What is up you beautiful people!

I'll make you a promise. I won't talk about Ordinals this week. Just kidding. 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

Ordinals is now over a month old since it *popped*. The amount of new use-cases and functionality being researched right now is nothing short of amazing. Lets jump in.

• Yuga launched a generative Ordinals collection. This one had entire Ordinals space watching to see results as the biggest entity in the entire NFT space tested the waters of Bitcoin. The 288-piece collection ended with a high bid of 7BTC and brought in over $16m in total. Major bullish for the future of digital art on Bitcoin.

• John Light posted a tweet thread covering a potential new use-case for Ordinals. Using it to store data related to something called a "Soverign rollup". Very early idea. See the thread here.

• Not even 2 weeks after John's tweet. We see the first example of a rollup on Bitcoin with RollKit. This is made by the team at Celestia building modular blockchain tech.

• Bitcoin Optech is launching a podcast. Their newsletter is one of the best places to stay updated on whats happening with updates to Bitcoin Core and the lower level workings of Bitcoin.

• Excellent new ecosystem map of the growing Bitcoin ecosystem.

• Inscribe.news is a new site making it dead simple to inscribe news onto Bitcoin to be stored as a permanent ledger of record. It allows you to post a title, URL and description.

• OrdinalsWallet launches one of the first fully trustless marketplaces! Made possible by utilizing Taproot and PSBT's (Partially signed Bitcoin transactions). Site looks pretty sexy as well.

• Megapont launched what might be the first "proper" 10k Ordinal collection, called MegaPunks. They built some pretty innovative tooling in-house to make the minting and delivery process as seamless as possible. Ordinal collection inscribooors should check out.

I don't know about yall but the bull market vibes are already here for me. Reality just hasn't caught up yet.

Stacks

Stacks builders continue to set the bar for Ordinals tools.

• The Xverse wallet got an update to support Ordinals transfers! Lets goo! You can update your app in the App store now to get access to the latest feature.

• DeFi protocol Arkadiko just released their 2023 roadmap. Top priority is making sure a seamless transition to the Stacks 2.1 upgrade coming in a few weeks. They are also working on an updated stableswap between USDA <> xUSD. Also working on an oracle solution and potential improvements to the tokenomics of the DIKO token.

• The Hiro Wallet team has shipped two big features. First, you can now send your Ordinals from the Hiro wallet. Second, The wallet now has BNS name support so you can send and receive BTC directly to a .btc name. Give it a try @ jakeblockchain.btc 😃

• An extension of BNS has been released called BNSx. This removes some of the limitations of the current BNS construction like one btc name per wallet and extends some features. Check it out at dots.so

Gamma launches a HUGE update for Ordinals. They are enabling the ability to launch Ordinals collections. Here's the TLDR:

• Creators can launch collection with no-upfront cost. Collectors pay the inscription fee when they mint a piece.

• Launch bulk collections quickly and easily.

• No code platform makes it dead simple to use.

• Everything is done with native BTC and on Bitcoin mainchain.

• All collection images are held in two locations. One on IPFS for high res storage, these are displayed by default on the website. Second, a compressed version is directly inscribed on Bitcoin. Balance of high quality <> permanent provenance/cost.

• Finally. They teased some alpha on an upcoming marketplace that will be fully trustless, Bitcoin native, and all collections made with the above tooling will be available for trading on day 1. Huge

Lightning

Did all the Lightning devs move over to Ordinals?

• Lightspark announces its first product. They have partnered with Xapo bank and integrated Lightning in their system. Xapo is the first licensed bank to integrate Lightning for their customers. Lightspark is a new company from an OG in the digital payments space, David Marcus.

• TBD, That mysterious company from within Jack Dorsey's bigger entity Block, announced a new initiative to be a Lightning Service provider and use Bitcoin from Block's heavy balance sheet to manage liquidity. They call is C=

Rootstock

What's in the pipeline for RSK?

• RSK has removed its hard cap limit on how much BTC can be moved into the chain via their PowPEG. This is a good signal the system has been working as intended and they have high confidence it's safe for the future.

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

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