This Week in Bitcoin (February 22nd, 2023)

An Ordinal startup has been acquired. Things are maturing quickly.

What is up you beautiful people!

I'll make you a promise. I won't talk about Ordinals this week. Just kidding. But first. Shoutout to The Stacks Foundation for sponsoring this podcast. If you want to get started building on Stacks and push the mission forward of a user-owned internet with Bitcoin as the base layer. Check the links below. Learn Clarity: https://start.stacks.org/ Learn more about Stacks: https://stacks.co/ Apply for a grant: https://stacks.org/grants

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

Bitcoin

The lines are getting blurred. There are ordinals updates in both the Bitcoin and Stacks section. I can't tell where one ends and begins. If they built on Stacks first, I'm calling them as such. The below are Bitcoin originals.

  • Ordswap is one of the first places to buy and sell Ordinals that isn't happening in the DMs. You can list, purchase and inscribe Ordinals from this website. Pretty snazzy look as well.

  • A new report has come out on Bitcoin mining showing that around 52% of mining hashrate is powered by sustainable energy.

  • Mining hit a new ATH total hash rate of 345M TH/s on February 21st, 2023.

  • 440,000 addresses now hold a non-zero amount. Probably driven a lot by Ordinals.

  • OrdinalHub has been acquired by Luxor Mining. This is one of the first acquisitions in the Ordinal space. Cool to see this from the mining company that was early to jump on the Ordinal train. (Shoutout Nick)

  • Finally, Nos-FT is a web wallet that allows you to receive, store, and SEND your inscriptions to taproot addresses. This connects to your Nostr key. Check it.

The Ordinals hype has died down a little bit if you are looking at the mempool. I'll be keeping close tabs on the latest here.

Stacks

The Bitcoin L2 thesis is coming to life quickly.

  • The Xverse Bitcoin wallet now supports Ordinals! With the latest update, you can now handle almost all parts of the inscription process within the wallet. Paying your fees, sending to a Taproot address, and viewing your inscription can all be done via the chrome extension. This is live on both the browser and mobile versions of the wallet!

  • The Hiro Wallet was also updated this week and now supports receiving ordinals and paying your inscription fees with BTC in the wallet. Check it.

  • NeoSwap has also jumped into the Ordinals innovation. NeoSwap lets you remove friction in trading NFTS and find trades using AI that would otherwise be impossible. Over the last week they integrated a way to swap Ordinals. It doesnt appear to be fully trustless at this time, but there is work going on to crack that problem. This Twitter Space is a great place to learn about the latest.

  • sBTC development is well underway. They are aiming for a mainnet launch sometime around September. This is being built in public, You can checkout the GitHub to track all the work going on.

Bitcoin builders have achieved an insane amount in the past 2-3 weeks.

Lightning

The first company using Web5 is now live.

  • Zion V2 has officially launched. Zion is a new kind of social network powered by Lightning and the new Web5 decentralized identity standard. The mission is to make a truly censorship-resistant network with value exchange built throughout. I tried the V1 and left unimpressed. Should be worth checking out the latest version.

  • Voltage Cloud introduces Flow 2.0. This is a new Lighting service for channel operators that allows you to get liquidity into a channel, when you need it. What they call "Just-in-time" liquidity. The goal is to make managing a channel an expereince of setting and forgetting. This is currently on testnet.

  • Bored? Zaplife.lol lets you see zaps (Lightning tips) flowing across Nostr in real-time.

RSK

I've said it before. DeFi on Bitcoin is the next bull run driver.

  • Rootstock has just released a new BTC bridge protocol called RIF Flyover. This trust-minimized bridge acts as a trustless liquidity provider and allows BTC/RBTC to flow between Bitcoin mainchain and Rootstock. They mention in the article the average exchange takes about 12 minutes. Check out the details at the link above.

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

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