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

• Bob Bodily dropped a fire graphic on the current ecosystem being built around Bitcoin. Includes sidechains like Stacks, meta protocols like BRC20, Lightning, and beyond. Great work.

Ordinals

• BitMap Protocol entered phase 2 of their roadmap. Tweet

• BitMap Data Dashboard to check out stats on the protocol standard.

• ORC-Cash has entered the chat! This is a new token standard with some potential big benefits over the BRC20 design. Announcement - Some additional context here in this tweet thread.

Stacks

• Kenny Rogers released an interview video with Stacks Core Devs on how the upcoming Stacks network upgrade, titled Nakamoto, will bring faster block times to Stacks.

• Hermetica Finance opened its Beta up to the public! This is a way to earn yield on your STX (and soon sBTC) through locking collateral in a vault that is then used to trade options strategies. Tweet

• Uwu (stablecoin protocol) updated their app to have a clean and polished analytics page with historical data.

Lightning

• Lightning Labs released a banger! AI 4 ALL is a new initiative building tools at the intersection of Bitcoin and AI. A couple they mention in the article.

  • A dev can create an AI agent that can hold a Bitcoin balance, send/receive via Lightning, or do certain functions to control a Lightning node

  • Make a pay-per-use API that gives out quotas by paying small Lightning invoices. Big implications here as AI services use tokens to estimate compute costs. With Lightning, you can create on-demand compute paid at the time of execution. Tweet

• Mutiny Wallet is now in open Beta available to the public. Mutiny lets you create a self-custodial Lightning wallet using nothing but a web browser. No more downloading apps with Apple handcuffs or extensions for Chrome. A step change is onboarding UX if it works well 🙌

• Kody Low released something called Matador. This is a way to put API access behind a paywall with the ability to create “pay-per-use” APIs powered by Lightning micropayments. Should make it much easier for devs to create apps with a funding model that isn’t subscription based. Imagine you just send 200 sats to get a Midjourney V4 image generated. Tweet with some more ideas.

• Phoenix Wallet announced V3 of their self-custodial Lightning Wallet. The BIG unlock here is it now supports Splicing which is a more efficient way to spend and resize Lighting payments and channels. As usual, it’s slightly too big brain for me so check out the full announcement here.

Rootstock

• Rootstock completed a network upgrade, titled Fingerroot 5.0.0. The consensus changes include a transaction gas price cap, improvements to peg-out events, adjustment of block confirmations for a PowPeg migration period, and enhancements to the handling of pegout transactions, among others. Announcement

• Sovryn got a couple really nice feature updates. UX with Sovryn just got better. Also, Converting $DLLR to $BTC now includes a route through Money on Chain. If that route gives the user the most BTC, it will convert DLLR to DOC in Mynt & use Money on Chain to convert DOC to BTC in a single transaction. Tweet

Blockstream

• Blockstream released a blog post on the current state of scaling Bitcoin with L2’s. Its an interesting read as the prevailing narrative is which layer 2 will be the dominant one. They make the observation that it likely wont be a “one-size-fits-all” but a tapestry of open protocols working working well together. Think Fedimint being Lightning-compatible.

• Peach Bitcoin is integrating BTC/L-USDT swaps in their p2p trading application. Tweet

Interesting podcast I enjoyed this week was mine :)
A sneak peek at the thumbnail for my conversation with Edan Yago.
(Drops tomorrow)

Thats it for this week.
Love yall!
-Jake