ability to generate new loans.

Blockstream

• Blockstream Research released a blog on increasing Bitcoin security and privacy through some stuff I don’t understand. Check out the blog post.

Interesting podcast I enjoyed this week was mine :)

Thats it for this week.
Love yall!
-Jake