What is up you beautiful people!

I'm sensing some bear market blues and down moods as we enter into 2023. No more of that shit! Let me give you your weekly dose of exciting things happening around Bitcoin. The more I search and find these updates, The more bullish I get.Bitcoin is so obvious it hurts.

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 Bitcoin price is going up, but we don't talk about price here.

• Marco Falke was awarded a grant to continue working on Bitcoin Core. Marco is one of six people in the world who have access to the Bitcoin Core GitHub. The grant was provided by OkCoin and Paradigm Capital (Started by the co-founder of Coinbase). This will allow Marco to dedicate full time to Bitcoin Core and sustain himself. Most dont know that the job of maintainers is a volunteer position and they work through the generous support of the community.

• As mentioned above, the Bitcoin price is doing things.

• Electric Capital released their yearly developer report. Some interesting stats on Bitcoin. There are 300 full time devs, and 900+ monthly active devs building on Bitcoin. Though the number of of monthly active devs is largely flat from a year ago. Ill let you determine if that info is bullish or bearish.

• Bisq, The p2p Bitcoin exchange updates to v1.9.9. Hop, skip and a jump to the big 2.0.

Thanks all I saw this week on the Bitcoin mainchain front.

Stacks

In crypto, We're not used to stability. So what is this about a new stable-swap pool coming to Stacks?

• ALEX in partnership with Arkadiko just released a stable swap between USDA and xUSD. Now users can swap between those two assets much easier. It also has the benefit of helping stablecoins to keep their peg. On ETH, Curve exists and is absolutely massive! ($6B in deposits and $10B monthly volume) Nice to see this come to Stacks.

• What does the Electric Capital report say for Stacks? The report tracks over 160k GitHub's to track developer activity in the crypto industry. What did we find? Stacks is the most active developer ecosystem on Bitcoin for the second year in a row. Take that with a grain of salt as RSK and Liquid aren't tracked, and it's not clear if Lightning is rolled into the "Bitcoin" category or not. The stats report there are 41 full-time devs on Stacks, and roughly 112 monthly active devs.

• Sigle has released their newsletter feature! You can now write from your decentralized blog directly into peoples inboxes.

• IMO Stacks is the biggest opportunity in crypto right now. There's so many things going right if you're time horizon is a year+. If you're hyped on the potential like I am and want to learn Clarity to take advantage. Setzeus, a prominent engineer in the Stacks ecosystem just dropped a course to turn absolute beginners into productive developers. Check out 100 Days of Clarity.

Lightning

Music, AI, Movies, Podcasting. Lightning is getting integrated into everything.

• Lightning-powered Podcasting app Fountain released version 0.6 which brings a new activity view, the ability to fund your account with a debit card, and a bunch of UI/UX updates.

• Lightning.Movie lets you stream movies directly to your computer by paying a simple 1K Lightning invoice.

• FaerieAI lets you use a version of ChatGPT with a pay-per-use model where you purchase tokens by paying a Lightning Invoice. One thing I like about this over ChatGPT. You can choose if you want to use the model optimized for text (text-davinci-003) or for code (code-davinci-002).

• Wavlake has officially launched its music platform. They want to bring the power back to artists with open publishing standards and Lightning integrated so fans can directly tip their favorite indie artists. Check it out.

• Jack Dorsey puts up a 120m Sat bounty for the best GitHub replacement using Nostr. 👀

• Cash App's commitment to Bitcoin continues. They have rolled out full Lightning-functionality across the app to all US users (minus NY...losers) The rest of the globe coming soon. Thanks Jack.

• Fold released their API. Making it easier then ever for developers to integrate a Bitcoin rewards program into their applications.

RSK

Making progress to bring the peg back.

• RSK upgrade Hop 4.0.1 just hit mainnet. This is a upgrade that lays the foundation to bring the BTC PowPeg Peg-out back. This has been down for a couple months due to a change in Bitcoin Core. With this upgrade, That solution should finally be ready and once a Bitcoin mining pool accepts the updated transaction script, things should get back to normal.

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

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