What is up you beautiful people!

Welcome to 2023! Let's shed the old, negative, dead energy of the bear market that existed a week ago and get hyped about what's being built right now!

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

Bitcoin has hit teenage years.

• 14 years ago, on January 3rd 2009 the first ever Bitcoin transaction was submitted, and on January 9th it was officially mined. Netting Satoshi the first block reward of 50 BTC. It's pretty wild to think how much progress has been made in these 14 years. And because tech like this folllows a crazy adoption curve, the next 14 years are set to be even crazier!

• An old Bitcoin proposal gets a fresh influx of cash to bring Bitcoin layers to life. Paul Sztorc (The man behind drivechains and BIP300) has raised $3 million to bring some of these ideas to the market faster and with a better chance of actually being adopted. Starting with clones of Ethereum and Zcash that have no altcoin and run directly by bridging in native BTC. Learn more about this effort at Layer2Labs.com

• Fun fact: The Bitcoin network settled over 8 trillion dollars worth of volume in 2022.

It's a new year. Theres talks of a pending nasty recession. If you aren't bullish on Bitcoin in 2023. Continue reading below to see whats coming down the pipeline.

Stacks

Hello USDC, Nice to meet you.

• Everyone and their mom knows stablecoins bring massive utility to many around the world. ALEX is in the final stages of their Stacks Bridge. Making it dead simple to transfer your USDC from the big dog that is ETH (~44 billy in market cap), and bring them over to Stacks to use in the Bitcoin ecosystem of apps. Extremely bullish move for liquidity on Stacks. One of the consistently most frustrating complaints over the past year.

• In tandem with that, ALEX will be launching a stable swap to make it easy to go from xUSD (USDC derivative on Stacks) and into USDA, The native stable coin of Arkadiko. The building blocks of BitFi coming together.

• Xverse wallet released their desktop chrome extension. More ways for you nerds to use your crypto easily.

• Finally, the biggest news on Stacks over the last month BY FAR has been sBTC. The upcoming solution that aims to solve the Bitcoin peg-in/peg-out problem to bridge native BTC into Stacks. Max (@Hiro Systems) sat down with Igor from Trust Machines, who is working on the sBTC solution. They go over some of the finer details of how it works and is being implemented. Highly recommend this video for those interested.

Lightning

Lightning builders continue to crush. Incoming long list of new ish!

• Lightning capacity has stayed over 5,000 BTC capacity for the past month+. Curios how this metric moves as more applications come online.

• Breez raises $4.5 million to bring Lightning-as-a-Service. TBD on what that means. So far they have built a point-of-sale system and podcast player that integrates easy tipping using the Lightning network.

• Mash released a WHOLE bunch of new updates for their website monetization tools. Decreasing the amount of code to place on your website, how things get displayed, when they show up and a bunch more. If you want to add Lightning payments to your website, Mash is the way.

• Someone has created native Bitcoin NFTs that are attached to individual satoshis. Uhhhh, Mind blown? It's called Inscriptions.

• Damus has officially submitted to the Apple app store. Damus is a new kind of Twitter built with Nostr and Lightning at the core. Decentralized through and through.

• Zeus released their latest update (V0.7.1). Zeus aims to be the best non-custodial Bitcoin and Lighning wallet out there with easy ways to connect to your own node and control how payments are sent. Check it.

RSK

In the future do we spend stablecoins, and hold Bitcoin?

• Hard to say but another stablecoin is in the mix and its on Rootstock. Dollar on Chain launched last month with a Bitcoin-backed stablecoin. Unfortunately I couldn't see how the application works because the creators have blocked the US from access.

• IchibanSwap is a new DEX for swapping between tokens on RSK.

Blockstream

As usual, Blockstream releases a bunch of new, mostly nerdy, updates to Bitcoin.

• The Liquid network has been updated to match the latest version from Bitcoin Core at V22.

• Fuji Money was announced. Bringing Bitcoin-backed stables and swaps of assets in a peer-to-peer fashion with Liquid or Lightning. You can get on the waitlist here

Theres a bunch of updates I missed on Liquid over the last few months. Check out there update blog for the most complete list.

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

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