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- This Week in Bitcoin (October 14th, 2022)
This Week in Bitcoin (October 14th, 2022)
Jacob Brown
October 14, 2022
What is up you beautiful people!
Time for another edition of This Week in Bitcoin. LETS GO! 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
Google and Coinbase snuggle up together. Bullish for crypto?
John Light (@lightcoin) released his research of Rollups coming to Bitcoin. Rollups are one proposed scaling solution for Bitcoin that is still in its infancy. This report is one of the most in-depth to date on this topic. Report.
Google and Coinbase have opted into a partnership. Google Cloud will start accepting crypto as payment for some of its services early next year, with Coinbase as the backend provider of this service. They also mentioned they would explore the idea of using Coinbase Prime for holding digital assets. In return, Coinbase will obviously get a little sliver of fees on these payments. They also agreed to switch some of their infrastructure from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud. BULLISH
Stratum V2 code has been released for review and testing by the general mining public. Stratum is the most popular Bitcoin mining software making it easy for miners to control their hardware, and interface with the Bitcoin network and mining pools. V2 brings a suite of new features. Less data cost, better protocol standards, increases security and more. Check out their website to nerd out on Bitcoin mining yourself or read this great article from Bitcoinist.
Mining difficulty hits a new ATH. It hit an all-time high of 35.61 trillion on Oct. 10. That is the average expected number of hashes before a correct has is produced.
Stacks
DeFi on Bitcoin via Stacks is maturing
ALEX, Biggest DeFi platform on Stacks celebrates in one year anniversary of it's testnet launch. In that time they launched on Mainnet with swaps, pooling, staking and farming all coming online. Their latest testnet just ended which let users try out an orderbook. Laying the foundation for spot trading, market orders, and derivatives to come online in the next few months.
Speaking of the orderbook. It has a new name and some more details have been announced. The ALEX orderbook is now called STXDX. It will exist as it's own entity and have its own tokenomics separate from the ALEX application people are used to.
Zest Protocol gets a facelift and some news. Testnet will be going live next week. Zest is on-chain lending of BTC for institutional borrowers. First of it's kind using all the great tech being built on Stacks. Check out their website in the meantime and sign up to be the first on Testnet.
Lightning
Lightning is hitting new ATH every week, despite the bear market.
Danny Kroeger is building an open-source wallet. Danny was previously at Cash App working on Lightning, and currently runs one of the biggest Lightning nodes in the world. This new wallet is called TAO Wallet. Check out more here.
A very unique Taproot transaction caused the Lightning network to bug out. A 998/999 multi-sig transaction caused a bad block that couldn't be mined on Lightning apparently, but transactions were still growing through after that and a fix was pushed within 24 hours.
River Financial is a leader as a Bitcoin service provider. They just added another new service to the list. River Lightning Services makes it easy for businesses to offer Lightning in their products without worrying about channels, liquidity and any other in the weeds tech problems of being early. Just connect to an API and you're done. Announcement
RSK
RSK Peg-out still down.
Last week I mentioned RSK's peg-out solution was experiencing some issues. That is still the case today. They identified that with the latest Bitcoin Core client update, Bitcoin nodes are not accepting peg-out transactions as valid and so they are not being put into blocks and mined. The most likely solution here will be an emergency network upgrade on the RSK side to make the transactions appear valid for Bitcoin nodes. Incident report
Another RSK network upgrade is out as well. This one is non-mandatory but adds some new functionality. Hop 4.1.0 adds new JSON-RPC tracing methods, support for the latest versions of the Hardhat development environment, the introduction of a peer reputation system, and support for RocksDb storage library.
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