Welcome to Bitcoin Summer

It’s been an interesting week in Bitcoin land. TradFi peeps are coming in droves even though the SEC is still going hard. Meanwhile Ordinals innovators have created yet another protocol. We also got good updates from Stacks, Rootstock, Lightning and Liquid ecosystems.

Lets dive in!

Bitcoin

• The whitelist for BitKey beta has opened. BitKey is the open-source hardware wallet being created by Block.

• Blackrock (One of the biggest asset managers in the world) is filing for a Bitcoin ETF. Might be a big nothingburger but I did find this tweet thread from Adam Cochran particularly interesting on the potential impact it could have on Bitcoin.

• Bitcoin dominance hit its highest point (51%) since April 2021. Bitcoin summer continues.

Ordinals

If you want to make an omelet, you gotta break some Ordinals.

• A consensus issue has popped up in the Ord indexer client. This affects the inscription number depending on the indexer used apparently. Ord Version 0.6 seems to be the only affected client.

• BitMap is the latest "innovation” popping up on Bitcoin via Ordinals. I haven’t dived into it yet, It’s being hyped as infrastructure for the Metaverse on Bitcoin. I have skeptical 👀’s for this, but now your in the loop. Example BitMap - BitMap Creator Blockamoto - BitMap Game

• The OnChainMonkey’s team dropped their 300 piece Dimensions collection. It sold out quickly and did a few firsts in the Ordinals space. The collection is super high resolution without being big in file size due to using recursive inscriptions in a unique way. Also seeing good volume moving on marketplaces like Gamma.

Stacks

• sBTC is coming. Work on the upcoming native Bitcoin peg-in/peg-put solution has been ongoing for months. This week they released an alpha version of the product on testnet. For more in-depth info check out This Week in sBTC weekly newsletter.

• Domo (Creator of BRC-20) has joined the ALEX advisory board to help decentralize and create stronger indexers for BRC-20 tokens.

Lightning

• Stacker News - The Hacker News style news site that lets you stream and earn sats for posting things people want to hear just added a “Tech” sub-category, joining Bitcoin, Nostr, and Jobs for a total of 4. Might get more useful as Reddit fights their community.

• Binance appears to be running Lightning nodes now. The point of large exchanges not running Lightning nodes has been a contentious point for some time. The biggest critique has been it is a great UX for customers but they don’t make much money on Lightning because the fees are so low. This is a great sign.

• Voltage announces Surge - A best-in-class tool for node channel management.

Rootstock

• The Rootstock: Bitcoin Scaling Hackathon kicks off in 5 days. They announced new mentors coming on to assist developers creating something. Register here ($2.5 million up for grabs)

Blockstream

Blockstream held its yearly press conference to members of the media. Some nuggets they dropped.

• First glimpse at their upcoming in-house ASIC miner, codenamed “cyberhornet” was revealed. Set to hit the market in Q3 2024.

• Greenlight gets a big update and focus. This is their Lightning-as-a-Service that makes it easy for enterprise customers to spin up Lightning nodes using Blockstreams infrastructure.

Interesting podcast I enjoyed this week.

Thats it for this week.
Love yall!
-Jake