Welcome back to Bitcoin Summer

This week Michael Saylor and Microstrategy bought a bunch more Bitcoin, but you’ll only read that here. That’s not bullish enough to make it into the sections below with the latest releases and tech news around Bitcoin.

Below we got some goodies around Lightning that’ll make it more secure, a partnership between Stacks and Rootstock companies, Ordinals hit another million inscriptions, and 12 other goodies.

Lets dive in!

Bitcoin

• Ledger launched an institutional trading platform called Tradelink. They partnered with crypto exchanges and OTC brokers to facilitate the trades, and have tools to make it safer to enterprise customers to custody their digital assets.

• Weekly edition of the right curve Bitcoin newsletter Bitcoin Optech

• Bitcoin Frontier Fund had their latest demo day with 7 Bitcoin companies presenting across Ordinals, DLCs, bridge tech, stableswaps, gaming and more. This is where I work daily and we got some big things coming soon so keep an eye here.

Ordinals

• 14 million inscriptions have been created. 87% are of the text/JSON variety. Which means most of the action and experimentation happening around Ordinals is happening with BRC20s, Sats Names, Ord Games protocol, and others.

• Bioniq Market hit some key milestones as they work toward the launch of their Ordinals marketplace. This product will be the fastest and cheapest marketplace out there. Though you’ll have to wrap your Ordinals to ICP, which has trust assumptions I’m unclear on. DYOR. Check out the interview I had with the founder Bob Bodily.

• Magic Eden now supports trading of BRC20s. This is big as ME is consistently the biggest Ordinals marketplace by transactions.

Stacks

• ALEX DeFi platform released an article laying out their recent product releases and focus going forward. BRC20, Ordinals, Lightning and L2 talk are all inside.

• OKX wallet now supports stacking STX directly in the wallet, Powered by Xverse stacking pool. I think this is the largest product to-date to support stacking and earning BTC.

• Messari Crypto’s State of Stacks report for Q1. A few weeks old cause I missed it but worth a read for the Stackers in the audience.

Lightning

• Validating Lightning Signer released the beta of their product bringing better network security to Lightning. The jist? It’s an open-source library that allows a node runner to store their keys separately from the Lightning node.

• Lightning Labs put out a technical breakdown of Hash Time Locked Contracts and channel operations.

Rootstock

• Sovryn’s Bitcoin-backed stablecoin, $DLLR, got a big boost this week when Exodus Wallet announced they will be supporting the stablecoin and holding some portion of their stablecoin in their treasury in place of T-bills.

• It’s important to note. Stablecoins are a massively beneficial use case that is largely irrelevant on Bitcoin up to this point. Massive opportunity.

• BitFlow Finance said work has begun on a non-custodial bridge between Rootstock and Stacks. This brings Sovryn’s $DLLR stablecoin to their stable swap DEX live on Stacks and allows Curve-like efficient swaps on assets in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Blockstream

• Blockstream is one of the teams supporting Validating Lightning Signer (mentioned above) with technical expertise and a $150k grant to build for Core Lightning.

• Blockstream released a report titled “Simplicity: Holes & Side Effects” that goes into some nuances of working with the new smart contract language for Liquid.

Interesting podcast I enjoyed this week.

Thats it for this week.
Love yall!
-Jake