What is up you beautiful people!

This week the biggest topic of discussion has been Bitcoin NFTs. It's been a divisive topic. So I got some resources related to that for you. In addition, some goodies from Lightning and Stacks in the mix. Let's go!

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Now lets jump in and get updated on the latest. Starting with Bitcoin mainchain.Catch the podcast on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or Fountain,

Bitcoin

Might as well change this section title to "Ordinals". That's all the talk on Bitcoin rn.Some quick stats on Ordinals:Total minted on-chain: 100k+Maxi's angered: 1,069 (Basically all of them)

• Ordinals.com is the source to see all the things that have been inscribed on Bitcoin. If you haven't been paying attention. Ordinal Theory is a way to inscribe data directly onto a single satoshi that is stored directly on Bitcoin nodes. Most NFT data is stored in a separate storage space (Typically IPFS) and the blockchain points to the image. Ordinals are a much stronger way to save digital artifacts, forever.

• Bitcoin developers have jumped on the Ordinal train and two separate teams have launched dead-simple tools to inscribe your own Ordinal NFTs. OrdinalsBot was the first to market (~12% of all inscriptions came from here), and a few days later the Gamma team launched their Ordinals minting service.

• I'm also seeing a TON of devs creator wallet and view tooling around ordinals. Not uch have gone live just yet so tune in to the next edition. I expect as least a couple options to be live by then.

• In other news. The SEC has directly gone after staking and crypto exchange Kraken. They have deemed their staking product an unregistered security and have fined them $30 million. This has sent shockwaves through the industry. As usual, The biggest winner here is Bitcoin and DeFi which can't be stopped. GG Gary G.

• Final big news of the week for Bitcoin proper. Interlay released the whitepaper for their V2 version of its decentralized Bitcoin protocol. V1 was the first-ever trustless bridge for Bitcoin. V2 aims to make DeFi as easy as using an ATM with full swap, borrow, and lending functionality attached to deep liquidity. I haven't deep-dived into this project yet but I keep hearing about it's founder. Watch this space.

Bitcoin is an exciting space to watch on many fronts. Bitcoin block space is the most precious asset in crypto. The use cases for inscribing data on that blockchain to be stored for as long as Bitcoin lasts are huge. JPEGs are just the beginning.

Stacks

Ordinals have been the biggest news to happen to Bitcoin in AWHILE. Thank god cause it was getting kinda boring. Now that they are out in the wild. Builders are doing what they do best and creating new tooling for these Bitcoin NFTs.

• Stacks developer Hank created Ordyswap. A trustless way to swap Ordinals between two parties using STX as the currency. This can be a big unlock as the tech matures (and $sBTC launches). It's not wild to think Stacks could be the main way people interact with Ordinals.

• Innovation continues with .btc BNS domains. You can now connect your Lightning Address to your .btc name and receive payments directly to a Lightning wallet. Once connected, payments sent to *yourname*@btc.us will redirect to the Lightning Address connected to the account. Bullish on BNS.

• Hermetica Finance goes live on Testnet. Bringing Bitcoin-focused trading and yield products to Stacks, starting with a covered call options writing strategy.

• Maybe the biggest news of all. The Hiro Systems team (creators of the Hiro wallet on Stacks) have announced they are releasing Bitcoin integration THIS week, and with it will come Ordinals inscriptions integration. You'll be able to pay for, receive, and view all your inscriptions in one place.

Name a more innovative Bitcoin layer right now.... I'll wait.

Lightning

For the first time in months, Lightning the most interesting thing in Bitcoin. Still lots of interesting things happening 👇

• Lightning network capacity hits a new all-time high of 5,507 BTC! LFG

• Mash unveils "Page Revealers". Allowing you to insert a tiny piece of Javascript code and gate entire pages on your site behind a Lightning payment. This might be the cure to those damn Business Insider paywalled articles that want you to sign up for a monthly subsctiption. Now you can pay a few pennies and read them. 🙌

• Damus continues to integrate heavily with Lightning. Soon you'll be able to earn sats directly on posts.

• Wordle, the biggest word game craze from yesteryear now has a version on Nostr with Lightning. Check it out.

• Lastly, Breez has announced their new Lightning-as-a-service SDK. Allowing developers to easily integrate Lightning into their apps with minimal setup. This is powered by Blockstream's Greenlight.

RSK

The biggest DeFi project on Bitcoin has some things to say.

• Sovryn has came into 2023 strong. They just announced a full rebrand of the website.

• They also announced a new Bitcoin-backed stablecoin called $DLLR. I won't bore you with the details here, Check out the announcement for full details.

Blockstream

$200 Trillion dollar market cap. His words, not mine.

• This isn't quite Blockstream news but the CEO (and Bitcoin OG of OG's) Adam Back posted a Twitter thread on how Bitcoin could reach a $200 trillion market cap in the next decade. Talk about bullish.

• The Blockstream Jade wallet got a new firmware upgrade. It brings a bunch of medium sized "quality-of-life" updates for the user experience.

• Blockstream released a proof-of-concept Options client to showcase some of the unique abilities of its new scripting language. Check out the blog post here.

• The Build on L2 community is officially open. You can join here to connect with devs and discuss topics around building new projects on Liquid and Lightning.

That's it for this week's edition.Don't forget to hug a Bitcoiner.-Jake

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